There’s a perception of Lorne Michaels out there that he’s very rigid. People think the longtime Saturday Night Live showrunner hates anything that doesn’t follow the script exactly. That’s the conventional wisdom because numerous cast members have said that over the years, and Lorne himself has given several interviews in which he’s talked about how improv can really mess with the timing of the show, the camera cuts and even the basic rhythm of the sketch. If one of the longest-serving SNL cast members of all time is to be believed, however, the truth is actually more complicated.
Darrell Hammond, probably best known for playing Donald Trump and Bill Clinton during a more than decade long run on the show, stopped by Amy Robach and TJ Holmes’ podcast to talk about comedy, mental health and his career. During the chat, he was asked if he ever broke character on the show, and he said the one person who could consistently make him laugh at inappropriate moments was Amy Poehler. He said the two would do Regis and Kelly sketches, and she’d always save something she didn’t do in dress rehearsals for the show, and sometimes it would get him.
Contrary to what you may think, however, he never once heard anything about it from Lorne Michaels. Here’s a portion of his quote…
I never got any flack for anything like that. They say Lorne didn’t like it, but he never said anything to me about it because the audience loved seeing Amy improv.
I’ve never worked at Saturday Night Live before, but I have seen many hundreds of episodes of the show and read multiple books about it. My guess is the truth is somewhere in the middle. Michaels definitely doesn’t like people going off script during sketches. He famously fired Damon Wayans for changing his role in a sketch without talking to anyone about it, and he’s definitely not encouraging cast members to go rouge.
But it’s also impossible to look at the history of Saturday Night Live and not notice that he’s featured plenty of comedians in key roles who sometimes broke character and/ or got a little goofy (as well as numerous hosts who couldn’t keep it together). Poehler had a fun energy about her that could really get other people laughing, but there are also more prominent examples like Jimmy Fallon and Andy Samberg who had trouble keeping it together on a consistent basis. Many of SNL’s best remembered sketches also involved some level of chaos, as we saw last season with Beavis and Butt-Head.
If you do your job the majority of the time and the occasional sketch goes sideways, I think it’s pretty clear Michaels is not going to be mad. As Hammond put it, he never heard from his boss a single time about breaking character or laughing a bit during sketches. There’s a difference, however, between laughing, and just improvising lines for the sake of improvising lines. I think it’s that second type that Michaels wouldn’t tolerate, and it’s that line between professional but also goofy that has kept the show culturally relevant for fifty seasons.
You can watch SNL starting later this month as it returns to the TV schedule with some casting changes, and prepares for its much-anticipated 50th anniversary special early next year.