Roughly midway through the first “Saturday Night Live” broadcast, in October 1975, Chevy Chase, dressed in a suit and seated behind a simple desk with a telephone, read a joke about the new Detroit headquarters for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
The union’s president, Chase said, had remarked that Jimmy Hoffa would “always be a cornerstone in the organization.”
Thus was born Weekend Update, the satirical news segment and institution-within-an-institution at “S.N.L.,” a fundamental part of the series for virtually all of its 50 years.
While hardly the first TV news parody, Weekend Update is the most enduring franchise of its kind, giving “S.N.L.” its most direct platform to make fun of politics, presidents, global crises and daily oddities.
Like “S.N.L.” itself, Weekend Update has been a launchpad for comedy careers. It has also been a crucible of controversy, particularly when its iconoclastic performers have come into conflict with NBC executives who weren’t laughing at their pointed routines.
Weekend Update was designed to a satisfy a young audience that was craving topical commentary. “We were following Watergate, the end of the Vietnam War,” said Lorne Michaels, the “S.N.L.” creator and longtime executive producer. “There was a lot going on.”
It also served to reintroduce “S.N.L.” on NBC stations that joined the broadcast at midnight (after airing their own local news at 11:30). “In a sense, we needed a second start to the show,” Michaels said.
Since then, Weekend Update has restarted and renewed itself multiple times under different anchors and creative regimes. Here, a dozen of those people tell the story of its news-making history.
LORNE MICHAELS I was thinking about the kind of show that I wanted to put on and how I was going to fill 90 minutes. There had been a British satire show called “That Was the Week That Was” in the ’60s, and an American version on NBC. I thought, I’m not sure you can do a half-hour on the news, but you can definitely do 10 minutes.
CHEVY CHASE (anchor, 1975-6) There was this new cast, and during a table read, Lorne went around the table and said, “Do something.” You know, all those news reports end with a nice story: I did one about this zoo in which a baby hippopotamus was born. It’s the cutest damn thing — unfortunately, the baby hippopotamus stepped on the baby sandpiper that had just been born. I think that set Lorne’s sights on trying to put me in there and do a Weekend Update-type thing.
MICHAELS I’d done similar things in Canada, where it had been me behind the desk. I thought, if I’m anchoring this and I’m also cutting other people’s sketches, it’s going to be awkward. I’m not Orson Welles.
CHASE On all the news shows, they had kind of — oh God, hideous stuff, like “I’m Chevy Chase and have a pleasant tomorrow,” or “I’m Chevy Chase and — ” something. I loved doing it that way: “I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not.” OK, so [expletive] off.
AL FRANKEN (writer and commentator, 1975-80, 1985-95) I wrote jokes for it. I wanted to get stuff on Update because I thought it was a good vehicle for jokes. Chevy killed with it. The first season, Chevy was the star of the show.
CHASE I wanted to include people who didn’t get enough time. So I put Garrett Morris all the way on the other end of the studio yelling the news [“News for the Hard of Hearing”], or Laraine Newman at the Blaine Hotel. I wanted our cast to be inclusive of each other. There were seven of us, unlike the 112 there are now.
MICHAELS Because Chevy said his own name and because it was popular, he was the first person to emerge. Subsequently, it’s where most people broke out: Gilda Radner, John Belushi, and to this day it continues. [When Chase left], I thought, You can’t follow Chevy. Any other guy doing it would be seen as a reaction to him. Jane was my first choice.
JANE CURTIN (anchor, 1976-80) I’m a good cold reader. It was easy for me to look into the camera and spew things without going over the top because I had done commercials. At that time, there weren’t many female anchors, and they were all very ambitious and driven. There was a brittleness to them because they had to compete with the men. So I thought, well, I’ll do that.
Dan [Aykroyd] just appeared — I guess they thought we needed more people there — and I thought, Oh, great, company. I trusted Dan. The chemistry was there just from watching him work and being in sketches with him.
