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All Of It with Alison Stewart
Full Bio: Lorne Michaels and Saturday Night Live
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For this month's Full Bio, we're going to learn more about Lorne Michaels, Saturday Night Live's creator and showrunner.
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Alison Stewart
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. It is almost time for our get lit with all of it book club event. We are reading Mothers and Sons by Adam Hayslett on Wednesday. I'll be in conversation with Adam and you and this month's musical guest who is dropping an album this week, Spencer Pepit of the Ophelias. The Ophelias will release the album Spring Grove this Friday, produced by boy genius Julian Baker. This weekend they'll also kick off their tour with a show in Brooklyn. We have lead singer and songwriter Spencer for a special preview of the record before it comes out. That's this Wednesday, April 2nd at the New York Public Library's Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library branch. To get your Tickets, head to wnyc.org getlit Tickets are free, but they tend to sell out quickly, so reserve yours today. Again, that's wnyc.org get lit. Full Bio is our book series where we discuss a fully researched biography for a few days. Our guest is Susan Morrison. She's the author of the man who Invented Saturday Night Live. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live. It went on the air October 11, 1975, and at the helm was Lorne Michaels, a month shy of his 30th birthday. Michaels is now 80 and has been through the evolution of TV. Susan Morrison got Lorne Michaels to agree to talk to her for her 600 page bio, as did members from Michaels past and present. Names you've heard of, like Bill hader and Conan O'Brien, and names you might not know like Hart Pomerantz and Rosie Schuster. Today we start the book with Lauren's childhood. Lauren David Lipowitz was born in Toronto, Canada on November 17, 1944 to Florence and Henry Abraham Lipowitz. He was the oldest of three children. And that's where we begin with Susan Morrison, the author of Lorne the Man who Invented Saturday Night Live, our choice for Full bio. So Susan Lauren's name was Lauren Lipowicz. His grandparents owned a movie theater. What kind of entertainment did he grow up watching and liking?
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Susan Morrison
Well, he stressed that as a boy in very cold, very boring Canada, you Had to kind of make your own fun, you had to make your own distraction. There's a lot of ice skating on, you know, flooded playground ponds and things like that. But when American television finally came to Canada, that really turned the lights on. It really changed his life because before they got American channels, the CBC was dominated by a lot of, you know, folk singing and Shakespeare. Sort of boring. But he, you know, as soon as he could watch the Phil Silver show, your show of shows, you know, all the great American variety shows, he was completely hooked. And one of the things that I loved hearing about from him is how he would watch with his grandmother, his very sophisticated kind of, you know, she, she booked, she had a movie theater and she would explain who these men and women on the TV were. And there was a, there's a great thing that I think he really internalized, like he'd be watching Jack Benny on TV with who was a guy, an older man with black hair. And his grandmother would explain how he had started out as a young man in vaudeville, you know, and then radio came along and he was older and he was a white haired man in radio. Then came television and all these guys had to dye their hair or if you're George Burns, get a toupee so you could be on camera. And, you know, so he had this sense of the sort of Darwinian nature of showbiz and adapting to changing media and to changing times. And I love the idea that you can draw a direct line from, you know, 8 year old Lorne watching TV to, you know, 70 and 80 year old Lorne figuring out how he has to change his show as the times change.
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Alison Stewart
His mother, Florence was a real character. What's an example of something she did that explained who you were dealing with when you were dealing with Florence?
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Susan Morrison
Well, he said, my mother was. My mother kept the compliments on a high shelf in a jar that wasn't open very often. I think she was a typical Jewish mother right out of Philip Roth in that she was very demanding of him and kind of withholding. But when he was out of the room, she was bragging her head off about him. You know, he was a prince to everybody else. But when he was there, he felt like he wasn't quite measuring up. And I think he internalized that management style. And you know, a lot of people have said the same thing about him.
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Alison Stewart
He didn't have his father very long. His father died when he was 13.
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Susan Morrison
14. 14.
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Alison Stewart
What happened with his father?
