Gerald R. Ford, the 38th president of the United States, was a football star at the University of Michigan and, as Susan Morrison puts it in “Lorne,” her new biography of Lorne Michaels, the creator of “Saturday Night Live,” “a man of some physical grace.” If he’s remembered otherwise, as a singularly clumsy occupant of the White House, it’s because his brief administration happened to coincide with the first seasons of the show, in the mid-1970s. On “S.N.L.,” Chevy Chase, a comedian with no special talent for impressions and a knack for pratfalls, played Ford as a man locked in a perpetual losing battle with gravity, crashing through a Christmas tree, a press-conference podium and his Oval Office desk.
Does that count as political satire? Ford and his family are known to have appreciated the joke, and most American presidents since then have at least pretended to laugh along with their “S.N.L.” treatment. Donald Trump has been an exception, but on the other hand he is the only successful presidential candidate ever to have hosted. Answers to the trivia question implied in the last sentence include George McGovern, Jesse Jackson, Steve Forbes and John McCain.
For most of its 50-year existence, “S.N.L.” has walked the fine line between provocation and caution, aiming for a sweet spot of non-bland consensus. It arrived at NBC in the wake of the cultural and social rebellions of the 1960s but attempted from the start to shed both the pop fizziness and the countercultural earnestness of that decade. What made it radical was that — in the words of Michael J. Arlen, The New Yorker’s astute TV critic — it seemed “to speak out of the real, non-show-business world that most people inhabit.”
Through good and bad seasons, Republican and Democratic administrations and countless personnel changes, “S.N.L.” has served as a barometer of comedic normalcy, which is no small achievement. It’s been cool and cynical, surreal and silly, bold enough to make adolescents of all ages feel daring for staying up past 11:30 (or catching up on YouTube the next morning) and safe enough to keep advertisers and network executives happy.
The sketches have refracted the comic sensibilities of hundreds of writers and performers, many of whom have graduated to movie and television stardom. But most of those alums would agree that “S.N.L.” is anchored in the personality of one man: Lorne Michaels.
Before “S.N.L.,” Michaels (born Lorne Lipowitz in Toronto in 1944) worked, with modest success, as a joke writer and comedian. He doesn’t do those jobs on the show, but he isn’t an invisible behind-the-scenes puppeteer or a faceless network apparatchik either.
Everyone who watches knows who Michaels is — the unreadable boss, the mystical Jedi of modern humor, the patient headmaster of a finishing school for misfit comics — but his fame is obscured both by his natural, stereotypically Canadian diffidence and by the somewhat paradoxical traditions of modern media. An engineer of celebrity and a household name in his own right, he can walk undisturbed from his home on Central Park West to his office at Rockefeller Center.
In “Lorne,” Morrison, an editor at The New Yorker and a former editor of The New York Observer, has built Michaels the kind of biographical monument usually consecrated to founding fathers, canonical authors and world-historical scientific geniuses. A fair question might be whether the progenitor and supervisor of a long-running sketch-comedy show (with lucrative side gigs as a movie and television producer) merits such treatment.
That the answer turns out to be yes is largely a tribute to Morrison’s journalistic chops. Briskly written and solidly sourced, “Lorne” is in essence a nearly 650-page magazine profile — something I mean almost entirely as praise. (An excerpt recently appeared in The New Yorker in the guise of a standard-length profile.)
Rather than plod chronologically through her subject’s 80 years on earth, Morrison adapts the magazine writer’s technique of cutting back and forth between present and past. The book’s sections correspond to the days of a workweek, each beginning with a fly-on-the-wall account of how an episode comes together.
We’re in the room in the autumn of 2018 — pre-Covid, mid-Trump — and the forgettable nature of the resulting episode (Jonah Hill was host; Maggie Rogers was the musical guest; the funniest sketch involved wigs for pugs) works in Morrison’s favor. What she depicts seems like a more or less typical cycle of pitches, tweaks, minor dust-ups and ego massages. Through it all, Michaels — nobody ever calls him anything but Lorne — delivers koans, notes, non sequiturs, old showbiz stories and an occasional laugh, as current and former employees try to explain what makes him tick. More clues are provided as we flash back to his early life in Toronto and Los Angeles, his three marriages and his long march through the institutions of broadcasting.
“Lorne” is not a comprehensive, season-by-season chronicle of “Saturday Night Live”; Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s “Live From New York,” published in 2002, still fills that niche, though it could use an update. Not that the recent history gets much attention from Morrison. Four hundred and fifty pages in, we are still in the early 1990s, but the foreshortening is merciful. Her two-track narrative counterpoints the self-contained, endlessly repeated drama of making an episode with the novelistic tale of a young man’s rise in a volatile industry. In such stories, the action is all in the climb. By the time he turned 50, Michaels had attained not a pinnacle but a plateau. Or, to put it another way, it’s more interesting to learn how he built the house of “S.N.L.” than it would be to read through decades of maintenance reports.
In Morrison’s pages, Michaels is surrounded by famous acquaintances, admiring and sometimes baffled employees, and adjectives like “gnomic,” “inscrutable” and “aloof.” By the end of the book, you know a lot about him — about his habits, his social life, his taste — without quite knowing what he’s all about.
This elusiveness may be the secret to his success. According to Morrison, Michaels counted among his friends William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, and Mike Nichols, the film and theater director. Each in his way stands as an enigmatic avatar of middlebrow, midcentury, Manhattan-centric American culture. Neither was a great artist, but both had exemplary careers, sustained by aesthetic instincts that were at once sophisticated and solidly mainstream.
Michaels possesses a similar touch, not snobbish but not entirely populist either. Starting out as an iconoclast in the world of network television, he has lasted long enough to become one of the last living embodiments of its values. From this sometimes crazy tale of show-business resilience, Morrison extracts a suitably low-key moral: “If you learn how to stay afloat, and if you don’t expect that the show will always be great, if you know that it will go up and down, you’ll survive.”
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