MICHAELS “Jane, you ignorant slut” was a parody of “60 Minutes” at the time.
CURTIN This was the ’70s, and it was an interesting dynamic that men and women had. It was not unusual to have a response that pointed — but not exactly that direct. I never assumed anybody would use it that way without the other person thinking it was funny. If they’re not using it in jest, then they’re an idiot.
After five seasons of “S.N.L.,” there was plenty of cast turnover and creative burnout, and Michaels was contemplating his future. On the May 10, 1980, broadcast, Franken performed a satirical Weekend Update commentary, “A Limo for a Lame-O,” that mocked the NBC president, Fred Silverman, for the network’s poor performance. The fallout from this segment is sometimes cited as a reason Michaels and Franken departed “S.N.L.” at the end of the season.
MICHAELS Al observed, when he was leaving the studio, that there was a limo waiting for Fred Silverman. So Al did his Me Decade guy, attacking the biggest person he could. I don’t think it was meant to be hostile. [The NBC executives] Brandon Tartikoff and Barbara Gallagher, both of whom worked for Fred, were at dress rehearsal when Al did that. I said: “Will you please call him and let him know not to watch that? Just so that he’s not blindsided.” But as it turned out, neither called.
FRANKEN Silverman took it personally, and I just thought it was funny.
MICHAELS I was trying to make up my mind whether I was going to come back [to “S.N.L.”] again. Fred Silverman and I did meet after it, but it was just a practical decision [for Michaels to leave]. For me, there’d be no time to reinvent the show, and I didn’t want to keep doing what I was doing.
FRANKEN I don’t think it was the Silverman thing. After five years, we were kind of tired of it and wanted to give it a break. Looking back in the long run, it was a mistake. We were young and should have been able to say, “We can do a sixth year.” It was kind of stupid.
In the five years that Michaels was absent from “S.N.L.,” Weekend Update went through a period of reshuffling and uncertainty. It was given new names — S.N.L. NewsBreak, Saturday Night News — and it cycled through various anchors including Charles Rocket, Brian Doyle-Murray, Mary Gross, Christine Ebersole and Christopher Guest. When Michaels returned to “S.N.L.” in 1985, one of his priorities was to stabilize and re-center Weekend Update, and he hired a sharp young comic named Dennis Miller to help him do it.
MICHAELS I went to see Dennis, and I liked him. I thought he was where the politics were. He was smart, and his jokes were really good. And he opened the door to [Jon] Lovitz and Dana Carvey coming on and doing characters and a lot of other good people coming to the desk.
When Miller departed in 1991, he proved a difficult act to follow. His Weekend Update successor, Kevin Nealon, said Miller “had put a stamp on it,” adding, “It’s kind of like a president — once the old one leaves, people have to get used to the new one.” Soon the segment caught the unwelcome attention of Don Ohlmeyer, NBC’s West Coast vice president.
MICHAELS We were at a generational change. Don and I would have dinner at Morton’s, and he’d say, “Adam Sandler is not funny.” And I’d say, “I think he is.” Don had very strong opinions. Don was competitive with everyone, and I wasn’t afraid of him. We’d get through it. Then Norm started doing Update.
JAMES DOWNEY (writer and producer, 1976-80, 84-98, 2000-5, 2006-13) At a meeting in Burbank in the summer of ’94, Don Ohlmeyer and some of the other NBC execs were critiquing the show. Toward the end of the meeting, Ohlmeyer laid down the law: Kevin Nealon had to go; he’s not doing the segment anymore. So who’s it going to be? I said, “You’re probably not going to like this, but I think it should be Norm Macdonald.”
This meeting was long, and the reason it ended was because Don Ohlmeyer had to go to L.A. County [jail] because visiting hours started, and he could visit O.J. [Simpson].
MICHAELS Don and O.J. were good friends, and that’s well documented. And Norm was from the part of Canada that you don’t mess around with.
