Flying and Crashing in Mig Alley Saturday Night

By JAY COCKS

It was the 1978-79 season, and she was just somebody's girlfriend, trying too hard to party down.

Remember: Saturday Night Live had become the brightest, brashest success on television, the show to see, and be seen at. Chevy Chase had already made his mark there, and left for Hollywood. John Belushi had brought his brute comic force to Animal House, which pulled down some $150 million at the box office, and he and his buddy Dan Aykroyd were spending off-time starring in Steven Spielberg's home-front destruction derby 1941. Gilda Radner was the country's favorite comedy Kewpie, and Bill Murray, a shambling declension of goofiness, was hoving into view.

Attendance at a live Saturday Night Live broadcast, as well as the private bust-out that followed, was a mandatory lap on the fast track. Some cruised through; others crashed. No one was surprised when Aykroyd glanced down at the anonymous girlfriend passed out on the floor and coolly observed, "If you can't handle MiGs, don't fly in MiG alley."

The swagger and flippancy of that remark were qualities, shared and multiplied among a staff of intrepid writers, that made the show into a certifiable cultural phenomenon. S.N.L. was the first network program to cut off a slice of the energy, irreverence and scapegrace spirit of rock culture. It was also the first major forum for the comedy underground that had begun to form in the late '60s. This was humor influenced by Mad magazine and the National Lampoon, Ernie Kovacs and Monty Python, William S. Burroughs and Johnny B. Goode. Under the shrewd editorial tutelage of Producer Lorne Michaels, this over-the-top farce, gussied up a bit for home consumption, became the house style at Saturday Night Live. With a bow to Hunter Thompson, Aykroyd called it "Gonzo television."

Alas, the '80s have become bedtime for Gonzo, so the occasion seems prime for a chronicle of the show. Saturday Night, subtitled "a backstage history," does remarkably thorough research on incredibly haphazard troupes. Authors Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad sometimes let enthusiasm get in the way of level judgment--Baudelaire and Blake are cited among S.N.L's spiritual fathers--but their book works up a vivid frontline fever as it relates the conceptual brawls, bad trips on the twin drugs of cocaine and sudden fame, psychological entanglements, romantic skirmishes and perpetual pitched battles with the censors involved in getting the show launched. Michaels, his cast and his writers saw themselves as comedic fifth columnists at NBC. The network executives, of course, mostly thought the players were crazy--until they caught on big. Hill and Weingrad are deft at dealing with all the infighting, as well as describing what the creative action was like inside MiG alley. They also benefit from a cast of characters that comes predrawn in broad outlines, like so many figures in a crazy coloring book. But the shading added by the authors is careful and, in the case of players elbowed out of the spotlight, like Laraine Newman and Garrett Morris, compassionate. Some of S.N.L.'s creators turn out to be as vivid as the performers themselves. Writer Michael O'Donoghue decorated his office with a picture of Mass Murderer Richard Speck and a pinup of a nude amputee, and once pushed hard for a segment in which Announcer Don Pardo would be fired, on the air, for real.

When Lorne Michaels left the show after five seasons, along with what was left of the original cast and writing staff, the show lost not only its keenness but its momentum. An interregnum presided over by a talent coordinator who was referred to as the "Ayatullah Doumanian" may have been television's most public and widely publicized embarrassment since My Mother the Car. From 1981 to 1985, Producer Dick Ebersol got the show back on a firmer, though slicker, course from which Eddie Murphy busted loose, as did his pal Joe Piscopo. Then Ebersol left, and Michaels, with a new cast and a lot of the old staff, took over again, but without the original brew of fervor and innocence.

The program may not have broken as much new ground as Kovacs did, and wonderful characters like the Coneheads or Belushi's demented samurai may not have been any funnier, finally, than anyone on Your Show of Shows, but this book gives full measure to the size and the weight of S.N.L.'s substantial legacy. If the show was in danger of going down in history as a farm team for Hollywood, Hill and Weingrad have righted that misconception. S.N.L. was bodacious and irreverent, brazen enough to make everything else on the networks seem irrelevant. If Michaels' current edition of S.N.L. seems to be struggling hard with some heavy freight, Saturday Night shows what is inside the load: memories of breakaway comedy from real glory days. The book is better than reruns. It is also a reminder--timely, but perhaps unwelcome for an old show trying to find new footing--that S.N.L. has made a little television history, and left a lot to live up to.