Playboy Interview: NBC's "Saturday Night'

On the second Saturday in October l975, a live, 90-minute comedy show, titled, appropriately, NBC's "Saturday Night," premiered on that network in what used to be the time slot for "Tonight Show" reruns. It featured a group of young, rubbery-faced unknowns, billed as the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, and a guest host of the week, George Carlin, cavorting in a series of sketches, commercial parodies and take-offs on the news. The quality of the material ranged from funny to insane, with occasional references that only a bona fide graduate of the late frerk subculture could appreciate. But its most salient characteristic proved to be a total disregard for any of television's traditional taboos: Viewers soon found themselves witnessing things they never expected to see on the tube. Among the targets satirized were cripples, homosexuals, bizarre sexual practices, politicians, the Pope, all minority groups, the aged and the recently deceased--in other words, just about anything.

News of the show spread rapidly by word of mouth, especially among those 20-to-10-year-olds who rarely, if ever, watch prime time. Advertisers began to take note. So did the press and, though several critics lambasted the show as "tasteless," "sophomoric" or "subversive," most hailed it as a "breakthrough," and compared it with enthusiasm to the pioneering days of television, especially to Sid Caesar's "Your Show of Shows." It soon became necessary for anyone giving a party on Saturday night to have a television set tuned to NBC at the crucial hour. In less than a year, the show's estimated viewing audience was 22,000,000 and the show went on to win four 1975--1976 Emmy Awards.

At least some of "Saturday Night's" success can be credited to its guest hosts, who have included Candice Bergen, Elliott Gould, Lily Tomlin, Richard Pryor and a reunited Simon and Garfunkel. Former press secretary Ron Nessen hosted a show that featured, among other things, a sketch in which Gerald Ford stapled his ear to his head. When a snickering press spread a report that Ford was not amused, the show's already unprecedented notoriety skyrocketed.

But "Saturday Night's" greatest strength lies in its high-powered cast and writing staff, most of whom are under 30, have had little or no previous television experience and harbor a healthy lack of inhibitions. Because the people who produce and write TV shows don't often get the public recognition that the more visible performers get, we decided to interview the entire crew of loonies, so we sent Associate Editor John Blumenthal and New York--based free-lancer Lindsay Maracotta to talk with them at NBC headquarters in Rockefeller Center. Their report:

"If we had suspected it wouldn't be easy interviewing the entire cast and writing staff of a television show, the full measure of the task didn't strike us until we stepped off the elevator at the 17th floor of Rockefeller Center. In the slightly shabby offices of the 'Saturday Night' slow, we were met by a group of casually dressed people who seemed to be in a constant state of motion--they flowed ceaselessly in, out of and around offices like fish at. feeding time in the aquarium. We quietly requisitioned the nearest empty desk and sat back to try to take it all in. After a while, individuals began to distinguish themselves from the maze: Michael O'Donoghue shuffled down a hall, singing 'Giaccobazzi spoken here' under his breath; John Belushi appeared as if from out of the ozone, flickered briefly, then disappeared; Gilda Radner hopped from place to place like a migrant rabbit, her cuckoo-clock laugh cut-ling through the general hum.

"We soon discovered the method behind this mad activity. For three consecutive weeks a month, 90 minutes of comedy must be written, rehearsed and performed on the air in exactly six days. The schedule runs more or less like this: All sketches must be in by Wednesday, at which point the cast is assembled for a read-through; Thursday and Friday are spent in intensive rehearsals and taping spots that require special effects, with constant rewriting occurring right up to, and sometimes even after, the Saturday-night dress rehearsal several hours before air time.

"Any wishful-thinking notions we had of getting the entire gang to sit down together were shattered when we found that producer Lorne Michaels regularly fails to get them into the same room for their Monday-night creative meetings. Chasing them down in smaller groups proved almost as difficult and conversation took place in studio halls, with carpenters striking sets, technicians stringing cables and assorted writers and players streaking by in a wake of cue cards and coffee cups. Nonetheless, after two weeks of pursuit, we managed to get them all on tape. (For reasons of space, we are including only 14 of the 19 members of the performing and writing cast. Arbitrarily, we left out writers Tom Schiller and Marilyn Suzanne Miller, as well as multiple--Emmy Award--winning Herb Sargent, the show's script consultant. As the interview was taking place, a new cast member, Bill Murray, and another writer, Jim Downey, were added to the show.)

"Things came to an abrupt halt when Danny Aykroyd sent us a subtle signal that he was tired of talking. Gesticulating wildly, he threatened to blow the tops of our heads off with the .44 magnum he claimed was in his top desk drawer. 'He's only kidding,' his pal Belushi assured us. Still, it seemed like a good time to retire and find a quiet place to ponder the vision of life according to 'Saturday Night:"

Dan Aykroyd, writer and performer, does possibly the most deadly accurate impression of Jimmy Carter of anyone to date. Aykroyd, a Canadian, was a member of Second City companies in Toronto and Pasadena and starred in the Canadian television series Coming Up Rosie. A glittering eye and a slightly crazed smile are his trademarks as pitchman in many of Saturday Night's commercial parodies.

Writer Anne Beatts, an ex-contributing editor of the National Lampoon, was the only woman on the Lampoon's editorial board from its inception to April 1974. She has written and performed material for the National Lampoon Radio Hour, including Gold Turkey, an album she subsequently recorded. She is also coeditor of the recently published book Titters: The First Anthology of Humor by Women.

John Belushi, writer and performer, also an alumnus of Second City in Chicago, went on to appear in the National Lampoon show Lemmings and to write, direct and act in both the National Lampoon Radio Hour and the off-Broadway National Lampoon Show. A versatile performer, he has impersonated everyone from Marlon Brando to Henry Kissinger to Joe Cocker and is the show's resident samurai.

Chevy Chase, writer and performer, is to date the first superstar to have emerged from the ranks of NBC's Saturday Night. Starting as a writer, he quickly became known for the athletic pratfalls in his Gerald Ford impersonation and for his role as the mugging anchor man of "Weekend Update." Before joining the show, Chase had written for Groove Tube and the Smothers Brothers. In October 1976, he officially left NBC's Saturday Night to do a series of specials for NBC but continues to appear on the show semiregularly.

Performer Jane Curtin, the anchor woman of "Weekend Update," was chosen for the cast of NBC's Saturday Night from an audition of 500 people. She had previously been a member of the Boston improv group The Proposition, toured with The Last of the Red Hot Lovers and co-authored and performed in an off-Broadway revue, Pretzels.

Al Franken and Tom Davis, who have worked as a writing and performing team since high school days in Minnesota, admit they hold nothing sacred, with the possible exception of Hubert Humphrey. Before joining the writing staff of NBC's Saturday Night, they had appeared at the Improvisation in New York and Harrah's in Reno and co-authored and performed in the film Tunnelvision.

Lorne Michaels, producer, began his career with Canada's CBC radio and television networks and went on to write monologs for Woody Allen and Joan Rivers. He then wrote for Laugh-In and was a co-writer of the 1973 Emmy-winning TV special Lily starring Lily Tomlin and coproducer of Tomlin's 1975 special. When NBC executives were looking for a late-night weekend comedy show that would appeal to young urban adults, they turned to Michaels. He conceived of a live, presentational show that would incorporate a variety of comedy styles rather than serve one star and that would be as free as possible from the usual restrictions of TV. Promised 17 shows and six months' development time, he put together the talent for the staff and cast of NBC's Saturday Night.

Performer Garret Morris began his career studying music at Tanglewood, Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music and was a member of the Harry Belafonte folk singers. He has appeared on Broadway in Showboat, Porgy and Bess and The Great White Hope and his film credits include Where's Poppa?, The Anderson Tapes and Cooley High.

Performer Laraine Newman's ambition to become a heroine of horror films may have spurred her portrayal of Luciana Avedon rising from a coffin to drink the blood of teenagers. Newman had studied mime with Marcel Marceau and theater at the California Institute of Arts, then became a member of the Groundlings, an improvisational group based in her native Los Angeles. She was chosen for the cast of NBC's Saturday Night after appearing in the 1975 Tomlin special coproduced by Michaels.

Writer Michael O'Donoghue's fascination with the perverse and admittedly bizarre took root when he became one of the original editors of the National Lampoon. He was writer, producer, host of the National Lampoon Radio Hour, has written several books and co-authored the film Savages. Although primarily a writer, he also appears on the show, notably as narrator of the "Least-loved Fairy Tales," in which nobody lives happily ever after.

Gilda Radner, performer, has portrayed many of NBC's Saturday Night's more memorable characters, including the bemused Emily Litella and Baba Wawa, a take-off of Barbara Walters. Radner was originally a member of Second City, then appeared in a Canadian version of God-spell and in several CBC shows. She was subsequently a regular on the National Lampoon Radio Hour and a member of the off-Broadway production of the National Lampoon Show.

Writer Rosie Shuster worked extensively as a writer for the CBC TV network before coming to the United States. She received an Emmy nomination for her work as a writer for the 1975 Tomlin special.

Writer Alan Zweibel served his apprenticeship in the Borscht Belt, where he wrote material for over 25 comedians. As his own act, he then worked New York's Improvisation and Catch a Rising Star and in several Playboy Clubs around the country.

[Q] Playboy: Most reviews have been favorable, but some critics have called Saturday Night tasteless. One critic even went so far as to compare it to Nazi cabaret. How do all of you respond to that?

[A] Michaels: Who compared it to Nazi cabaret?

[Q] Playboy: Syndicated columnist Harriet Van Horne.

[A] Chase: Gee, Harriet and I have a date tomorrow--I'll have to ask her about that. Who is Harriet Van Horne? Her name alone should suggest the problems that woman must have.

[A] Michaels: Ask Michael O'Donoghue about the Nazi stuff. He kind of handles the Nazi questions--he has the uniform, anyway.

[Q] Playboy: OK, Michael, what about Nazis?

[A] O'Donoghue: Oh, there's nothing much. I'm one quarter German and when Deutschland iiber alles is played, I get a little tremor in my heart. It's a rush, but I can't help it.

[Q] Playboy: Anyone else want to respond to criticism?

[A] Zweibel: In response to such criticism, we are forced to read this statement especially prepared for important interviews [Begins reading from a blank piece of paper]: "We are sorry to hear of such things, because we believe in the show ourselves and any time we read of such things, we are compelled to regret them with great chagrin."

[Q] Playboy: Let's try something a little more specific. Many viewers remember your "Claudine Longet Men's Open Invitational Ski Tournament" sketch as an example of the show's going over the line. How do you feel about it today?

[A] Chase: Yeah, it was felt we'd gone over the line with that one. But here's how it came about. Claudine had shot this guy in the back about 20 times and then tried to get out the bathroom window--no, no, that's a total falsification. I have no idea what really happened, but something told me that a guy doesn't show a woman how to use a gun by giving her the handle and having her point it at his stomach and pull the trigger. That logic somehow didn't work for me. The "Update" item that I wrote said that Claudine Longet fatally shot and killed Jean-Claude Killy while showing him how she had accidentally shot and killed Spider Sabich. I wrote that because I thought there was something fishy about the whole thing. Ultimately, Michael came up with the "Claudine Longet Men's Open Invitational Ski Tournament." Again, the desire wasn't to hurt Claudine Longet any more than it had been to hurt Ford or any of the other people we satirize.

