I don’t know of whom I’m more jealous, Lorne Michaels or Susan Morrison. The latter’s “Lorne” is one of the best biographies I’ve ever read. It’s as though she videotaped his life and the lives of everyone he’s ever spoken to, edited out all the boring parts and left us a book rich in details and anecdotes.
Review: The man who brought you ‘Saturday Night Live’ has had a wild life
Nonfiction: From Lily Tomlin to Michael Che, “Lorne” Michaels has worked with a lot of comic greats.
For the Minnesota Star Tribune
February 15, 2025 at 1:30PM
Her achievement is all the more remarkable because Michaels and his “Saturday Night Live” already are reasonably well known, but even more so because he is a complex, not easily definable subject.
Michaels (born Lorne Lipowitz) was raised in a middle-class, Jewish family in Toronto. His father died when Lorne was 13, but Lorne found solace with an uncle who encouraged his show business wanderlust.
He enjoyed success as a writer and performer in clubs and on Canadian radio and television. The same goes for when he moved to Los Angeles and worked as a writer, then producer of television shows such as “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” a Flip Wilson special and “The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show.” “Despite the success,” Morrison writes, “Michaels was nagged by a mental picture of what his career should be.”
He wanted to produce the show he imagined in his head. Working with Lily Tomlin on several specials came close, but it was thanks to Johnny Carson that he finally got his chance.
Carson insisted that his network, NBC, halt Saturday night re-runs of his “Tonight Show.” Afraid local stations would reclaim that time slot if network executives didn’t offer a viable alternative, they searched for a replacement. Enter Michaels.
His pitch was honest, billing the show as “new wine in old bottles.”
”We will always be experimenting on the air and responding to our mistakes,“ Michaels promised. ”I know what the ingredients are, but not the recipe.”
Fortunately for chef Michaels, “SNL” played to his strengths. For one, he was “skilled at managing creative egos” and “helping people feel that their contributions are valued,” a job made even trickier because he was surrounded by young comics, transitioning from obscurity to fame and fueled by drugs that were readily available around the set.
Another useful trait was his desire to steer clear of confrontations, waiting out the storm of the moment via the strategy of “General Fabius Maximus, who avoids battle and seeks to win by attrition.”
Though Michaels was funny, his greatest contribution was that he understood funny. He “contributed not by dreaming up premises and punchlines, but by considering how a joke could be performed and how a sketch was paced.” Chevy Chase explained: “He knew what was funny and why.”
When he made choices about the weekly line-up, they were based on many factors: Does everyone in the cast have something to do? Is there enough topical material? His goal: “find enough colors to make a rainbow.”
“Lorne” is divided into six sections, one each for Monday through Saturday, which corresponds to the week in 2018 when Morrison was given access to the show. She describes in detail what happens each day as writers and performers hope to get their ideas approved. The chapters in between offer a history of a man and a show that changed the comedy landscape — and has been doing so for almost 50 years.
Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
By: Susan Morrison.
Publisher: Random House, 599 pages, $36.
Nonfiction: From Lily Tomlin to Michael Che, “Lorne” Michaels has worked with a lot of comic greats.
