Susan Morrison (Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, SPY Magazine, The New Yorker) is a journalist and author. Susan joins the Armchair Expert to discuss never wanting to subject her children to a life of moving around, marrying comedy and journalism into irreverant reporting at SPY Magazine, and loving the idea of walking through New York City as time travel. Susan and Dax talk about why humor is just the language we all speak to get by in the world, how Saturday Night Live is a monopoly for comedy, and that she could draw a line from all of Lorne’s life experiences straight to the producing skills he would later develop. Susan explains that Lorne is a master of teaching people how to be in a room, why listening for the laugh during dress rehearsal is his secret sauce, and how Lorne’s strategic instincts directly contributed to SNL being the longest running entertainment show in history.Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What is the significance of Lorne Michaels in comedy?
knew that he was looking for someone for the second season of Severance and so they just really clicked and so what's really fun is now to watch the second season with her because she'll tell you like oh yeah the goats ran off there and this is when John Turturro was like crying because it was so fucking cold you know oh my god that's fantastic yeah it's fun to have that kind of commentary yeah for sure the inside scoop
Well, we send Adam Scott angry voice memos after every episode. That's kind of our participation in it. We yell at him for cliffhangers. Why is this taking so long? Are you guys shooting this show three hours a week? Why isn't there another season?
I saw Adam and Ben on some talk show and someone said, when's season three? And I think Ben said, like, 2035.
Yeah, right. Yeah.
It's become an IQ test where it's like the gap between year one and two is three and then it's got to be six and then we go up to... Yeah, exactly.
Susan, where are you from? Tough to answer that because when I was a kid, my dad worked for IBM, which meant that we moved every four years. So I was born in New Jersey and lived in Poughkeepsie and Denver and Stanford, Connecticut. And now I've lived in my apartment in New York for 40 years. So I think that makes me feel like I'm a New Yorker.
That qualifies...
I have a similar, I wonder if you attribute it to your childhood. We moved so much that in 30 years in LA, I lived in one single apartment for 10 years. Then I lived in a house for 16. And now we're here and I just don't ever want to.
No, exactly. I think I will never move because my whole childhood was putting things in those Neptune moving boxes and unpacking them. And I always wanted to spare my kids that.
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Chapter 2: How does Susan Morrison's background influence her work?
What are his rules of sketch?
Some of them are really broad, tonal things like Do It in Sunshine. He likes to remind people that comedy is an entertainment. And he doesn't have a lot of patience for people who want to do some kind of dark Brechtian black box. And sometimes Do It in Sunshine is something as simple as the costumes. Something that I think I cut from the book because the book was way too long in the beginning.
Well, when you write for 10 years, you're liable to stack up some pages.
Bruce McCulloch, one of the kids in the hall, was a writer on the show in 85, 86. And he told me that Joan Cusack was in the cast then, and they were doing a run-through of a sketch, and she was in some kind of dowdy dress. And Lauren said, can't you put her in something more attractive? You know, she's a pretty girl.
And Bruce got really mad, and he said, okay, Lauren, you want me to put her in a fucking dowdy? You know, I can't believe I wasn't fired for that. But the point is just that you want it to be pleasant and right. And you don't want people yelling at each other. You don't want to write anger.
I found this really interesting. He has no tolerance for people that are doing impersonations out of a place of hate. And this is an increasingly interesting dynamic that's presented itself in the last decade on
the show which is everyone's politics are so fucking rigid now that you have these performers that almost refuse to lampoon liberals then if they're playing a conservative they hate the conservative they're playing with and they have a tendency to make them unenjoyable to watch
Yeah, it was so interesting for me to spend a lot of time there during the first Trump administration because a lot of this tension was kind of coalescing for the first time. Taryn Killam, who had been playing Trump before Alec Baldwin did, was really outraged to get a note every now and then saying, can you give him a little more charm? And Lorne didn't mean like because we like Trump.
Of course.
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Chapter 3: What role does humor play in our everyday lives?
We have these famous sketches of who was it that did Jimmy Carter?
Oh, yeah, Dan Aykroyd.
Yeah, Dan Aykroyd. They have a rich tradition of blasting liberals and Republicans.
Oh, and Daryl Hammond's Bill Clinton.
So funny. Oh, incredible. Yeah.
We live in such a strange time now, especially in Trump II, this whole culture war thing that I think people feel like everyone should be mobilized at all times. And Lawrence's take, I guess, would be that's not what they're there for. And it reminds me of this great word that Seth Meyers coined when he was head writer, which I just think is so smart. It's the word claptor.
The idea of claptor is there's some political humor, you do it, you make a political joke, and people go like... Yes, yes, of course. Very good. They're clapping because they agree with the sentiment. But what you want is you want this uncontrollable physical reaction of a laugh. Yes.
But, like, at the same time, back then, 2018, when Trump was two years in, it was around the midterms, I remember talking to some of the writers, and this was when Trump was tweeting about SNL every day.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Chapter 4: What are Lorne Michaels' secrets to success?
So it was a
A complicated jiu-jitsu thing. But when Sandler hosted a few years ago, he sang this funny song about how he got fired. It's now kind of out in the open, but back then it was papered over. One of the delicious ironies of this is that Don Ulmeier, the guy who forced Lorne to fire these people, Lorne was just kind of ahead of the curve there. He knew that this kind of comedy was coming.
A year or two later, Ulmeier calls him and he says, you know, I was wrong about Sandler. Could you get me a print of Billy Madison to show at my kid's birthday party? Right.
Oh, wow. What you'll do for your kids. You'll eat crow.
Yeah, true. Conan says there's a Game of Thrones of show business. Lauren's going to be the winner. And after the nuclear apocalypse, all life forms will be wiped out. But Lauren will be there in his office talking to the cockroaches and saying, I see you as a Chevy cockroach. He just has that instinct.
Yeah. It's wild. What's beating it as far as longevity? 60 Minutes maybe has been on longer?
The Tonight Show's been on longer as a franchise, but it's the longest running entertainment show that there is.
Yeah, 50 years. Every year I've been alive. Well, I love the book. I hope you take this as a compliment. It reads like a New Yorker article. It's so fast moving and every sentence is just packed with all this rich detail. Even his fucking desk, if you're describing his office, there's a story about the desk, but it's done in three sentences. You're just getting so much.
It's very dense in the most satisfying way. I really, really love it. Yeah, it's fantastic. It's out. I hope everyone reads it. It's so interesting. Every page you're like, oh, that's juicy. Oh, that's juicy.
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