When I first heard that the ribbing Ford was getting hurt his feelings, it bothered me. On the other hand, he was a man in the public eye, who had to be held accountable for falling on little girls in wheelchairs, just the way Nixon should be held accountable for bombing Cambodia. Thank God, Ford didn't try to bomb Cambodia. God knows who he would have bombed first by mistake.

[Q] Playboy: Let's interrupt ourselves here and ask you, Chevy, what you're doing in this interview. We thought you'd decided to leave Saturday Night and do other shows for NBC.

[A] Chase: Yes, the contract says I have to do one one-hour special a year.

[Q] Playboy: We assume it's going to be comedy. Did the network give you carte blanche?

[A] Chase: No, but I already have American Express and BankAmericard.

[Q] Playboy: So what is your association with the show at this point?

[A] Chase: What show is that?

[Q] Playboy:Saturday Night.

[A] Chase: Oh, that show. No, I've given up on that show.

[Q] Playboy: Completely?

[A] Chase: Yeah, I think it's pretty much in the dumper. By the time your interview comes out, it'll probably be off the air. No, I'll be connected in every way. I'll still be associated with it. But I have other things to write and I just want to move ahead. 1 never want to do anything too long. It's a very rough thing, the show; you have no idea. It's like asking Picasso to churn out a new one every week. These folks are the best writers and performers around, but remember that this is just showbiz--so who gives a shit how great we are? We're not as important as, say, Indira Gandhi, so, looking at this from afar, I have to ask, Why the hell are we being interviewed, in the first place? Still, these people are the best, and they're forced to come up with 90 minutes of live comedy every fuckin' week! You can print "every fuck-in' week," by the way.

[Q] Playboy: Done. Getting back to whom you satirize on the show and why, is everyone a fair target for your humor?

[A] Chase: Everybody's a fair target except Jack Benny, for some reason. I don't know why, but to say on "Weekend Update," "Jack Benny died again today," will not get a lot of big laughs.

[A] Curtin: The press makes you a fair target. If you're in the news, you're a fair target.

[Q] Playboy: What if you're in the news unwittingly?

[A] Curtin: Very few people are in the news unwittingly.

[Q] Playboy: Does Claudine Longet fall into that category, too?

[A] Curtin: She's a fair target in that situation, yes. Why should she be any different from Richard Speck?

[Q] Playboy: What it she'd been found innocent?

[A] Curtin: More power to her. But you can't go through the paper and decide whose feelings you want to hurt and whose you don't. You can't play favorites.

[A] Shuster: If an individual is being hurt gratuitously, that's where I draw the line. If a person is well enough known to be a target, I think it's all right to attack him, because he's put himself in that role. It comes with the territory. But no one here ever suggested doing Betty Ford mastectomy jokes--it's too cheap a shot. It's too easy. It's like Totie Fields leg jokes.

[Q] Playboy: Do any of you have heroes--people you wouldn't go after?

[A] Belushi: Yeah, but I won't tell you.

[A] Aykroyd: I do. Moon Landrieu, mayor of New Orleans.

[Q] Playboy: Why is he your hero?

[A] Aykroyd: Because his name is Moon, of course. They named the kid Moon; that's heroic.

[A] Belushi: Ernie Banks is a hero of mine.

[A] Aykroyd: George Montgomery. He made the transition from acting to advertising furniture polish.

[Q] Playboy: Let's broaden the question a little. Are there any sacred cows? Is there anyone or anything you wouldn't touch under any circumstances?

[A] Aykroyd: Everything and everybody is open, including ourselves. Hell, I've been called psychotic on the show several times and I don't mind. I have certified papers to prove it.

[Q] Playboy: To prove what? That you're psychotic?

[A] Aykroyd: Yeah, I'm a latent psychopath. I could be Charles Whitman. Everybody is open, including our own foibles and our own psychological perspectives. We made fun of Belushi. We did that sketch in which he sold his clothes.

[Q] Playboy: Refresh our memory.

[A] Belushi It was the "John Belushi Line of Clothing" and I sold the clothes I had on. It was a poke at the way I dress--which is to say, in wretched taste.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have any sacred cows, Michael?

[A] O'Donoghue If I did, I'd wipe them out as an act of faith. I've found that if you attack your heroes, later you find out they're really swill, anyway. [Telephone rings. O'Donoghue picks up the receiver] Hello? Hello? Who's this? Anita Loos? Hi. I loved your book. Is my mother out there? [He hangs up the phone]

[Q] Playboy: How about Mother? Is she sacred?

[A] O'Donoghue Mother? As a matter of fact, when I wrote for the National Lampoon, people used to write to me and say, "Boy, how do you like this? What if your mother was tied up with barbed wire and Japs were fucking her?" That really blows me away.

[Q] Playboy: Anybody else on sacred cows?

[A] Radner: Oh, I know what bothered me! We did a Nazi scene on the Eric Idle show and I got a little worried about it, because it was right near Yom Kippur.

[Q] Playboy: What Nazi scene was that?

[A] Radner: These Germans were planning strategy in a Nazi beer hall and we all went "Heil, Hitler!" and sang Tomorrow Belongs to Me, and I wanted to wear a disguise so my mother wouldn't recognize me.

[Q] Playboy: Let's get back to the subject of criticism for a moment. What's your hate mail like?

[A] Zweibel: Hateful.

[A] Newman: Zweibel wrote a commercial about a woman buying some tooth paste. Kresk, for her dead son, the point being that his body would decay but not his teeth if he brushed with Kresk, etc., etc. And a woman wrote in and said that her son had just died and that was the first time she'd laughed since he died. But that's not really hate mail, is it?

[A] Shuster: We made up a list of people that dolphins are definitely smarter than and I added Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé to the list and when we got a letter from them, I felt ashamed, because they are big favorites of my family and there they were, feeling humiliated.

[A] Morris: All I get is mail saying how wonderful I am, of course, and how beautiful and marvelous I am and how I should be on the show more often. Actually, Lorne got one letter saying, "Dear Mr. Michaels. I think you're a genius. John Belushi is a so-and-so, but that Garrett Morris is such a dummy. How can he be on TV doing the things he does?" That one came as a result of the "Hard of Hearing" sketch.

[Q] Playboy: Describe that for us.

[A] Morris: It was a bit we used to do on "Weekend Update." Chevy says. "And now, for those of you who are hard of hearing, here is the headmaster of the New York School for the Hard of Hearing, Mr. Garrett Morris, who will give you the news for the hard of hearing." Then he says, "The top story of the day..." and I shout, "The Top Story of the Day...," and so on. It was sick, right? A lot of people misunderstood it and said it was unfair to the deaf.

[Q] Playboy: What was your answer to that?

[A] Morris: My answer was, "Huh?"

[A] Franken: We got some hate mail for a piece we did on those homosexual mass slayings in Houston about three years ago.

[A] Davis: It was on the show Candice Bergen hosted last year. The show was a little too sweet, so we needed something with an edge to it.

[Q] Playboy: How about you, Dan? Have you gotten any hate mail?

[A] Aykroyd: After I did the "Bassomatic" parody, in which I threw an entire dead fish into a blender, some woman wrote to me.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Aykroyd: She objected to liquefying dead lower species. I guess. Hell, that's the way we used to make fish chowder. We just put the whole fish in there with some clams and oysters and crackers and mixed it all up. Makes a great chowder. You get to see the actual physical shape of the fish change instantly. And this lady got upset, so I wrote her back with a long dissertation on the properties of matter and mass and molecular change. She wrote back and we got this dialog going.

[A] Newman: When I impersonated Squeaky Fromme on the show once, some Manson people wrote in on this bright-orange stationery with little flowers and daisies, saying, "Dear Mr. Michaels. You know Charlie's a really beautiful person and you shouldn't have talked that way, and we really love your show, but you shouldn't have spoken about Squeaky that way, because that was really terrible. Love and peace." With a happy face drawn on.

[Q] Playboy: To which sketch were they referring?

[A] Newman: It was me as Squeaky and Jane as Sandra Goode in prison doing an adfor----

[A] O'Donoghue Human-hair pot holders. And that wasn't all. As the camera pulled back, both girls were bald and had crosses carved on their heads and Laraine was pinching her tits and screaming and they were doing a self-mutilation thing. My God, it was distasteful! You're not going to see that kind of thing on the Dick Van Dyke show.

[Q] Playboy: That's for sure. Do you get any fan mail, Michael?

[A] O'Donoghue: Yes, and I also get mail saying. "Dear Scum."

[Q] Playboy: How about mail from minority groups?

[A] O'Donoghue: No, the ethnic groups don't fucking care. People think they care, but nobody cares. This illusion is kept up in the media. Oh, my God! Nudity on Broadway! Will it be permitted in Bad Breath, Wyoming? What next? Nobody gives a fuck.

[Q] Playboy: All right, everybody gets a turn. Anyone else on reactions to the show, hate mail?

[A] Radner: I got a letter once that said my lace looked like a dried-up prune.

[Q] Playboy: How did you react?

[A] Radner: Like a child. I cried.

[Q] Playboy: Do you ever answer mail like that?

[A] Radner: Yes. Zweibel and I once spoke at a college and I said something about Belushi that was misinterpreted by someone who loves Belushi and he wrote John a letter saying that I have about as much talent as his Irish setter. I wrote back saying something mean about the dog and I sent him an autographed picture of me, but first I told Belushi to write something nice so the kid would like me. Belushi wrote, "I like Gilda very much. She's a cunt with teeth."

[A] Michaels: We got some mail on a sketch Eric Idle wrote involving goldfish, a statement on the American tendency to overfeed pets. Since Dan's gotten mail about fish, too, I have to conclude there are a lot of fish lovers out there. The sketch involved throwing a lot of stuff into a goldfish bowl and hundreds of people wrote in, complaining that we'd killed the goldfish, when we hadn't really killed them. In fact, a stagehand died trying to save the fish, but no one wrote in about him.

[A] Chase: I remember when the Vatican had just come out with its statement condemning homosexuality and whacking off. All I could think about was men in frocks whacking off, so I wrote a satirical thing about the Vatican for the show. Afterward, I got a bomb threat by telephone and when I went home that night, there was a package waiting for me. Very suspicious. I called the New York Bomb Squad. The following week, we did a parody on them. It was a take-off on what had actually happened. They're not really careful. These guys come in and look at the suspected bomb, and their first test is to kick it. First they look this way. then that way, then they say, "Everybody look out!" and then the guy kicks it and jumps back a foot. He could have blown the building up. Anyway, it turned out to be chicken soup.

[Q] Playboy: One of last year's most publicized--and criticized--shows was the one hosted by Ron Nessen, President Ford's press secretary. Since you knew Ford would be watching, was there a premeditated effort to stack that show with shockers?

[A] Michaels: Behind that question is the assumption that I even have time to realize the President might be watching. There really isn't time for that. The show represents what's going in our lives that week--and we rarely have time to think beyond that. This is roughly how it goes: On Monday, we walk in and find nothing written. There will be a new host wanting to know what he's supposed to do, so you set about filling 90 minutes of air time. Scripts are started, sets are ordered, and all of a sudden it's Wednesday and you see there's nothing written for Gilda. By Saturday, we're frantic and the show goes on, in whatever shape it's in, and after that, we go out and drink. Sunday is for lying home and sulking. So you can see, there just isn't much time to be Machiavellian about who's watching or what the effect is going to be. The process is one of problem solving. It's reactive rather than conspiratorial.

As for that specific program, one of the problems we had to solve that week was dealing with a technicians' strike at NBC. We had to come up with sketches that were stand-up presentations--such as ad parodies--because the cameras couldn't move. That's why we had sketches like the "Fluckers" and "Autumn Fizz" commercials--not because we stacked them for that particular show.

