Where do you start with a show that has been SO influential in all our lives? Well, I guess like everyone, all I REALLY know is the personal. I can tell you the story of a 15 year-old kid in Texas and how Saturday Night Live changed HIS life. It’s 1975, and it starts as it always does with a “cold open” and the first person you see is Michael O’Donoghue, reading to John Belushi:
“Repeat after me. I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverines…”
I watched that first show and the all of the following episodes and fell in love with New York City. Five years later, I was living in that city and five years after that, I met one of my idols, Michael O’Donoghue. By then, he had left the show he helped create as its first head writer. We became great friends, much to my amazement and delight. I was a groomsman when he married the music director of SNL, Cheryl Hardwick. More on that later…
I don’t think you can overstate Michael’s influence on SNL. Looking back it seems that first year, that nearly every word out of those incredible actor’s mouths could have come out of his own. There WERE other great writers, but the “tone” of the show was set by Michael, no doubt about it. Yes, there were many other comedy and variety shows before that, but none had the subversive counter-culture vibe that we now take for granted. Michael came from the National Lampoon and his humor was widely known, so, he was one of the only guys who were really “established”, so to speak. Everyone else was really an unknown. Lorne Michaels said recently that the SNL of today would never have existed without had that first cast not happened the way they did. They had a HUGE impact on the culture at the time. NYC was broke, the Vietnam War had just ended and Watergate was still fresh news. The establishment (like NBC) was under attack and Michael lead the charge.