The Four Incarnations of a Comedy Legend

One of the amazing things about the history of “Saturday Night Live” is how consistently good--or at least novel--it’s been through all its chapters, and how awful it’s been at the same time. It never was a vehicle of true dissent, as it pretended to be; it tried to slicker us with attitude and broad recognition jokes instead. It rarely offered meaning or content, and for a comedy show whose purpose was to entertain, it certainly hung out a lot of its dreary backstage laundry.

Still, no other comedy show in the history of television has given us more of those instances when a character seizes the moment and enters the bloodstream of the ulture with a memorable phrase or attitude, as in Emily Litella’s adenoidal “Oh . . . never mind.” or the Church Lady’s “Well now, isn’t that special.” And of course, how could we ever forget that tiny voice of alarm crying, “Oh no, Mister Bill!!!”

Roughly speaking, the show has gone through four incarnations. After the first group left (Harry Shearer had the unenviable task of replacing both Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi for the 1979-80 season), Jean Doumanian’s cast included Denny Dillon, Gilbert Gottfried, Gail Matthius, Ann Risley, Charles Rocket, a skilled impressionist named Joe Piscopo and a black teen-ager from Roosevelt, Long Island, named Eddie Murphy, who claims to have auditioned six times before he was hired and whose first appearance was as a wordless extra in a sketch called “In Search of the Negro Republican.” Before long he would augment the cast with his characterizations of Dion, the flamboyant gay black hairdresser; Buckwheat; the militant Raheem Abdul Muhammed; the pimp Velvet Jones; convict-poet Tyrone Green; the soulful exercise guru Little Richard Simmons; and, of course, the character based on a Jewish night-club owner who snapped us to attention with the line, “I’m Gumby, dammit!”

After Doumanian left, Dick Ebersol juggled several casts. The 1981-82 group, in addition to Piscopo and Murphy, included Robin Duke, Christine Ebersole, Mary Gross, Tim Kazurinsky, Tony Rosato and Brian-Doyle Murray. Brad Hall, Gary Kroeger and Julia Louis-Dreyfus joined the following year. Jim Belushi signed on for the season after that.

Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Rich Hall, Harry Shearer and Pamela Stephenson played the 1984-85 season, during which we were introduced to Short’s Ed Grimley and Crystal’s Latin celebrity host Fernando (the unctuous “You look mah-velous!” went into currency for a while thereafter). Shearer and Short expertly caught the inquisitorial tone of Mike Wallace sundering the quavery bravado of yet another highly placed corporate liar, and their rendition of a synchronized swimming duo during that Olympic year was so exquisitely well done that most of us would never be able to watch the real thing again with a straight face.

Joan Cusack, Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Michael Hall, Terry Sweeney, Randy Quaid and Danitra Vance joined the 1985-86 season. So did Jon Lovitz and Nora Dunn, both of whom survived to take their place among the current cast, which has been in place since October of 1986.

Perhaps one of the constants of the show has been the tension between the players who are happy to be where they are under the shadow of an institution and those who challenge the status quo. Dennis Miller fits the first category.

“I never had any illusions about my strengths and weaknesses,” Miller said. “I’m not a Rennaissance man. Early on I decided to choose just one thing to bludgeon my way into show biz with, and that was standup comedy. One of the most appealing things you can be in show business is someone with a point of view. On Weekend Update I can write my own jokes, unedited. I don’t have to go through 80 people. I don’t have any illusions about where I am either. I want to either live or go out on my shield on the strength of my own jokes. I’m pleased as punch to be in here. In so many areas of show business you’re out very quickly. Here you’re in, despite the critics. It’s a nice niche.”

To the extent that Nora Dunn comes out of a background of theater and political activism (she worked for Jesse Jackson’s Head Start program in her native Chicago), she most exemplifies what “Saturday Night Live” started out to be. She almost brings the show around full circle, except she has what few in the original cast had--the capacity to submerge oneself in a character. She understands one of the main roots of satire is a precise articulation of the thing being satirized, almost as though it were the thing itself. The humor is in the proximity, not the broadside attack.

Dunn is more of an actress than a comedian, and is so skilled that it’s entirely possible that she could go on to a major independent career, like that of Lily Tomlin.

“I could never do the comedy clubs,” she said, “because my humor worked out of character instead of jokes” (one of her originals is a condescending actress named Ashley Ashley who’s at work in a play called “Agnes on a Hot Tin God,” a mix of “Agnes of God” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”). The entirely prepossessing Pat Stevens is an original creation too, though Dunn credits Lorne Michaels with helping to develop it further (a Pat Stevens journal will be published by Harper & Row).

“As a Chicagoan I felt very protective toward John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd,” she said. “The roots of their comedy was so much about my neighborhood. They reminded me of the free, dangerous, gross humor of my brothers.” (She has three.) “I hated to see it dissipated.”

Still, as she watched the early version of “Saturday Night Live,” she pulled for the women. “It was great to see them whenever they could break through. There’s still a bias towards getting your stuff on. If I hear one more time a reference to ‘the women’s sketch’ I’ll go through the roof. It subtly reduces your work, like ‘this is the book section; here are the children’s books.’ ”

Dunn still sees censorship pressures at work, as when she wanted to do a sketch on priests having sex and was turned down, “after we read of 16 priests in California who developed AIDS.”

“I do wish we did stronger satire,” she said. “A lot of times I think we’re serving the institution of ‘Saturday Night Live.’ As one of the writers said, ‘The show is our mother. We have to please her.’ All our work can’t be funny and sharp all the time. You learn to live with the format, but those boundaries sometimes give me trouble. It’s a live show, but you wouldn’t suspect it by watching it.”