[Q] Playboy: What was the "Autumn Fizz" sketch about?

[A] Zweibel: Gilda and I wrote that piece together. Gilda comes out and says----

[A] Radner: "I love being a woman. Feeling soft, fresh and fragrant makes me glad I'm myself. When I think of the finest in jewelry. I think of Tiffany and Cartier. And when I think of the finest in feminine hygiene, I think of Autumn Fizz----"

[A] Zweibel: "In a seltzer bottle----"

[A] Radner: "The carbonated [burp] fizz." And then Chevy sat next to me and said----

[A] Zweibel: "Now in three flavors--strawberry, lemon and egg cream."

[A] Radner: And then I said, "Don't leave him holding the bag." And nobody wanted me to say that.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Zweibel: It was a cheap laugh. It was a laugh of people saying, "My God! They made a reference to a douche bag on television!"

[A] Radner: I was really proud of us in that show, because we didn't put any restrictions on what we thought was funny just because Ron Nessen was hosting.

[Q] Playboy: What about the "Fluckers" sketch? Michael, you were responsible for that one, weren't you?

[A] O'Donoghue: It was a parody about a jam that had various distasteful names, based on the idea that if you name a jam Fluckers. it has to be very good. I came up with even worse names--Nose Hair, Monkey Pus, Dog Vomit, Painful Rectal Itch, just the worst names. Can you imagine a jam so good it can be called things like Mangled Baby Ducks?

[A] Chase: That was one of the few times I think we went over the line, and I didn't think that was way over the line. I just thought it would look gratuitous, like we had to say dirty things to the President. I never wanted us to look that way. To say "Painful rectal itch" to Betty and Jerry Ford is not my idea of a breakthrough.

[A] Michaels: I agree. But you were awfully quiet at the time.

[A] Shuster: I found the "Autumn Fizz" sketch offensive because it was a cheap shot. I'd still like to do a douche commercial, but maybe have Kenneth Clark doing it. When you're dealing with low subject matter, you have to elevate it.

[Q] Playboy: Then, as a woman, you didn't find it offensive?

[A] Shuster: Well, this is a male-dominated show, but it's less so than most TV shows. We did one piece that Lily Tomlin hosted about a class for women hard-hats. The women here loved it and the men hated it. Lily was the instructor, brandishing a jackhammer, and went into a number on how girls on a construction crew should address men who walk by: "Hey, dream bulge! Wanna make bouncy-bouncy? Wanna do some squat jumps for me on the girder? Hubba-hubba!" That kind of stuff. Danny was the volunteer model and he had a hard time doing that piece. The women really got into it, though.

[A] Beatts: We wrote one piece that never got past the first draft. It was about a feminist restaurant, where the man got totally humiliated: His food was served on the floor, the waitresses humiliated him and he was supposed to say, "Oh, fine, fine, I like this." We didn't run it. Some of us thought the humor was in the intimidation factor, but not enough of us felt it was really funny.

[Q] Playboy: There is a definite political message coming through on the show, isn't there?

[A] Michaels: What you have to understand is that we're all basically anarchists. Anarchists in the pleasant sense. Anarchy is a disturbing word for Americans, and as a Canadian, I don't want to disturb anyone, but basically we're all individuals doing whatever we feel is right--or not right. We're all employed by one of the largest multinational corporations in the world and we're paid large chunks of money to, if not bite, at least nibble at the hand that feeds us.

[A] Zweibel: There's a political message coming through, sure, because, like everyone else, we have our own personal feelings about things. Like what's going on in Chile, for instance--torture. But we don't take ourselves that seriously. We're not starting any crusades.

[Q] Playboy: Is it fair to say that most of you preferred Carter over Ford?

[A] Zweibel: I think most of us wanted Carter more than we wanted Ford.

[Q] Playboy: Chevy, do you think you had anything to do with the downfall of Gerald Ford?

[A] Chase: Yeah. Let me put it this way: The election was so close that had he taken New York, he would have tied the electoral vote. It's the most heinously egotistical thing to say I had anything to do with it, but I think I must have had some influence. I was clearly not a Ford man; I was, in fact, a Udall man.

[Q] Playboy: How about after the convention?

[A] Chase: I supported Carter. Carter's a better man. It's not that Ford isn't a nice fella. It's just that he never gave a shit about people.

[Q] Playboy: Why was Ford such a good subject for parody? Was he inherently funny?

[A] Chase: Anybody who was so guilty about being President that he kept trying to kill himself was inherently funny. It was the guilt that kept him banging his head on helicopter doors.

[Q] Playboy: When you hosted the Radio and Television Correspondents' Banquet in Washington, the one Ford also attended, what did your act consist of?

[A] Chase: I just did Ford. I was him. I was invited to be the host. I marched in with the President to Hail to the Chief and sat on the dais between the Secretary of the Navy or somebody and the President. I was a little nervous, because I didn't exactly know what I was going to do, except that I was going to stumble a lot, walk into the podium and basically do my terrible impression of Ford. I took John and Dan down as my Secret Service escort--mostly so they could have the experience and wear dark glasses. John, at that time, could still walk.

[Q] Playboy: Was Ford amused?

[A] Chase: He laughed a lot. He was gracious about it.

[Q] Playboy: When you met him later, what did you two talk about?

[A] Chase: Ice hockey. Small talk. Later on, Lorne went down to Washington to film Ford saying a few things for the Nessen show and Ford thought Lorne was me--a difficult mistake to make, since I'm 6'4" and Lorne's about 5'9". He had no recollection at all. But, to me, it was a revelation to look at the man in the eyes--not that he was a Nixon or some terrible guy. He never had the strength of a Nixon or a Johnson; that was Ford's problem. It was like looking into the eyes of 50 milligrams of Valium. He was a man totally sublimated by the office of President; not a guy who would come in and take over but a guy who would be totally led by protocol. His schedule was written that way. He'd look at the White House schedule for the day--"1:17 P.M., open your fly"; these were the kinds of things on his schedule. I'm sure it had to be written, "Open your fly," before he took a leak.

[Q] Playboy: Now that Ford's out and Carter's in, what characteristics of the new President will be most open to satire?

[A] Aykroyd: His enigma will become less and less as he begins to assume the role of President. He's going to become a wonderful target for satire.

[A] Chase: That business about lusting after women in his heart--why didn't he just say, "I've seen a lot of ass in my day and thought about it, but I've been faithful to my wife"? You don't have to lust after women in your mind. Let's drop the rhetoric. I'd like to know what the guy's like.

[A] O'Donoghue: Here's what I want to do with Carter. Nobody knows who he is. The secret Jimmy Carter, the one who actually gets dressed up as Eleanor Roosevelt for a state reception, that's a scene I'd like to see. I want to explore some surreal insanity with this man.

[A] Davis: Yeah, Jimmy Carter as the S/M pervert in the Oval Office.

[A] Franken: The best satire we did on Carter was the eye-contact sketch. Carter, played by Aykroyd, is in Plains after the convention and he says [imitating Carter], "Ah just wanna tell y'all just 'sactly how ah'm gonna run mah campaign. Ah'm gonna establish this one thing throughout this country. When ah'm in a crowd of 30,000 people or just seven or eight, what ah'm gonna do is establish eye contact." And then he quoted Dylan--the quote was, "Everybody must get stoned."

[A] Shuster: There was also that Carter lust piece that we did right after his Playboy Interview came out. It was Carter on a whistle-stop tour saying, "Whistle-stopping has given me an opportunity to meet women, to lust after women all over the country." Then he goes, "East Coast girls are nice, I really dig those clothes they wear, and the Northern folk..." right into California Girls.

[Q] Playboy: Do you see any source of humor in Carter's family--Rosalynn or Miss Lillian?

[A] Shuster: Anne had an idea for a parody of the Beverly Hillbillies moving into the White House. How they'd load all their stuff on a truck--Miss Lillian could be Granny, strapped to a rocker, and maybe Billy could tap-dance like Buddy Ebsen.

[A] O'Donoghue: Lorne killed something I wanted to do on Miss Lillian. I had Rosalynn saying that she was the one who had thought of nailing Miss Lillian to the barn to make her look weathered. She does look like barn wood, right? Can't you just see them nailing her out on the weather vane and her saying, "Oh, Jimmy, it's been months--come on, let me down, there's a storm coming!"

[A] Newman: And as Rosalynn Carter, I would have had the opportunity to utter that line and become enormously hated.

[A] Aykroyd: It's our duty as satirists in America to nail Carter to the wall as much as possible. However, there's the dynamic of the fact that I'm a Canadian citizen and, at any time, he could just give the word and I'd be out of here. One phone call to immigration and I'm gone.

[A] Belushi Half the people on the show would be gone.

[A] Aykroyd: That's right. You could wipe this whole show right off the map.

[Q] Playboy: But you and Chevy were invited to do your inauguration sketch at Carter's inaugural gala and, from what we gathered, there was no script approval by the Carter people.

[A] Aykroyd: In fact, we did have to submit a script to Gerald Rafshoon for approval. He OK'd it with one exception: We wanted to have Carter promising to be a "lusty, sexually active President" and Rafshoon made us take out "sexually active." Instead, we got to say, "I like to wear women's clothing in my heart."

[A] Shuster: That same line also got censored earlier on the regular Saturday Night show, when we did the Carter whistle-stop piece. We had Carter saying, "As your President, I look forward to sexually satisfying each and every one of you," and the word sexually was deleted by the censors.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Shuster: It implied that Jimmy Carter was going to fuck everyone in America, men included.

[Q] Playboy: We see. What other kinds of trouble have you had with the censors?

[A] Zweibel: Once we wanted to kill a baby on the air and they wouldn't let us.

[Q] Playboy: OK, we'll play straight man. What were their reasons?

[A] Zweibel: It was Mother's Day. But seriously.... You know those captions that get supered over people in the audience? I wrote one that got censored the first time I tried it: "Told a white lie to an albino."

[Q] Playboy: Why? Was it offensive to albinos?

[A] Zweibel: I guess so. I don't know how many albinos watch the show. The demographics don't show that.

[A] Franken: Here's a line I couldn't get past the censors: "If Helen Keller were alone in the forest and she fell down, would she make a sound?" Now, you can't really sit there and say, "It's not really a Helen Keller joke, it's really an epistemology joke." Once we put the word horny in a piece. The lady censor said we couldn't use horny but we could use sexy instead. We told her that a dog humping her leg is horny but not sexy.

[A] O'Donoghue: Actually, the network's been pretty good. Not 100 percent but not really unreasonable. I don't see it as some monolithic oppressive fascist force.

[Q] Playboy: Has it ever censored any of your jokes?

[A] O'Donoghue: It's kept a lot of my jokes off the show.

[Q] Playboy: Can you remember any of them?

[A] O'Donoghue: I can remember all of them. There was one about... who's the girl in a coma in New Jersey?

[Q] Playboy: Karen Anne Quinlan.

[A] O'Donoghue: Right. I wrote a joke about her that never got on. It was her birthday and I wrote that some thoughtful relative had given her some moss for her north side. Now, come on, that's perfectly simple. She's in a coma. She'll never know. Another joke that got cut was one I wrote saying that the earthquake in Italy was caused by the movie Earthquake. It opened in Italy and, unfortunately, some butterfingered projectionist turned up the Sensurround a bit too loud, killing untold thousands, leveling 12 cities.