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Susan Morrison
Well, his mom, I think, was the really dominant parent. And when Lauren was 14 years old. He and his father had an argument one night because he had missed his curfew. And Lauren's mother had been pressuring Lauren's dad to discipline him about it. So they had a big argument. They yelled at each other. You know, voices were raised. That night when Lorne was in bed, his father collapsed. It was a heart, an embolism. They didn't know that at the time. He was rushed to the hospital. Lorne didn't get to visit him there. He was in the hospital for two weeks and died. So Lorne carried around with him through his whole adult life this terrible feeling of guilt and shame that his last interaction with his father had been this very difficult fight. And I think it really introduced a shade into his emotional palette. He, you know, forever after, always avoided confrontation. You never see him raise his voice at anyone. He's afraid of conflict, I think. And it also, as a 14 year old, plunged him into a real kind of dark place. His mother was very depressed. He had to suddenly be the man of the house. He almost failed in school that year, almost had to skip a grade. And after this rough time, during which his mom was afraid he was going to become a juvenile delinquent, to use the phraseology of the 50s, he kind of pulled himself together and learned how to manage and also how to sort of manage people in a way. There's a picture in one of his yearbooks of a group shot of the class and it's all these smiling Bobby soccers. There's Lauren in the back row looking very glum and blank. But the caption described him as, you know, Lorne, the author of how to Win Friends and Influence Teachers. Like, he already had figured out, I think, how to use his sort of gift of gab to sort of make his way in the world. So I think he had a tough time after his father died. And then he somehow turned on a dime and figured out how to navigate the world on his own.
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Alison Stewart
Was there anyone who became a father like figure to him as a teenager?
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Susan Morrison
Yes. Well, after losing his dad, he started on this path of all his life looking for interesting father figures. The first two when he was a teenager. One was his Uncle Pap, who was a very successful businessman in Canada. Their family was much richer and more sophisticated than Loren's was. And Uncle Pep really stepped up, took Lorne under his wing, taught him about money, taught him about business, gave him a job, really kept an eye on him. Later would pay for him to take trips to Europe. And another, maybe even more Important mentor in Loren's life was Frank Schuster, who was the father of his friend Rosie Shuster. He lived a few blocks away. And people don't know the name Frank Schuster today, but with his comedy partner, Johnny Wayne, they had a two man comedy act called Wayne and Schuster, which was an incredibly big act in the 50s and 60s. They were guests on the Ed Sullivan show more than any other act, even more than Topo Gigio, which you might not get if you're not a baby boomer. I got it. So Frank Schuster was this comedy star and he lived near Lorne, and Lorne basically camped out in his study until he was finished school. And, you know, there was a comfortable den, there was a real live father in it. And Frank Schuster taught him the ropes. He explained, you know, how the Marx Brothers jokes worked. He told him who Preston Sturges was. He started telling him all these great old showbiz stories that form the backbone of Lorne's conversation even today.
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Alison Stewart
My guest is Susan Morrison. The name of the book is Lorne the Man who Invented Saturday Night Live. It's our choice for a full bio. Well, after his misbegotten high school years, he entered university, the University of Toronto. And you write about this one teacher that used to get a laugh by the way he pronounced the name of someone. And that really sparked something in Lorne.
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Susan Morrison
Yes, yes. One of the fun things about writing about Lorne Michaels is that he has this life that almost kept making me think of a Victorian novel, you know, like a Dickens novel or something. And every single thing that he did, every encounter that he had as a young man, he was very good at kind of taking away a nugget of wisdom, taking away a lesson from it. And he was interested in comedy as a college student. He loved watching Johnny Carson on the Tonight show and analyzing his monologues. But he was in a political science class and the teacher was talking about the prime minister, Diefenbaker, and he just said the name Diefenbaker in a way that was clear that he was making fun of the man, but he didn't actually make a joke about him. And everybody in the classroom laughed. And it really struck Lorne, like, oh, he didn't actually make a joke, but what he did is he made everyone in the room feel like they were kind of on the inside. It made them feel like they were part of some little elite club. And I think he realized that that's one of the things that humor can do. It's like, you get it, you're on the inside. And you know, that's a type of humor, a type of reaction that SNL has sought in its viewers for years. From the very beginning. You know, you recognize that this is a recurring character. You've heard that catchphra before. You know, you're in the in crowd. And I think that was a really important thing for him to learn at that age.
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Alison Stewart
Lorne met a man named Hart Pomerantz. Who was Hart Pomerantz?