DOWNEY In three seasons, we did 60-odd shows where there was at least one O.J. joke, sometimes two or three. When we started the fall of ’97, O.J. was out of the news. There was nothing to do.
Then right before Christmas, O.J. went to have dinner at a restaurant in Brentwood, and the manager asked him to leave. So we did a joke about that: The restaurant not only agreed to give O.J. a small settlement, but they had also promised to set up separate murderer and non-murderer sections. There was also a joke about [the N.B.A. player] Latrell Sprewell, who choked P.J. Carlesimo, his coach, and was being represented by Johnnie Cochran. We said, “He vows to find the real choker.”
I was visiting my son, and I got a phone call from one of the people at the show saying, Chris Farley’s dead, and you and Norm are fired.
MICHAELS The Norm thing just kept getting under [Ohlmeyer’s] skin. We had it out at some meeting in the fall when he said, “He has to go.” And I said, “I’ll do it at the end of the season if you still feel that way.” And we agreed we would meet on Dec. 28.
A few days before that, Chris Farley died. I was in Aspen, and I went to the airport, went to Farley’s funeral — which was really rough, saw his parents — and then I flew back. I went to dinner with Don and I thought, I just buried somebody who I cared a lot about. I thought it would be part of [the conversation], but it wasn’t. Don said: “[Norm] has to go. He’s fired.” And I said: “Don’t do this. You do not want to fight with comedians. They never stop.”
DOWNEY The NBC execs said: “We’re the experts on public relations. The smart move, Norm, is for you to stay off television.” So he went on Letterman and talked about the firing, and that became this huge viral thing. We were getting calls from Marty Short, Chevy Chase, Jerry Seinfeld and all these people to say how insane the thing was. It was no consolation to Norm. He wanted to continue to perform, and he was, in effect, blacklisted for a period there.
MICHAELS This was a show of force, and I was going have to deal with it — a who’s-the-boss moment. But Colin [Quinn] stepped up, which was great.
Quinn took over from Macdonald and stayed at Weekend Update until 2000. Before the show’s 26th season, Michaels decided to return to a two-person format for Weekend Update, testing it with co-anchors including the cast member Jimmy Fallon and Tina Fey, an “S.N.L.” head writer whose on-camera personality was not yet known to viewers.
TINA FEY (anchor, 2000-6) Colin Quinn was leaving the desk, and they were auditioning in-house and asked me to test. It was bizarre but exciting to me because I was a writer. I thought I would never be on the show. I tested with Jimmy; I could help him seem more serious than he was — this schoolmarm-schoolboy dynamic.
What an opportunity to try whatever you want and figure out: What is my act? How do I want to present as a version of myself? There’s sort of a dark, aggro, ’90s attempt at feminism — feminism that is oftentimes quite sexist and sort of brutal. But it was a chance to hone your voice. “The Daily Show” and Jon Stewart were huge, and we were like, Oh, are we supposed to have a take on things, too? I would not want to see any one of those runs now.
AMY POEHLER (anchor, 2004-8) After Jimmy [left in 2004], [Fey] was trying to think about: Did she want to do it alone? Did she want to do it with someone?
FEY I remember thinking, I’m supposed to be like, Now it’s my time. But I didn’t want that. It wasn’t just me being a chicken — it was not how I wanted it to be. And thankfully, Amy was down to do it.
POEHLER Purely as a fan of the show, I did think it would be exciting to see two women at the desk. Anchors need a shared language, and we had that. There were times when I would watch where I’d think, Oh, that’s too loose, especially in the beginning when I was still trying to find my way. But I was lucky that I was doing it with my friend.
SETH MEYERS (anchor, 2006-14) As the male cast members came in after me, they all had more range than I did. Are they really going to choose me [for sketches] over [Bill] Hader, [Andy] Samberg, [Jason] Sudeikis, Fred [Armisen], Will [Forte]? By the time the question came up — Who was going to do Update with Amy? — I don’t think I had much of a future on the show, or any interest in a future on the show if I wasn’t doing Update. I could see the writing on the wall.