[A] Chase: Zweibel wrote a Karen Anne Quinlan joke for me that was simply that Karen Anne Quinlan had left a wake-up call for April. But I decided to attribute the wake-up call to Franco. The censors wouldn't allow it on the grounds that it implied resurrection and the Catholic Church wouldn't like it. Now, you don't often get censorship standards dealing with resurrection--to me, this was silly. It took a long time before they let us do that Franco thing--Franco died, is dead, is still dead. The censors put us off with it until Johnny Carson came out with a bit that clearly implied the same thing. In fact, Carson was always allowed to do more--but that's when I came down on them. I said, "Look, Carson got to do this last night. I'm doing this joke." And I did it. But it took months.

[A] Shuster: In that Carter lust bit we were talking about before, they wouldn't let me talk about the sex life of Bess Truman. Carter was going on about the tradition of sexually satisfied women in the White House and his guess was that Bess Truman was one satisfied customer.

[A] O'Donoghue: Oh, I remember now: Here's my favorite joke! They won't let it on. [In a typical TV announcer's voice] "What will smart, fashionable women be wearing this fall? From California comes the answer--a lovely floor-length Chowchilla coat. Chowchilla coats, made from the matched skins of 26 school children. They're not in the stores yet, but it's only a matter of time." And I kept submitting this joke in new forms in which the skins came in white and Mexican. And then I had one with big Negro patch pockets after some tragic busload of kids were killed in Macon, Georgia. And they won't let it on. But I do get some amazing things on. Once I described Susan Ford wearing high heels, handcuffs and a Bicentennial dog collar with a Nazi tattoo, vote for my dad, all over her body. That Bicentennial dog collar--it's a curious image.

[A] Beatts: Rosie and I wrote a piece from a Franken and Davis idea that got censored. It was on sex education for children and Miss Joan was explaining how sex worked and she said, "The man takes the lady out to dinner, then they go home and dance lying down." We eventually got that line in a piece with Ruth Gordon, but originally they objected to the idea of sex and children. The censor just read the line and said, "Uh-oh."

[A] Franken: Something Tom and I wrote that got censored because it was supposedly in bad taste--though it was in excellent taste--was an ad for something called Placenta Helper. It's two pregnant women meeting and one says it's her first pregnancy and the other says she's had three. "By the way," she says, "are you going to eat your placenta?" And she says, "You're kidding, you mean the placenta?" And the other one says, "That's right, many mammals do it--it's completely natural and there's no cheaper source of protein."

[A] Davis: And then there was Placenta Romanoff and Placenta Orientale and Placenta Casserole....

[A] Franken: And it was censored for bad taste. But it was about bad taste. In advertising. What we were trying to do was make a comment about packaged products like Hamburger Helper, which is a joke phrase to about 70,000,000 people in this country, even if the other 130,000,000 people don't get it. They don't understand that we're making a comment on how 100 percent natural is used in advertising. A lot of the humor we do is aimed at people who understand our reference points.

[A] Shuster: I just want to say that I agree with the censors about sex and drugs. I think if you do sex one week, you should wait till the next week to do drugs.

[Q] Playboy: OK, we'll bite. Why?

[A] Shuster: Because I think you'll burn out your body if you don't. Also, I find it best if you don't take uppers and downers at the same time. It's just something I've learned.

[Q] Playboy: Lorne, as producer, do you ever go into battle with the censors to get something on the show?

[A] Michaels: Constantly. There's a censor in the booth Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

[Q] Playboy: Can you think of any battles you've won?

[A] Michaels: The show, for one. Aside from that, there have been only a few pieces that've been shot down. Take "Placenta Helper," for example. In terms of taste, would I sit in a room and write "Placenta Helper"? No. Would Franken and Davis? Of course. They wrote it, I read it, and I thought it was funny. But the major censorship that I do simply involves whether or not it works well for the particular host who has to do the sketch. Karen Black wanted to do "Placenta Helper," so the question was, do I fight for it? When I was on Laugh-In, the battles with censors involved getting four-letter words on the air, or stronger sexual inferences, and I don't want to play that way. And I haven't. The tone of discussions between the network and me has been relatively high. I'm not interested in getting "fuck" on the air. When you work in TV, you know the rules. It's a mass medium and it's carried into the home and if you want to write in a certain way, there are plenty of other outlets. What I'm more interested in is intelligence in what we do. It's much more important for us to be able to do the Final Days sketch the way we did it than to get "fuck" on the air.

[A] Franken: Speaking of the Final Days parody, the censors made us change something in that sketch. They made us change the term Christ killer to Jewboy.

[Q] Playboy: What was the context?

[A] Franken: Well, the sketch begins with Pat Nixon in the White House, writing in her diary and looking back over her memories. Then we cut to Nixon talking to the Presidential portraits, saying, "You, Abe, you're lucky, they shot you. Come on, clot, move up to my heart and kill me, kill me." Then David and Julie Eisenhower come in and David says, "Mr. President, Julie and I think you ought to go up to bed." And Nixon says, "Aw, shut up. God, he does look like Howdy Doody!" And Julie says, "Daddy, you're not going to resign, are you?"

[A] Davis: And Nixon says, "No, no. A pessimist would resign. I'm an optimist." Julie says, "That's right, Daddy, it's the pessimists who want you to resign, isn't it?" Then Nixon says, "That's right. Remember that Army hospital we visited in Vietnam? There was a young injured soldier there from Des Moines, Iowa. He'd been hit in the eye with a surface-to-air missile and he had only four pints of blood left in his body. And, as you know, man normally has eight pints of blood in his body. Now, the pessimists in this country would say that that boy was half empty. I like to think that he was half full."

[A] Franken: And then Chevy, who played David Eisenhower, says, "That's right, Mr. President. I was just talking to two reporters from The Washington Post and they said they thought you were half crazy and I told them I like to think of you as half sane."

[A] Davis: Then Julie and David leave and Nixon goes up to the portrait of J.F.K. and says, "You, Kennedy, you always looked so good all the time. They're going to find out about you, too, the President, having sex with women within these very walls. That never happened when Dick Nixon was President. Never." And then he breaks down and we cut back to Pat and she's writing "Never" in her diary.

[A] Franken: Anyway, to shorten what was a long sketch, Nixon finally asks Kissinger to kneel down and pray with him. Kissinger says, "Mr. President, why don't we put on our pajamas and go sleepy?" And Nixon says, "Why don't you want to pray, Jewboy?" Now, originally, we had written Christ killer, but they made us change it to Jewboy.

[Q] Playboy: How did they arrive at that distinction?

[A] Franken: It was total nonsense. They said they didn't want to perpetuate the myth that the Jews killed Christ. Well, first, the Jews did kill Christ----

[A] Michaels: I thought the Romans were involved somehow, but undoubtedly yours is more recent information.

[A] Franken: But, secondly, the fact that it was Nixon, the evil character, who was calling Kissinger a Christ killer defused the myth. I mean, since the bad guy is saying it, you're showing how ridiculous it is to call someone a Christ killer.

[Q] Playboy: Still, it's hard to believe you got any of that sketch on the air--it's so biting.

[A] Michaels: But that's the whole point. You fight for the Final Days parody because you believe in it, because it's so honest; every reference in it is right, everything is so true. A big argument last fall involved a Renee Richards joke in "Update," something about tennis without balls. It's the kind of joke that Carson's been doing in one form or another for 15 years, a standard late-night-comedy joke. So we get a review in Variety saying that Saturday Night is as irreverent as ever and the whole review centers on this joke. Now, in that show, there was also a very brilliant piece written by Marilyn Miller for Garrett and Lily Tomlin--a moving, stunning piece. But there's no mention of that. So what happens is our rep becomes "tennis without balls."

[A] Shuster: I was amazed we got the Anna Freud piece on.

[Q] Playboy: Tell us about it.

[A] Shuster: Danny played Freud and Laraine was his daughter, sitting on her father's lap and arousing him sexually. She was telling him her dream about a man who had a beard and who looked a lot like her daddy, and how everybody was offering her a banana and the only banana she took was Daddy's banana. And Freud says, "Sometimes a banana is just a banana--don't say anything to your mother." It was the most thinly veiled symbolism.

[Q] Playboy: Lorne, do you ever impose your personal tastes on any of the material?

[A] Michaels: Isn't that the point to being a producer? What I do is look at a piece and say, "I think that's funny. I think it's offensive, but I think it's funny." That becomes the criterion. It might not be what I would create, but it deserves an airing--it either works or it doesn't. Taste is just another word for discrimination. I wouldn't cut something because I thought it was offensive. I decided to suspend that judgment. For example, with the Claudine Longet piece, I thought it was very funny. I also thought it was very offensive.

[Q] Playboy: Do you ever get any feedback from the people you've parodied?

[A] Aykroyd: Tom Snyder snubbed me on an elevator once.

[A] O'Donoghue: I heard Tony Orlando say, The minute they stop their stuff about me, I'm going to be worried."

[Q] Playboy: He was no doubt referring to your sketch about what it would be like if Tony Orlando and Dawn had their eyes gouged out.

[A] O'Donoghue: Right. I originally did that on the National Lampoon Radio Hour with Ed Sullivan gouging his eyes out. We were going to do the Mormon Tabernacle Choir gouging their eyes out. I kid the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but I love 'em. Can you imagine 90 people gouging their eyes out?

[A] Newman: But Tony Orlando told me his feelings were hurt by the things we do. I feel bad about that. I really do. I don't want to hurt anybody.

[A] Curtin: Sure, it makes you feel bad if you hurt somebody's feelings, but people hurt each other's feelings every day. I once told Gilda that I thought she should put Emily Litella to sleep for a while and I hurt Gilda's feelings.

[A] Radner: We were in a cab when she said it and I went [sobs], and then I got real quiet and went home and cried some more.

[Q] Playboy: Laraine, you've parodied Luciana Avedon. Have you ever heard from her?

[A] Newman: She's in outer space. I mean, now she's doing a new commercial that focuses on a little girl making a flower centerpiece and she says [impersonating Luciana Avedon], "Lo-o-ok at her. She is be-yooo-tiful. When I was her age, I was a mess." That woman's out to lunch.

[Q] Playboy: Gilda, has Barbara Walters ever said anything to you about your Baba Wawa character?

[A] Radner: I don't think she's seen me do it, but I've heard she knows about it and enjoys it. Someone told me she was flattered and that she said that sometimes she feels that she talks just like that. I once got in an elevator with Tom Snyder and he said hello.

[Q] Playboy: What did you say?

[A] Radner: I said, "Hewwo, Tom, it's wewy, wewy, wondewful...."

[Q] Playboy: Talking about feedback, Lorne, did the Beatles ever respond to your generous cash offers--which eventually rose to S340O--for them to appear together on the show?

[A] Michaels: Well, George Harrison did host a show in November, you may remember. And as for the others. Paul McCartney told me an interesting story. He said that he happened to be with John Lennon, watching the show, when I made the first offer. He said they decided then and there to come down to the studio and surprise us. At the last moment, they realized the commotion they would have caused and decided not to.

[Q] Playboy: One thing we haven't discussed is your treatment of sex. How far would you go----

[A] Radner: You're trying to finagle sex into this interview!

[A] Zweibel: Oh, my God!

[A] Radner: I knew this would happen! We knew all those other questions were just a sham. You were just getting to this!

[A] Aykroyd: There's so much of this sexual inference these days! [Turning to the female interviewer] By the way, I'd eat you out with handcuffs and a suit on and you wouldn't have to do anything at all. I'd have the handcuffs behind me and a suit on. Of course, right now, I'd like to retract that statement. You can print it, certainly, but you must also print my retraction. I'm very sorry.