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Susan Morrison
Well, Hart Pomerantz was probably the geekiest person to ever walk the earth. He was a law student in Toronto. And his little brother, even geekier than Hart, named Earl Pomerantz, auditioned to be in the college review at the University of Toronto that Lauren was producing called the UC Follies. This guy wore Coke bottle glasses. You know, one of his jokes was, my eyesight is so bad that my windshield is made of prescription glass. You know, so Earl auditioned. Lorne didn't think there was a place for him in the show. So Hart Pomerantz called up Lorne. He was this law student, but he had had some success writing for local comedy reviews, including one that starred the hometown hero, Robert Goulet. And so Hart said, listen, I'd really like you to cast my little brother Earl, and if you do, I'll write for you. I'll. I'll give you some sketches for your show. And, you know, at that point, Lauren was just this college student. The idea of having someone who was almost an adult, who had some professional credits, contribute a couple of sketches to his college review seemed like a good deal. So that was the beginning of Hart and Lorne knowing each other. And a few years later, after Lorne graduated, he had heard that Hart Pomerantz had actually gone to New York City, you know, which was really a glamorous, faraway destination, and done some standup at a comedy club called the Improv. So Lorne, who was always kind of looking for the main chance, figured, ah, this guy could be my ticket out of here, my connection to professional show business. So he reached out to Hart and the two of them started writing jokes together and even developed a kind of a two man comedy act. Not unlike Wayne and Schuster's Lipowitz and Pomerants.
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Alison Stewart
They were formed.
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Susan Morrison
Right. One of the things I think is so funny about them calling themselves Lipowitz and Pomerants is that Lauren's mother, like every mother in his neighborhood, had her heart set on her son going to law school. And you know what? Sounds more like a law firm than Lipowitz and comrades.
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Alison Stewart
They earned something like $10 a joke when they wrote for people. Who did they write for?
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Susan Morrison
Well, they wrote for Joan Rivers, they tried to write for Dick Cavett, but he didn't hire them. The most exciting thing was when they were actually flown on an airplane down to New York to meet with Woody Allen, whose career was taking off at such speed at that point. He had a couple movies going, he had a play on Broadway, he had a lot of television appearances that his agent, Jack Rollins, wanted him to hire some writers to help. So he brought Pomerantz and Lipowitz down to meet Woody Allen. And one of the really big pleasures of reporting this book is Hart. Pomerantz actually had tape recorded this whole brainstorming joke writing session in Woody's living room. Between the three of them, you have these two 20 something Canadians, very green, and Woody, you know, who's something of a success just brainstorming jokes and they're trying to make a joke about a lobster in a tank. And you know, you listening to it, you really just get the sense of the grueling. You know, it's just, you know, nine, nine misses for every one hit. They just go around and around and around. It's just a fascinating document to listen to that. And I excerpt a chunk of it in the book and, and you can already see the beginnings of Lorne's producer personality. You know, he kind of takes control, he's a little pushy with his ideas, and yet he backs off when, you know, they're not accepted. And he's sort of trying to be encouraging to Woody. And it's fascinating to listen to. No jokes came out of that meeting, except it really boosted Lauren's confidence enormously. And Woody did compliment one joke that Lauren told him that he didn't use. But here I'll tell you now because it is a pretty, pretty trippy, interesting joke. And the joke goes, there's a guy who becomes obsessed with the notion that somewhere in the world is another person, a doppelganger who's thinking exactly the same thoughts as he is at the same time. And he's desperate to meet this guy. So he looks and he looks. Somehow he finds the phone number of this man, calls him on the phone, the line is busy because he's been thinking the same thought as the other guy. So Woody didn't use that joke, but he told Lauren that it was brilliant. And that single handedly kept Lauren going for a couple of years.
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Alison Stewart
This is also when the name change happens. What led Lorne changing his name to Lorne Michaels.
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Susan Morrison
Well, in those days, almost every. Everyone in show business who was Jewish and not just show business, but other professions, would change their names, you know, would Anglicize them and, you know, Milton Berle, I'm just every Jewish comic you can think of had a much more unwieldy name at the start of their lives. And in fact, you know, all of Lorne's father, Abraham Lipowitz, probably would have changed his if he had been in a profession, but he didn't. But all of his brothers had changed it. And so he just wanted something that was more kind of showbiz friendly. He had married Rosalind Schuster by then, and her mother also urged him, as did Frank Schuster, to change Lipowitz. I mean, Roz's mother said that she didn't want the daughter who she had named for a heroine out of Shakespeare, to have the last name Lipowitz. You know, so, yeah, he tried on all different possibilities, Lipton. And he settled on Michaels and I guess, you know, it's sort of a nice, straight ahead Anglo name. Hart Pomerant speculated that he chose it as an homage to Mike Nichols, whose work really knocked Lorne out. For years, he just was fixated on wanting to make a movie just like the Graduate.
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Alison Stewart
After the break, we'll learn how Lorne Michaels made his way in Hollywood. This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart and we continue our full bio series with Susan Morrison. She wrote Lorne, the Man who Invented Saturday Night live in the 1980s. Lauren was asked by David Letterman about his career in comedy.