POEHLER Update became a very safe place. I know it’s treacherous and it’s cutthroat and it’s blah, blah. But for me, it became a place to settle and be myself.
When I was on the desk with Seth, there was a freedom that came from getting better at the job, and also — it’s like senioritis — you get looser, and you try more stupid stuff. For me, the most memorable Update moment is the Palin rap [performed with then-Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, at the desk]. I had that flexibility to perform even when I was actively pregnant.
MEYERS Even as Amy was getting much larger with a child growing inside her, there was no talk of like, What are we going to do when she has a baby? When [she went into labor], she texted me, “Good luck tomorrow.”
POEHLER When I gave birth [to her first son, Archie], I watched it from the hospital room, holding my kid while Maya [Rudolph] and Kenan [Thompson] sang to my son, and Seth proceeded to do it by himself. [Poehler returned for a final Weekend Update appearance at the end of that year.] That passing of the torch is dope. You’re taking over someone else’s space, and it’s like you have to thank the ancestors and also cleanse the place of ghosts. You have to sage and leave an offering at the same time.
MEYERS I had no exit strategy at “S.N.L.” I’m so grateful that [“Late Night”] came up because I was destined to overstay my welcome.
In 2013, Meyers was joined by the cast member Cecily Strong as a co-anchor and he left the next year to host “Late Night.” Michaels then tapped Colin Jost, an “S.N.L.” writer, to join her on the desk.
But Strong said she soon missed character work. “I enjoyed having my own voice on the show,” she said. But “I wanted to score on the other parts of the show.” She also left the desk in 2014, and Michael Che, a correspondent on “The Daily Show,” was brought in to co-anchor Weekend Update with Jost. They overcame a very rough start, going on to become the longest running anchors in its history.
COLIN JOST (anchor, 2014-present) I was itching to perform more. Lorne asked me if I thought I could do Update, which is a funny, very Lorne way of getting into it.
MICHAEL CHE (anchor, 2014-present) I was doing “The Daily Show,” and they were like, would you test for [Weekend Update]? In comedy, you take anything that’s presented to you, especially something on television. You say yes no matter what.
Norm was great, and Quinn was great, and Tina was great. There had never been an anchor like me, so it was inherently going to be different. Not to say that’s a good or bad thing. We all just have very different comedy styles, and I had to figure out a way to do it the way I would do it.
JOST I’m still nervous every week before I go out. But I’m also excited instead of it feeling like an existential crisis all the time, which it was for the first three years. And Mr. Che keeps me guessing about how he will surprise-slash-undermine me.
CHE Humor is contagious. Once we started having fun with each other, the audience wanted in on that too. We were already as bad as we could possibly be. Once it started to get funny to us, it got funny to everybody else.
JOST Weekend Update has outlasted the format it was based on. There’s no news coverage like this anymore. The look of it — the graphics, the maps behind us — is almost nostalgic now. At the heart of it, there have to be good jokes. If it’s funny, then that’s the only ingredient you need for success.
CHE It’s such a free-form space for the cast to score. As many anchors as it’s made, it’s made probably quadruple the cast members. You see Sandler play a song, or you see Bobby Moynihan, or Cecily, or Kristen [Wiig], or Pete [Davidson] and Leslie [Jones]. You might have a character that might not justify a whole sketch, but you lock them in a chair and let them talk directly to the camera. There’s something magical about what it can do.
MICHAELS If we did it the way John Oliver does it, it would be dependent on that person. But it’s always been the voice, or voices, that show up. They’re a news person, or they’re in character — whatever it is, it’s another chance to show off and do something. Most people become stars on Update, starting with Chevy. It’s got a great history, and the longer you’re away from it, the more romantic it looks.
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