[Q] Playboy: Apology accepted.

[A] Aykroyd: What I really meant was sunglasses and handcuffs. OK?

[Q] Playboy: That makes all the difference.

[A] Aykroyd: Fine.

[Q] Playboy: We were really going to ask a very innocent question. How far would you go on the show if there were no restrictions at all? Would there be nudity?

[A] O'Donoghue: Well, you'd have nudity the way you have nudity everywhere else. I don't think you'd get up and say [in a typical TV announcer's voice], "Welcome to the Nude Hour. We'll have nude jokes and nude dancing and nude singing!" That would get a touch tedious. But I'd like to see nudity on the show, or whatever tools I can use.

[Q] Playboy: In what context?

[A] O'Donoghue: You're not going to lead me into this answer. I'm not going to say I'd love to fuck Mamie Eisenhower in front of 50 billion people and send it by Telstar all over the globe so even the Philippines could see it. Perhaps I would. That could be amusing. I could get into that. But it wouldn't be the basis of my life.

[A] Franken: We'd use sex humorously, I think. There's a certain humor in graphic sex.

[Q] Playboy: Can you give us an example?

[A] Franken: Well, like a penis entering a vagina.

[A] Michaels: There's certainly a movie in that.

[A] Franken: There's a lot of humor in pornography and a lot of people doing X-rated films that are satires of X-rated films and things like that.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think about all that. Gilda?

[A] Radner: You mean nudity? I've always believed that I don't have to take off my clothes to be funny. I happen to have the best legs in the business; they're large, but they've got a good shape. I was once in a scene with Peter Boyle and I played a French maid and I got to wear net tights and Michael followed me around a lot. When I took off the outfit, he didn't talk to me. I'll do almost anything if it's funny. But I still have trouble kissing somebody in a scene. I get real confused if I have to kiss somebody on the lips.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Radner: Because when you don't know him. it's like kissing a doorknob.

[A] Beatts: I've always felt the show didn't have enough sex in it. It's had enough violence but not enough sex. But that's a trend everywhere. By the time television gets sexy, probably nothing else will be.

[Q] Playboy: X-rated television, you mean?

[A] Beatts: Inevitably. Frontal nudity could happen on this show any night. All you need to do is have the camera pan the audience and someone flash. I've always wondered why that never happened.

[Q] Playboy: Maybe one of your viewers will oblige after reading this. While we're on the subject of sex: Chevy, did you ever indulge in any of the unspeakable practices you alluded to on the phone right before "Weekend Update"?

[A] Chase: Even as we speak. I'm indulging in one.

[Q] Playboy: Can you describe it?

[A] Chase: It's something that I'm doing beneath the table. It involves something nearly as big as a breadbox. I know you can't see it. I wear a brace of sorts that prevents people from discovering it, but at the snap of a finger, I can have an orgasm to my great satisfaction.

[Q] Playboy: We don't want to belabor the issue, but we've read a lot about how you Saturday Night people exist as one big, happy family. Doss it ever get incestuous?

[A] Chase: Aside from the homosexual relationships? The only ones I know about are Franken and Davis and the thing Lorne had with Zweibel. Other than that, I know that some of the women writers, Marilyn Miller and, in particular, Rosie Shuster, are always fiddling with themselves in the office, which we just think is funny. Nobody gets really turned on by it.

[A] Zweibel: I'm having Gilda's baby.

[Q] Playboy: Sorry we brought it up. Let's change the subject. You said before that most of your audience understands your reference points. Who is your audience?

[A] Belushi Everybody who's sick of the other things on television.

[Q] Playboy: Yes, but who are those people? Doesn't the show appeal mainly to the generation that grew up on TV?

[A] Chase:I didn't watch any funkin' TV. I hate TV. It stinks. It's god-awful. What I love about doing Saturday Night is the chance to be the off-Broadway of television, of having a bird's-eye view, of having a perspective on it, of making fun of everything else on TV. But you can do that for just so long and then you become part of the very clicé you're parodying.

[A] O'Donoghue: Television is really low. You know the best way to measure a comic sketch on TV? In kilowatts used. Like, would my sketch light up Boulder Dam? So I'm not thinking in terms of laughs--I'm thinking in terms of kilowatts used.

[Q] Playboy: Does the show deal with real life more than other TV shows do?

[A] O'Donoghue: No, I think the show Emergency says everything that could be said about human life. I look to it for guidance. I pray to it.

[Q] Playboy: Why is it so important for the show to be live?

[A] Aykroyd: Feedback from the audience. All the laughs on this show are honest laughs.

[A] Belushi You don't have to tape it, you don't have to go through all the phoniness, there's no delay. Everything that comes out goes out.

[A] Aykroyd: Exactly. When we get a laugh, it's a real laugh.

[A] Belushi And there's no going back, so you have to be the best you can.

[Q] Playboy: But would it seriously compromise the integrity of the show----

[A] Morris: Integrity of the show? Jesus Christ, what show have you been looking at?

[Q] Playboy: The Saturday Night show. Would it compromise the integrity of the show to edit out the one or two turkeys each week?

[A] Michaels: Absolutely. The liveness is not for the audience, it's for us. There's no safety net, and that encourages everyone to relate to one another in a truthful manner. One of the major lies told to casts on taped shows is that the mistakes will be fixed in the editing; what happens is somebody else becomes the judge of whether something works and it becomes a different process. Whereas this show is theater. When it doesn't work, it's clear that it doesn't--there's no sweetening. This show gets performances from people because they know that this is it. There's that edge. You can't do it again. (continued on page 212)Playboy Interview(continued from page 88) When something calculated to go for big laughs gets complete silence from the audience, that's scary. You can feel it in the studio when that happens. And, for me, it has a great deal to do with the integrity of the show. In the beginning, what sometimes happened was a performer would give a great performance in dress rehearsal, and then, on the air, it would go right down the dumper. Now the cast tends to hold back more until air time. They won't give me everything at the dress rehearsal; they'll be saving it.

[Q] Playboy: How does a live audience affect you, Chevy?

[A] Chase: Well, I've never seen a dead audience. I think that might be our next step, maybe the last taboo we can break--an entire audience of corpses.

[Q] Playboy: Which brings to mind another thing we've been wondering about--why are there so many death-related jokes on the show?

[A] Aykroyd: Give us an example of that.

[Q] Playboy: We just talked about one. Franco's continuing death.

[A] Aykroyd: That isn't death. That's Spanish.

[Q] Playboy: Oh.

[A] O'Donoghue: Basically, I don't think we're living in a very healthy age. When anybody does humor, he reflects what worries and distresses people around him. And we're dying. We're second-rate, sliding into third. Death humor is popular because it releases fears and anxieties about that.

[Q] Playboy: But don't you think the show gets a little harsh sometimes?

[A] O'Donoghue: Sometimes it gets too harsh and sometimes it gets too sweet. For example, those fucking Muppets, those little hairy faceclothes. I'd deep-six them in a second. You'd write a comedy line for them and they'd stick in three "Holy Guacamoles!" You know how they made those things?

[Q] Playboy: How?

[A] O'Donoghue: They cleaned up after Woodstock. That was the refuse. They made the garbage into Muppets.

[Q] Playboy: Aside from death, another one of your favorite topics seems to be drugs. Chevy, you don't admit to being part of the TV generation. How about the drug generation?

[A] Chase: Well, the generation that we happen to appeal to is the drug generation. We all grew up together. We all know what drugs are about, we've all smoked pot. Nowadays, people are getting to know that being straight is a wonderful high, but they had to go through a period where they tried drugs first.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't it safe to assume that a large part of your audience watches theshow under the influence of some sort of drug?

[A] Davis: Let us say that we are aware that there are many people out there who are taking chances experimenting with uncontrolled substances and I think those people know who they are. If they want to go ahead and do that, well, that's their business. If it makes them laugh more at the show, I guess it's OK. As long as they don't go out and drive, I guess it's OK. I don't know if that stuff is good or bad, but if those kids out there, those crazy kids, want to smoke that hemp, then I think there should be less of a penalty for it.

[Q] Playboy: That's very touching, Tom, but what we were going to ask you was whether you'd heard any statistics on how many people watch the show stoned.

[A] Michaels: It's an impossible guess. Say there are 25,000,000 viewers--if ten percent of them are stoned, that's 2,500,000 people, smoking, say, two joints each during a 90-minute show--that's 5,000,000 joints. If 50 percent of them are stoned, that's 25,000,000 joints being burned in a 90-minute slot. That's a lot of grass.

[Q] Playboy: During one show, on "Weekend Update," we believe, Chevy asked viewers to send in samples of suspect killer grass. Was the response very big?

[A] Morris: Chevy got an enormous response to that. Mostly, though, he got rolling papers. He looked sort of stupid for a couple of weeks, his eyes were glassy. But they kept sending him that cherry rolling paper, which is the worst. Of course, I don't smoke grass.

[Q] Playboy: Of course not.

[A] Morris: But if I did, I'm sure I would find that cherry rolling paper the worst, too.

[A] Michaels: Yeah, we got a lot of joints as a result of that thing. I remember when the first one came in, no one would smoke it. At least for the first few weeks. It could have really been killer dope. We hyped ourselves to the point of actually believing it. Who are they out there? Why would they send us dope?

[Q] Playboy: Do any of you write or perform under the influence of----

[A] Belushi: No!

[Q] Playboy: Never?

[A] Aykroyd: I would lodge a personal protest if I knew anybody was working under the influence. I would refuse to go oncamera with him. That's the way I feel about it. It's a matter of breaking the law that's there to legislate physical purity, which is all we have to work with, this body.

[A] Belushi: It's a discipline. It's like Muhammad Ali when he trains for a fight. He's been in there this long because of discipline. If we burn ourselves out with drugs or alcohol, we won't have long to go in this business. You can't work with an alcoholic or a drug addict.

[A] Aykroyd: It's a mix of exercise, theater and robotic function. At show time, there are five or six red tape marks on the floor. The camera shoots you at one and you move on to the next mark and read off the cue cards. You have to read off the cards, because everything is changing--you can't memorize your lines, because later, things get cut or changed.

[A] Belushi: You want to be your brightest then.

[A] Aykroyd: If they could build humanoids or clones to do what we do, then they'd have the cast of Saturday Night.

[A] Belushi Except they wouldn't have the talent or the likability.

[A] Aykroyd: Discipline, exercise and talent channeled into a robotic function.

[A] Belushi: If you want to compare it to anything, compare it to athletics.

[Q] Playboy: OK. Using that as a springboard, do you think a performer should refrain from having sex before a show?

[A] Belushi There's no time.

[A] Aykroyd: Right. For a fulfilling sexual experience, I require at least 25 seconds.

[A] Belushi I think it would hurt. The night before, maybe, but that day you're just too busy. But I want to stress this point and make it perfectly clear. You can't perform under the influence of any drug to your capacity. John Barrymore Could do Hamlet drunk and get great reviews, but that's what eventually turned him off acting.

[A] Aykroyd: I've written letters to the United States Treasury Department, asking whether I could be of help in informing on anybody in the entertainment industry who uses drugs. I'm quite happy to cooperate with the Federal Government.

[A] Belushi Two or three vice-presidents at NBC are not here now because of Dan's undercover work. You're going to blow your cover, Dan.