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Lorne Michaels
You performed yourself? Yes, I did. And what was the nature of that act? It was, sad to say, a comedy act. As you can see, there's almost no trace of that left in me. I know I began writing with another guy in Canada and we would write and perform ourselves. I was not great at performing, although I was very good at. Actually, my part was mostly asking questions, but I sort of knew what the answers would be. And then I'd say stuff like really and really. And I was a pacer. I would sort of. He was very funny and I would sort of take the pause moment in between and sort of support him during that. And then I began to get more and more interested in producing and comfortable there.
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Alison Stewart
Lauren landed jobs writing for Rowan and Martin's Laugh in and the beautiful Phyllis Diller Show. It was his work on Lily Tomlin's cutting edge specials L that gave him a calling card for what he wanted to do. Next produce, let's get back into our full bio conversation about Lorne, the man who invented Saturday Night Live with Susan Morrison. Lorne Michaels was in LA in the late 1960s. He got a job on Laugh In, a TV show from the late 60s, the early 70s, just a wacky variety show. Can you explain what the comedic landscape was like in the late 60s for TV?
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Susan Morrison
Yes, it was an interesting time in television. Lauren showed up in LA from Toronto with an idea that he really wanted to radicalize television. You know, he. He knew that the movies were. Were really forging ahead. You had directors like Robert Altman and Scorsese and Terrence Malick, you know, breaking boundaries. And in music, you had rock and roll. You had the Stones and David Bowie. But he found that television, when he got to LA, was somehow stuck in the 1950s. There were these very cornball variety shows. He worked on one, which was Perry Como's Christmas Special. He worked for one called the Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show. And almost exclusively these places, as well as Laugh, in which he went to next, were staffed and written by men in their 50s and 60s, guys who had started out working in radio. So suddenly he just felt like, oh, my God, I'm in this backwater. You know, television is a cul de sac. On the Phyllis Diller show, you know, there were guests like Ernest Borgnine, and Phyllis Diller would, like, play her saxophone at the end of the show. It was just very corny. And he had this idea that he wanted to take the variety show format, you know, music sketches, blackout jokes, and update it, you know, filling it with the concerns of his generation. Sex and drugs and rock and roll. He used the term, I want to make new wine in old bottles. You know, he liked the structure, the format, but he thought that all the material was just, you know, for people 20, 30 years older than he was.
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Alison Stewart
Let's listen to a little bit of laughing and we can talk about it on the other side.
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Susan Morrison
Forrest and I have the most violent political arguments. He thinks the Democrats can do no wrong. And of course, I'm for Johnson. It is said that the man who soweth the oats in the garden of his neighbor, perhaps he has not a pot to plant in Welsh may lookit, but man cannot live by broad alone. It's not that I'm against marriage. I'd get married in a minute if I didn't have to live in.
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Actually, there've been a lot of successful show business marriages.
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Susan Morrison
Eddie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds, Eddie Fisher, Liz.
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Progressive Insurance
Taylor, Eddie Fisher, Connie Stevens at Laugh.
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Alison Stewart
In he was considered one of the young guys. What did their humor look like next to the old guys, the old radio guys?
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Susan Morrison
Well, there's. There's an old, kind of an old Catskill vaudeville kind of style of joke that's called like a blackout, which is just sort of, you know, it's a one setup at a quick punchline, a real kind of badump bump sort of thing. And Laugh in really specialized in that. Its creator, George Slaughter, compared it to a pinball machine. It was just really fast, you know, one liners, gag jokes, you know, people sticking their heads out of holes in a psychedelic wall, shouting a punchline. Lord was much more interested in a kind of cerebral, almost high concept kind of comedy that, you know, closer to the kind of jokes that Woody Allen was doing. He. He liked. He liked the idea that humor could reflect really what was going on in somebody's real life, in somebody emotionally, and Laugh in, even though it was modern and, you know, or mod, as you'd say, and kind of psychedelic graphics politically, considering it was the late 60s, it was toothless. One of the head writers was a crony of Richard Nixon's. So there wasn't going to be any criticism of the Vietnam War. There wasn't going to be any tough politics on the show. You know, Lorne could never get a Nixon joke on that show. You know, a standard. The extent that they went at Vietnam, it was, you know, Goldie Hawn in a bikini confusing the Viet Cong for King Kong. You know, it was sort of a dumb blonde joke. But they really didn't want to go anywhere near politics. And Lorne at that point felt that humor. He was messianic about humor. He wanted it to be smart. He wanted it to be able to change the world, as he put it. You know, they were watching Watergate all the time. He really. He really thought that humor should be dealing in just those kinds of issues.