[A] Aykroyd: No. Right now, I'm not much good to the Feds, because the people I've informed on know about me. I can never be a law-enforcement officer--my right eye is bad, I've got webbed toes on both feet, both eyes are a different color, curved spine, sway-back. I'm a genetic mutant.

[A] Belushi Genetically, I'm perfect.

[Q] Playboy: From what you say, Dan, it sounds as if you once considered being a cop.

[A] O'Donoghue: He just likes to wear the uniforms. If he weren't in Saturday Night, he'd be in some fetish show. We're paying him big bucks to be able to put on a state-police uniform.

[A] Aykroyd: Yeah, there was one cop sketch on the show that Michael wrote----

[A] O'Donoghue: It was a parody of those Southern California cop shows. We had a couple of mindless robot cops going around saying, "What do you want to eat tonight, Mexican or Chinese? We ate Chinese last night." Then they'd just kill people and you'd see cars crashing into each other and squeals and shots, and now they're saying, "You want to kill Mexican tonight? No, we killed Mexican last night. How about Chinese?"

[Q] Playboy: Let's backtrack for a while. Can you tell us how some of the regular bits on the show originated? Things like the bees, the samurai, Emily Litella, "Weekend Update"?

[A] Chase: Tom Schiller thought up the samurai thing. It came out of nowhere, really--he just said, "Samurai Hotelier," and I said, "That's great!" We'd seen Belushi do a samurai imitation at his audition and we always wanted to use that character. We changed it to "Samurai Hotel," because we thought nobody would know what a hotelier was.

[Q] Playboy: How did you get into that whole samurai thing, John?

[A] Belushi I studied kendo in Japan for three years. Under the master, Tochiyama.

[Q] Playboy: Really?

[A] Belushi Actually, I saw it on TV and I was blown away by it. I saw it three times in one week and I started doing it at home. I had a pole like a ballet bar and I put a robe on and put my hair up and I walked around doing that voice.

[Q] Playboy: You've cut through a lot of things--sandwiches, tomatoes--with that samurai sword. It must take practice.

[A] Belushi: No. I never knew I could cut through that tomato until dress rehearsal. You have to think through the tomato. It's a Zen discipline.

[A] Radner: I knew Belushi long before that and he'd cut anything in half with that sword. He's really an accomplished samurai.

[Q] Playboy: Does he cut his furniture in half?

[A] Radner: You bet he does. He's that type of guy. Belushi's one of the few people in the world I'd let beat me up. He really hits me. None of this fake stuff. But I can tell when a punch is coming and I can go with it so I don't get hurt. Most comedy shows just use sound effects and fake punches.

[Q] Playboy: John, do you enjoy beating up poor, defenseless women?

[A] Belushi Yes. Especially Gilda. Pain is part of comedy.

[Q] Playboy: Gilda, how did Emily Litella originate?

[A] Radner: Emily originally came out of our Monday-night improv sessions and was later assigned to Franken and Davis, who named her. We used her in a talk-show scene in which she was a woman who wrote teeny-tiny fairy-tale books. Then Rosie Shuster had this idea about "busting school children" and we gave it to Emily Litella. That was followed by things like "Firing the Handicapped" and "Presidential Erections." To this day, I don't know how we got away with that one.

[Q] Playboy: "Presidential Erections"?

[A] Radner: Yeah. The initial laugh is a sexual laugh, right? But then we talked about the word erect only in terms of buildings, monuments, so the censor let it by.

[A] Zweibel: If we had gone on about the President's sex life----

[A] Radner: Then we couldn't have gotten away with it.

[Q] Playboy: Have you phased Emily Litella out or just given her a rest?

[A] Radner: For a while, we didn't do her because the public got ahead of us on it. They were sending in requests. I wanted to go on Chevy's last show because he and Emily had worked together a lot, and I was going to say, "Cheddar." That's what I called him. "Cheddar, what's all this fuss I hear about your teething? I thought you had all your permanent teeth by now." And he said, "No, Mrs. Litella, I'm leaving. I'm leaving Saturday Night. I'm going." And I said, "Oh. That's better. At least you're not in pain." And the "never mind" thing--it used to be a surprise, but after doing it so much....

[A] Zweibel: I was in the supermarket once and this guy was announcing the daily specials over the loud-speaker. He said, "Shoppers, now for only ten minutes on this aisle, pork loin, 59 cents a pound." And he gives the whole spiel, and then you hear him say, "What? Oh, that was yesterday? Sold out? Not now? Well, never mind." And he said it like Emily Litella and the whole supermarket went bananas.

[A] Radner: I love to do her. I'd do her every week.

[Q] Playboy: How about the bees? How did they originate?

[A] Zweibel: The bees were Rosie's idea, I think.

[A] Shuster: I hate to blow that myth, but I actually originated the ants. I'd seen this horror movie that had the marching of the marabunta----

[Q] Playboy: The marabunta?

[A] Shuster: The marabunta was an army of red ants and it gave rise to this non sequitur idea about what it would be like to have ants in a maternity ward. You know, "Congratulations, it's a drone."

[Q] Playboy: Ants don't have drones; bees do.

[A] Shuster: Oh. Then it must have been bees.

[Q] Playboy: How did "Weekend Update" originate?

[A] Zweibel: It was Lorne's idea. The fact that we're a live show makes it important that we do news. Things can happen on Saturday and we talk about it on Saturday Night.

[Q] Playboy: That's one of the things that's so interesting about "Update"--that you seem to do it right up to the minute.

[A] Zweibel: If something happens between dress rehearsal and air time--dress rehearsal ends about 9 or 9:30 and the show, starts at 11:30--we often come up with a joke about it and you'll see it an hour or two later on the show. Sometimes we even pre-empt the real news that way.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't it difficult to come up with jokes that close to show time?

[A] Zweibel: When you're under pressure, you can pull it out of somewhere. I'm not saying they're always gems. Here's an example of a joke I wrote between dress and air: When Patty Hearst was caught, the news stories said that she might have had group sex when she was a fugitive. I wrote a joke saying that she admitted having group sex with the S.L.A. but only up to a point--that, basically, she was an old-fashioned girl who was saving herself for the right army. It was an immediate joke--there was a situation and there was a joke for it.

[Q] Playboy: What are some of your favorite "Update" lines?

[A] Newman: My favorite was a joke Zweibel and Herb Sargent wrote based on Elton John's interview in Rolling Stone, where he came out of the closet as a bisexual. The joke was related to that, but instead of Elton John, it was Speedy Alka-Seltzer coming out of the medicine cabinet to reveal that he was a bicarbonate. It went on, saying, "In anticipation of the criticism that he might receive, Speedy threw himself into the bathtub and his spirit effervesced. Grief-stricken close friend Poppinfresh, the Pillsbury dough boy, said that Speedy left a notethat read simply, 'Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh, what a relief it is.' Memorial services will be tomorrow at ten, to be repeated every four hours."

[Q] Playboy: Chevy, you were originally hired as a writer, not as a performer. How did you make the transition?

[A] Chase: Lorne and I originally met in a line waiting to see Monty Python and the Holy Grail and I was hot, making comments, and I guess I was funny, so a couple of months later, Lorne called me and asked me to write for the show. The transition was simple. When the Not Ready for Prime Time Players were hired, there were six--everybody except me. Then there was a screen test, not an audition, a screen test, just to see how everybody came off, what they looked like, and I got in on that. I wrote a news item on a piece of paper--the final story of the night--something about a newborn baby sandpiper--one of those sweet, sentimental horseshit stories--and, of course, at the end of the story, the baby sandpiper gets stepped on and killed by a baby hippo. It got laughs and on top of that, we were doing commercial parodies and I'd written a few and I seemed to be the right character for them.

[Q] Playboy: Which commercial parodies are you referring to?

[A] Chase: The Geritol take-off, for one. It was Michael and I, two guys; we were (continued on page 220)Playboy Interview(continued from page 215) clearly homosexuals, but we played it straight. I said, "This is my wife. I love her very much." And Mike said, "I take care of myself. I get plenty of rest and I take Jamitol whenever I get the chance." And then I said, "He makes me take it, too." Another ad parody I did was Tom Schiller's "Tryopenen" ad, which was about those arthritic pain pills in the bottle that's so fucking hard to open--it had one of those tops--and, of course, the guy's trying to open the damned thing, but he can't, because he's got arthritis. The whole thing was my hands trying to open this Tryopenen bottle, banging it and hitting it. Anyway, I came oft well on those, so Lorne decided to give me a spot on the show.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you think you became the best-known performer on the show?

[A] Chase: The fact that I used my name and said, "I'm Chevy Chase and you're not"--the connection of this guy with the odd name--got me visibility right away. That, more than anything, made me stand out. Not that I was better than the others, which I clearly was, anyway, but.... Here's the secret, and I might as well tell you, so the others can learn something from it, because even as this interview comes out, I'll be making millions while they're just trying to get out another show. The secret is the way you play the camera. You must play the fuckin' camera. You've got to look into that lens and do a job on it. I learned this early on, because I was fuckin' around for four years with Ken Shapiro and Groove Tube, and all we had were these little cameras that we played with. Basically it was mugging, but it was all connected with the camera. Anyway, on Saturday Night, I had a showcase--"Weekend Update"--and you heard my name every week and I got to play the camera. I wasn't forced into awful situations like John, into sketches where you can't play the camera, where maybe the jokes aren't that good and you have to act the shit out of it to make it work, and boy does he do it. And he can do it--he's as good as you can get.

[Q] Playboy: You also got a lot of visibility because of your impersonation of Gerald Ford.

[A] Chase: Right.

[Q] Playboy: How did you develop that?

[A] Chase: I used to put up a card on Lorne's routine board and it said, "Trust me," and it meant don't worry about opening the show, I'll come up with something and it'll be fine. Just trust me. And Lorne would, because he knew that if I had the confidence in it, it would probably work. One day, Ford fell over a wheelchair onto a little girl with a flag or some kind of inept move, and it was just too much. It was the same week, I think, that he'd announced he was running. So I told Lorne that I had a good opening, that I'd be Ford giving his acceptance speech and then I'd fall. And that was it. I came out to the podium in a tuxedo and I said, "Good evening, my fellow Americans. I am here tonight, good evening, my fellow Americans." He'd read the line twice. I did every possible inept thing I could. I'd fall then say, "Uh-oh, sorry, no problem," get up, then fall again. For some reason, we repeated it every week--much to my pain.

[Q] Playboy: You actually hurt yourself badly once doing your Ford bit. What happened?

[A] Chase: I broke my podium. Broken podium is no big thing.

[Q] Playboy: How long was the podium in the hospital?

[A] Chase: Just a few days, in bed for three or four weeks.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't you hurt yourself before dress rehearsal and go on to do the show anyway?

[A] Chase: Yeah, I didn't know till later that night that it was really serious.

[Q] Playboy: Before we go on, there's one crucial question our readers must have answered. What's your announcer, Don Pardo, really like?

[A] Aykroyd: Don Pardo is a 15-year-old boy who has a very deep voice.

[A] Chase: Actually, Don's half Chinese and also has only one arm. He's a very interesting guy. He's been doing methadone for years now, to break him from this awful smack habit. You have to carry him in and put him there, sit him there, because he's always nodding out.

[A] Zweibel: He's great. He's a regulation-looking guy, grayish hair and he likes very, very young girls.

[Q] Playboy: Speaking of girls--are there any Saturday Night groupies?

[A] Franken: There are these two teenage girls who hang around the studio all the time, but they're not really groupies.

[A] O'Donoghue: Unfortunately, writers don't have groupies.

[A] Davis: If you want to know about groupies, ask Chevy or John.

[Q] Playboy: OK. Chevy, how do you handle groupies?

[A] Chase: I like to fondle them between the thighs. No, there aren't really any groupies, not in the sense of jumping up and down and fucking you in the back room.

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about guest hosts for a while. How do you go about writing for one?

[A] Shuster: It's mostly based on preconceived notions.

[A] Beatts: And a little research based on prejudice.

[Q] Playboy: When do the hosts come in?

[A] Shuster: You meet them on Monday, the Monday before the show, and you have to pitch your ideas Monday night. Then the show gets assembled.

[A] Beatts: And they have their own ideas of what they'd like to do. Sometimes we're influenced by that. Some of them want to sing, like Elliott Gould. It was kind of sweet, I guess, Elliott's song. Elliott's mother probably liked it.

[Q] Playboy: You sometimes require your hosts to participate in somewhat compromising situations. How did you talk Ralph Nader into that "Party Doll" sketch?

[A] O'Donoghue: I don't know if Ralph quite understood what the actual function of the dolls was. The premise of that sketch was that Ralph was testing these blow-up dolls. That's what he claimed. But then he also bought them music boxes for their birthdays and treated them as real people and had forced one, because she was naughty, to sit backward on the chair. At one point, he mentions a nail test and he starts talking to one of the dolls. "Excuse me," he says, "Rita had better sit up straight. Does Rita remember what happened to Yvonne? Yvonne failed the nail test. Yvonne got nailed to the door." And a guy says, "The nail test?" And Nader says, "To test puncture resistance in vinyl." He has a consumerism-type answer to every question, but he dresses the dolls up and paints their nails. It was really pretty odd. And he did a damn good job. He really got into it. At the end of the show, he was nuts. He was throwing peanuts to the crowd. He looked like a Rose Bowl float or something at the end. He's insane.

[Q] Playboy: Did Nader ask you to change anything in the sketch?

[A] O'Donoghue: He made us change one line in the end because it was sexist and I changed it to something equally sexist. The ending had Nader saying, "Excuse me, I'm going to have to cut this interview short. Rita is beginning to leak." And the reporter says, "Do you pump her up?" and Nader says, "Usually, but I have a headache tonight." And he found that sexist, so we changed it to, "Usually, but I have a yeast infection." I guess Ralph thought that a yeast infection was something safer, an organic kind of disease; I didn't want to disturb that belief.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you suppose Nader consented to do the show?

[A] O'Donoghue: I don't know why he did. Everyone who does this show does it for a reason. You get paid, I think, $2500 for a really grueling week's work, not much money, really. People do it to change their image, to show they have a good sense of humor. So I guess Ralph did it to show he's a regular guy. Nessen did it to co-opt us and we did it to co-opt him, so that was a trade-off.

[Q] Playboy: What constitutes a good host?

[A] Beatts: What we basically ask the hosts to do is to trust us with their lives, careers and reputations. You can see why some hosts might be a bit reluctant to let us maniacs come in and just say, "It's all right. The sketch will be there. Don't worry, it'll be fine," and it's 4:30 Friday and it's not written yet. Some people just have more confidence than others as far as saying, "OK, whatever you do, I'm with you." Those are the ones we like the best, whether they're the best hosts or not.

[Q] Playboy: Hosting the Saturday Night show has become something of a sought-after honor for celebrities. But if you could have your choice of any one personin the world as a host, whom would you choose?

[A] O'Donoghue: Laszlo Toth.

[Q] Playboy: Who?

[A] O'Donoghue: Laszlo Toth. The man who took a hammer to Michelangelo's Pietà.

[Q] Playboy: What sort of sketches do you envision writing for Laszlo?

[A] O'Donoghue: Basically, I see Laszlo breaking a lot of very expensive sculpture, preferably priceless, and leaving it in rubble at the end of the show.

[A] Aykroyd: I wanted King Olaf of Norway to host.

[A] Michaels: We pursued King Olaf. The only reason I liked the idea was so I could say, "The king's guests tonight will be...." Also, we were talking about having a Slinky as a host and that might still happen.

[A] Zweibel: George Burns would be my choice. If we got him, I'd like to see him host it standing in front of a TV set, watching the show and commenting on it, like he did on the old Burns and Allen Show. Some of us would love to have Squeaky Fromme host. I'd love to do a show with her and not make one mention of the fact that she tried to kill President Ford. Treat her as if she were Tatum O'Neal. I love the type of comedy where something is really evident but you don't make any mention of it. Like the debates sketch we did with Chevy portraying Ford with a hypodermic needle sticking out of his sleeve during the whole thing. It was a parody of Ford's getting his swine-flu vaccination and Chevy came out and did the whole debate wearing a suit with this hypodermic just sticking in his arm. Nobody even mentioned it. If Squeaky did the show, we'd make it like she was the girl next door.

[A] Beatts: I wanted to have Marshal Ky. Remember Marshal Ky--the Vietnamese guy? He and his wife used to dress in those identical black-satin jump suits. We approached him, but he wasn't interested.

[Q] Playboy: One of you was quoted as saying that you'd have Nixon host the show in a minute.

[A] Michaels: No, what was said was we'd like him to host for a minute.

[A] Shuster: You know how I'd like to have Richard Nixon? On the end of one of those two-way mirrors, so that when he thought he was just looking in the mirror, we'd be looking at him through the goldfish bowl.

[Q] Playboy: Alan, you're shaking your head.

[A] Zweibel: No, Nixon's not for me. The only way I would do it with Nixon would be to handle it as if he were Robert Goulet. If you ask me, Howdy Doody would be a great host.

[Q] Playboy: What would you do with Howdy Doody as host?

[A] Zweibel: After each sketch, we'd clip another one of his strings, so at the end of the show there's just this dead puppet lying there. We had a midget do our first show last year; he was a tall midget but still a midget. I'd love to see him become a permanent member of the rep company. What TV show has a resident midget?

[Q] Playboy: Are there any ideas that haven't completely germinated yet that you'd like to do on upcoming shows?

[A] O'Donoghue: I want to do a Western thing called "Ambush at Medicine Breath." Just a silly little Western parody with an Indian named Yellow Snow and these settlers who are trying to smuggle--they get it wrong--firewood to the Indians. They get out there and the cavalry catches them. The settler says, "Isn't it firewood that drives them Indians loco?" And the cavalryman says, "No, no, it's firewater." And there's an inept wagon master who yells, "Pull the wagons into a rhomboid!" when the Indians attack. Another thing I want to do eventually is a quiz show called Begging for Dollars, in which people just plead for the money. There's no game at all, just humiliation.

[A] Shuster: This isn't a piece for the show, but I wrote a Playboy Party Joke once. Wanna hear it?

[Q] Playboy: If you insist.

[A] Shuster: [Reading from a piece of paper] "Two imbibers were imbibing when a comely coed wiggled by, her dimpled derrière all aquiver. Needless to say, the a posteriori charms of the generously endowed young thing did not escape the by-now-aroused attention of the twin sousers. Pausing to query, the first tippler quipped with a twinkle in his by-now-not-unreddened eyes, "Wanna fuck?" "Tits?" retorted his by-now-inebriated crony with a lascivious wink. "I thought those were grapefruits."

[Q] Playboy: You wrote it for Playboy?

[A] Shuster: Yes, after I read this incredibly complex Playboy Party Joke and just thought how stupid it was. It seemed to have that kind of language in it.

[A] Aykroyd: Here's what I'd like to do: a full embalming on television in which you take a male teenager, 16 or 17 years old, do the V incision at the pelvis, peel it back and remove all the major organs, use an I.V. of formaldehyde, drain the blood out. An actual embalming!

[A] Belushi: Doug Kenny's TV Dance Party is one I'd like to do. A parody of Dick Clark where you'd have these real bad groups from Long Island come on and have the kids dancing and Dick Clark would say, "I don't know much about music, but you guys are really bad."

[A] Aykroyd: Wisdom teeth removed on the air. Actually get a guy who needs his wisdom teeth pulled, have a dentist there and say, "Hi, I'm Marty Fein and what we're going to do here is actually take out four wisdom teeth. As you can see by the X rays, we have a vertical impaction up here, and now we're going to put the patient to sleep."

[A] Franken: We wrote a piece called "The Planet of the Enormous Hooters" that didn't make it on the air but might on some future show. The planet of the Enormous Hooters is inhabited by amazon women and all the girls, Gilda, Laraine and Jane, have these enormous prop breasts. Huge breasts.

[A] Davis: And Raquel--we were going to use it on the Raquel Welch show--Raquel has only her normal-size breasts. And Gilda and Jane and Laraine say, "Look at her. Ha, ha, ha. Her breasts are so small, they look like melons. We are going to banish you to the planet Earth, where you will live in anonymity and your small breasts will go unnoticed."

[Q] Playboy: Why did it get cut?

[A] Davis: There were too many breast jokes that week and Raquel didn't want to do that kind of joke--it'd been done before.

[A] O'Donoghue: Here's a sketch I want to do someday, if Stevie Wonder ever hosts the show. What I'd do is come out and present him with a painting, an original Monet. The painting is completely draped. So I pull the drape off and it's an empty canvas that just reads, Don't tell him. Please don't tell him. And I'm going on about this painting, describing the period, saying, "Note the attention to the water lilies; of course, this was the late Monet, and you can see the subtle use of..." and just go on and on in this manner. It's a sweet idea.

[Q] Playboy: Where do you get those sweet ideas? Where does your sense of humor come from?

[A] Aykroyd: Fiberglass.

[Q] Playboy: Fiberglass?

[A] Aykroyd: We take fiberglass tablets, but I wouldn't recommend them to everybody.

[Q] Playboy: Let's rephrase the question. When did you first know you were funny?

[A] Aykroyd: I was a month old. I was a riot.

[A] Zweibel: It comes out of nowhere.

[A] Shuster: Sometimes it comes from catching images off the tube. I was always transfixed by the cat-food commercial where you see a line of nine cats nudging each other from bowl to bowl. So I wrote a "Purina Rat Chow" ad. I don't want to sound like Sammy Davis Jr., but it was a tremendous thrill to see nine rubber rats rigged up to nudge each other from bowl to bowl.

[A] Beatts: I think we're all misfits. Everybody on this show's a misfit and some of the humor comes from that.

[Q] Playboy: In what way do you consider yourself a misfit?

[A] Beatts: I mean, do I look regular? I wasn't the class clown, but I certainly was the class freak in some sense in high school. Being an alien helps you develop a satirical viewpoint. That's the basic ABC of humor. Some of my humor comes out of the fact that I come out of an advertising background, so I know how commercials work and how they ought to be. The first thing I did for the show was my speed commercial--I wrote it and performed it.

[Q] Playboy: Can you remember how it went?

[A] Beatts: "Hi, I'm Mrs. Ellen Sherman, Cleveland housewife and mother. I'm an astrophysicist and Commissioner of Current Affairs. In my spare time, I do needlepoint, sculpt, read, brush up on my knowledge of current events and take riding lessons." And she goes on and on like that and the voice-over says, "How does she do it? She takes speed." There are still people who think that was a real commercial for speed.

[Q] Playboy: Is your humor motivated at all by revenge?

[A] Beatts: Definitely. There's a certain satisfaction to be derived from the fact that the people who made you miserable in high school are now alcoholic housewives married to insurance salesmen. But, on the other hand, that might not be such a bad life, so you can't go back and say, "Hey, I've made it." But it's always a fantasy to feel that.