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Alison Stewart
You write in the book that several people think that Laffin was a progenitor of snl. What do you think?
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Susan Morrison
Well, as I said before, Lorne took little bits and pieces of everything that he encountered on his journey to SNL and used it to stoke snl. It is true that Laugh in has bits and pieces that remind you of snl, but it didn't have musical guests like SNL did. Other examples of people who said SNL came from. Here is his. Lorne's camp buddy, Howard Shore, who would become SNL's first music director. He thinks that SNL was born on the plywood stage of their Summer camp, Camp Timberlane, where Lorne and the others put on something called the Fast show, which was a variety show with sketches and jokes and music. Rosie Sho thought that the show came from her father's den. You know, that so much of what Lauren learned from her dad really filled in all the blanks at snl. Hart Pomerantz thought that SNL came out of the Hart and Lauren Terrific Hour, which was a variety show that the two of them did for the cbc, which also had a lot of similarities to snl. So it was kind of this concept that took root in his mind early on and he just refined it and refined it and refined it over time.
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Alison Stewart
My guest is Susan Morrison. We're talking about her book, the man who Invented Saturday Night Live. It's our choice. For full bio, I want to mention two female comedians that were very important to Lorne Michaels. Rosie Schuster, who you've missed mentioned, and Lily Tomlin. Let's start with Rosie Schuster. They've been friends since they were kids. She was his first wife. Her dad acted as a mentor to him. That sort of describes her personally. How would you describe her professionally and her impact on Lauren?
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Susan Morrison
I think she had a huge impact and one of the pleasures of writing this book was giving her her due in his, you know, comedy formation, of his comedy instinct. I mean, she said that growing up in that household, you know, just the comedy rhythms would get in your blood. It was sort of a birthright to her to be proficient at comedy and to be a funny woman with a quick comeback and. But I think that partly because she grew up in a house in a comedy household, professionally, at first she sort of wanted to distance herself from that. I don't think she thought immediately that she wanted to grow up to be in the comedy business. It might be for that reason and also just for reasons of, you know, women in the 50s and 60s not feeling comfortable putting themselves out there, that I think for the first years of their relationship, as Rosie put it, she would whisper funny things in Lauren's ear and then he would say them out loud. You know, it was second nature to her to be a kind of a handmaiden, to stay behind the curtain to, you know, not take credit. And even when she did start writing for other comedy shows, she always used a pseudonymous. When I was talking with her, you know, more recently, she said, she said something. I can't remember exactly what her words were, but she said that she, she just had this instinct to be self effacing and not to step forward and Take credit. And I think that, you know, through years of adulthood and therapy, she's now recognized how great it is to get credit for your work. And anyway, as I said, it's a, it's been a real pleasure and privilege for me to be able to restore some of the credit to her.
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Alison Stewart
Lily Tomlin is the other person I wanted to mention. Lorne Michaels worked for Lily Tomlin on her series of specials. They won an Emmy for the show. She wanted to do thoughtful comedy. At that point in his career, could he do that?
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Susan Morrison
Well, he had been bouncing around la, pitching this show in his head to anyone who would listen. No one was interested. And, and it wasn't until he met Lily Tomlin that he found somebody who was on the same wavelength as he was in terms of wanting comedy that expressed sort of interior states of being, you know, wanting, wanting comedy that would play to what he called the TV generation. I mean, he and Lily were in the first generation to have grown up on tv. So they also wanted to make fun of tv. You know, they recognized that it had kind of shrink wrapped the culture and they saw it as a big target for satire. So in all of the comedy that both of them did, there are parodies of television commercials, parodies of talk shows. You know, TV was just a big fat target waiting there and no one had really gone after it. But I think she really enhanced, I mean, he, he, he, he described the kind of work she did as a kind of comedian's lib, that she liberated comedy from the punchline, you know, from the seltzer bottle, from the ba dum bump rim shot. She, she wanted to write things that were almost like little plays that explored people's characters and what was, you know, just the sort of odd humorous strangeness of being a person in the world. And she also, for the first time, you know, really wanted to include women's experience. And a lot of the sketches in the, in the specials that Lauren worked on with her, some of them written by him, really shone a light on women's experience. And it's really a breakthrough. I mean, as I said, I spent a day with her in la and I came away from there thinking, I don't know if I'm gonna do this, but someone has gotta write this woman's biography because she was really, really world changing.
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Alison Stewart
That was Susan Morrison, author of Lorne the Man who Invented Saturday Night Live. Tomorrow on Full Bio, we'll learn about the early days of SNL.
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