[A] Zweibel: I tried to get even with my old rabbi in a thing I did for "Update" recently. This guy with a hammer and chisel breaks into a museum in Italy and circumcises the statue of David and we show the statue with a bandage, over the groin----

[A] O'Donoghue: That would have been a great part for Laszlo Toth.

[A] Zweibel: Right. Anyway, then I came in--I performed in this one--as a rabbi and somebody asked me, "Rabbi, what do you think of what this culprit has done?" And I said, "In my opinion, he did a beautiful job." The name of the rabbi I used was the actual name of my old rabbi, who ten years ago wouldn't let me go out with this girl who wasn't Jewish. I've had this vendetta against this rabbi ever since. And Christ, if I can't work his name into a piece....

[Q] Playboy: You want to work his name into this interview?

[A] Zweibel: Uh, no. Funny--the next day was Yom Kippur and I went to temple. When I got home, my cat was dead.

[A] Radner: It's not really revenge. Here's this thing I figured out the other day; here's my definition of comedy: When I was a little girl, seven years old, this kid who lived nearby came over and said, "Yesterday morning, I saw you outside in your underwear." I said, "I didn't come outside in my underwear." And he said, "Yes you did." And I went into the house and cried and cried. And I thought, what happened? Did I go out of my mind? Did I go outside in my underwear by mistake? Did I mistake the front door for the bathroom door? You know how something like that can hurt you when you're a kid? I'm not sure to this day whether he really saw me outside in my underwear. But, anyway, I decided that this is what comedy is: If you do go outside in your underwear, when you get out there, you yell, "Hey, everybody, I'm outside here in my underwear!" So they can't get you, like that kid got me.

[A] Zweibel: You turn what you're usually defensive about into the offensive so people can't touch you.

[Q] Playboy: It's been said in the press that for a lot of you. the Saturday Night show is just a steppingstone to bigger and better things. What is the next step?

[A] Zweibel: Possibly junior high.

[A] Aykroyd: A featured panelist on the $20,000 Pyramid.

[A] O'Donoghue: The movies. I hope, and ditch this fucking show behind me. It's 110 hours a week--it's really an annoyance. It's not much of a life. I'd like to do heavy drugs, I'd like to go out, go to fancy parties, restaurants, dress, change my clothes a lot of times a day, drive fast....

[Q] Playboy: What about you, Rosie? Where do you go from here?

[A] Shuster: I'd like to go to the Caribbean.

[Q] Playboy: How about you, John?

[A] Belushi: Who knows? I've got a long life ahead of me. I might just do anything.

[A] Aykroyd: I heard John whistling around the office the oilier day, thinking, Governor of New Jersey. It ain't that far off.

[A] Belushi Who knows? Ronald Reagan did it.

[A] Aykroyd: It's a marvelous country, a fantastic planet--you can do anything. Christ Almighty, there's a universe waiting out there. Duality, yin and yang, positive, negative, male, female, there are two hemispheres, two poles....

[A] BelushiThere's gravity out there, don't forget. Gravity that holds you down.

[A] Aykroyd: The next step? You want to know about the next step? The next step is to stay away from the biological time bomb that's going to explode in this country in about 1979. There's going to be about four or five weird viruses, a natural biological check. The thing to do is stay away from it.

[Q] Playboy: How?

[A] Aykroyd: What it's going to require is the cooperation of General Motors. The Cadillac Division of General Motors should bring out, right now, all those old body dies from 1959. What they should do is get those body dies, get a cheaper grade of metal and produce those exact cars, exact replicas of the 1959 Cadillac, and distribute them to everyone in America. Given the fact that they have the technology to produce them, I think there's hope for America.

[Q] Playboy: That's very reassuring, but we're not sure that it answers the question. Let us put it this way: Do you think you'll ever end up regularly on prime time?

[A] O'Donoghue: I don't mind ending up on prime time. We were talking about doing a musical comedy or something. I don't have to always take a piss on the Pope when I have something to say.

[Q] Playboy: What about you, Chevy? To start with, do you think your leaving the show will hurt it?

[A] Chase: No. In a sense, it's good for the cast that I've left. It gives them all more of a chance to have the kind of luck I had. That's what they want. That's what anybody wants. I was kind of overshadowing them. All the articles were coming out saying, "Chevy Chase's Not Ready for Prime Time Players" or "Chevy Chase's Saturday Night." Well, fuck that--it never was my show.

[A] Beatts: It was always a little out of kilter with Chevy there, though he was good for the show. But when Chevy was in the hospital, it gave us a preview of what the show would be like without him and it gave everybody a lot of confidence, because we got some great reaction to those shows and to Jane's doing "Update."

[Q] Playboy: Chevy, you've been called more commercial than some of the other cast members. Do you think that's true?

[A] Chase: Who knows what's commercial? I guess I'm commercial because I look straighter. I look preppy and straight.

[Q] Playboy: What about all the rumors that NBC is grooming you to take over the Johnny Carson show?

[A] Chase Absolutely true.

[Q] Playboy: Really? When do you start?

[A] Chase: As soon as Johnny gets the balls to ask me to be a guest on the show and (concluded on page 228)Playboy Interview(continued from page 224) I can show him and everybody in this country that he's had it. He's finished. He's old and his time is up. The man is a waste. He should go home, read a couple of books and find out what it's all about. He should get a nice pad in Vegas, go buy a Buick and enjoy life.

[Q] Playboy: Assuming that you're putting us on, what kind of guests do you plan to have on The Tonight Show?

[A] Chase: I'd have Johnny on as much as I could. We want draw, don't we? No, actually, the rumors are totally false. It's a load of shit. Everybody and his uncle who seems to be somebody new on TV this year gets slated as the next Johnny Carson. Nobody's going to take over Carson's spot until Carson is good and ready to leave. And then he won't give a shit who replaces him. Second of all, nobody does it as well as he does. He's remarkable--after 14 years, he's still fresh. But that's the worst kind of job in the world.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Chase: Can you imagine coming out nightly and having to interview people about their books--some guy who's not really a doctor who wrote a book about goiters--and interviewing your Las Vegas Connie Stevens--type night-club acts? I can't think of anything more atrophying to my brain. There's no amount of money you could offer me to take that job, and nobody has. Nobody even suggested it. Only the press. And now Johnny Carson hates my guts and he doesn't even know me.

[Q] Playboy: Perhaps he's heard the rumors, too, and believes them. We read somewhere that he recently called the Saturday Night show "tasteless, sophomoric and cruel."

[A] Chase: I'm sure he did. And I'm sure he's felt that way from time to time. But his standards are not my standards. I'm a younger guy, I come from a different perspective and I just don't feel the way he does. He's a very funny man, I will say that, and I've noticed that I seem to have mannerisms that are similar to his, particularly when I did "Update." I touch my nose, I play with a pencil, I have a way of doing takes when a joke is bad--those are all Johnny Carson mannerisms. I'm not consciously imitating him, but I must have been influenced by him somewhere along the line.

[Q] Playboy: How do you know lie dislikes you?

[A] Chase: I sent him a very nice note when he was given a special Emmy or something, congratulating him and saying, "You're the best." I never heard from him. All I heard was that he told a friend of mine, "Chevy Chase couldn't ad-lib a fart at a bean-eating contest." Which tome is an extremely funny line, Johnny. But if that's the best lie can come up with, I'm sorry for the guy. I understand that he's funny and that at dinners he'll piss in ice buckets under the table and do all kinds of great outrageous things, but how many of us haven't done that? He dislikes me so intensely that he won't ask me on the show. Frankly, I think he was a lot funnier seven or eight years ago, when lie didn't have to get so uptight. I honestly believe that we would get along very well, that we would like each other. On the other hand, I really don't care about him.

[Q] Playboy: Chevy, where do you see Saturday Night going from here?

[A] Chase: The show's going to be less ga-ga ha-ha and more odd as time goes on. Because, first of all, people are genuinely burned out--you just can't keep it up. Secondly, because every other show on TV is copying this one, they've got to stay ahead. These are bright people, and they're not going to put up with something that's not interesting. So what happens is, the ideas, the sketches tend to get weirder. Danny came up with this "Blog Diet" sketch in which you're sent up to Alaska and an Eskimo takes your food away from you. That's how you lose weight. You're sent up there and told to catch fish. Now, that's odd to play to 20,000,000 people. There aren't going to be a lot of guffaws, but at least no one's going to say, "I've seen that before." No one's seen that before.

[A] Beatts: Actually, I look forward to seeing more sketches involving fine food and wine.

[Q] Playboy: But don't you think a lot of the show's success comes from the shock of seeing somewhat outrageous humor on television for the first time? Stuff that nobody else is doing, that nobody else could get away with?

[A] Michaels: Yeah; unfortunately, within the context of television as it now exists, it seems like shock value. But I don't think we ever truly shock. Who's being shocked? I'm not shocked. Are you shocked?

[A] Newman: One thing that shocked me was Michael--naturally, Michael. He'd found this photo of a kid under a truck, crying, and it looked like half the kid's body had been run over and the "Update" caption was that the truck driver got a ticket for parking on a child.

[A] Shuster: There's something about laughing at tasteless things, though. You laugh at what you're nervous about. One of my comedic philosophies is that comedy is about flirting with taboos. You try to tickle the taboo and just turn it around a little bit more or rub up against it and that has a shock value, because the taboo is something that you don't often hear mentioned.

[A] Beatts: It's all such hypocrisy, because there's this fiction that what we all really should be doing is watching Kenneth Clark's Civilization, that that should be what we're really interested in, and, actually, we all know that what we're really interested in is sex, drugs and violence.

[A] Zweibel: It's never the intention of the show to shock people. It's just perceived as shocking because this kind of stuff has never been done on television before.

[Q] Playboy: What happens when the shock value wears off?

[A] Beatts: We'll just have to explore the limits of the American people's disgust.

[A] Newman: Or we won't do it anymore.

[A] O'Donoghue: You can get tired and not want to keep doing it. Eventually, it becomes a big hat and a small rabbit.

[A] Beatts: It's funny that people are still shocked. I don't think you're seeing much on the show that isn't available elsewhere in the culture. It's just not available on TV.

[Q] Playboy: Some of you worked for the National Lampoon. Does the show's humor grow out of that magazine's humor?

[A] Michaels: No. I never liked the Lampoon. If anything, it comes out of The New Yorker.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think about that, Michael?

[A] O'Donoghue: No. the show's got a lot of different elements in it. Some are a logical extension of the Lampoon, I suppose, but there's also a California sweetness about it.

[Q] Playboy: All right, here we are at the door, on the way out. Sometimes we playboy interviewers ask one final question and even we don't know what the political effects will be. Anyone have anything he or she would like to say before we wrap it up?

[A] Morris: Aw, you mean Carter at the end of his interview. You all didn't have no little Playboy Bunnies with you down in Plains? Come on, man, you tellin' me you didn't have no Bunnies?

[Q] Playboy: No, honest.

[A] O'Donoghue: OK. it's up to me, I guess. I'll reveal something. I keep a dead collieskin on a coat hanger in my closet. Now, if that doesn't lose the election for me, I don't know what will.

"Remember that this is just showbiz--so who gives a shit how great we are?"

"Ford would look at the White House schedule for the day--1.17 P.M., open your fly.'"

"Here's what I'd like to do: a full embalming on television."

I don't always have to take a piss on the Pope when I have something to say."

"The show's going to be less ga-ga ha-ha and more odd as time goes on."