The First Church of Dan Aykroyd

The Cast of Saturday Night: The Playboy Interview

A nice talk with one producer, maybe six writers, about seven or so performers, including Chevy Chase, who's not really--oh, never mind.

Playboy: What about the "Fluckers" sketch? Michael, you were responsible for that one weren't you?
O'Donoghue: It was a parody about a jam that had various distasteful names. It was based on the idea that if you name a jam Fluckers, it has to be very good. I came up with even worse names--Nose Hair, Monkey Pus, Dog Vomit, Painful Rectal Itch, just the worst names. Can you imagine a jam so good it can be called things like Mangled Baby Ducks?

Chase: That was one of the few times I think we went over the line, and I didn't think it was way over the line. I just thought it would look very gratuitous, like I had to say dirty things to the President. I never wanted us to look that way. To say "Painful Rectal Itch" to Betty and Jerry Ford is not a breakthrough. Michaels: I agree. But you were awfully quiet at the time.

Shuster: I found the "Autumn Fizz" sketch offensive because it was a cheap shot. I'd still like to do a douche commercial, but maybe have Kenneth Clark doing it. When you're dealing with low subject matter, you have to elevate it.

Playboy: Then, as a woman, you didn't find it offensive?

Shuster: Well, this is a male-dominated show, but it's less so than most TV shows. We did one piece that Lily Tomlin hosted about a class for women hard hats. The women here loved it and the men hated it. Lily was the instructor, brandishing a jackhammer, and went into a number on how girls on a construction crew should address men who walk by: "Hey, dream bulge! Wanna make bouncy-bouncy? Wanna do some squat jumps for me on the girder? Hubba-hubba!" That kind of stuff. Danny was the volunteer model and he had a hard time doing the piece. The women really got into it, though.

Beatts: We wrote one piece that never got past the first draft. It was about a feminist restaurant, where the man got totally humiliated: His food was served on the floor, the waitresses humiliated him and he was supposed to say "Oh, fine, fine, I like this." We didn't run it. Some of us thought the humor was in the intimidation factor, but not enough of us felt it was really funny. Playboy: There is a definite political message coming through on the show, isn't there?

Michaels: What you have to understand is that we're all basically anarchists. Anarchists in the pleasant sense. Anarchy is a disturbing word for Amercans, and as a Canadian, I don't want to disturb anyone, but basically, we're all individuals doing what we feel is right--or not right. We're all employed by one of the largest multinational corporations in the world and we're paid large chunks of money to, if not bite, at least nibble at the hand that feeds us.

Zwiebel: There's a political message coming through, sure, because, like everyone else, we have our own personal feelings about things. Like what's going on in Chile, for instance--torture. We don't take ourselves that seriously. We're not starting any crusades.

Playboy: It it fair to say that most of you preferred Carter over Ford?

Zwiebel: I think most of us wanted Carter more than we wanted Ford.

Playboy: Chevy, do you think you had anything to do with the downfall of Gerald Ford?

Chase: Yeah. Let me put it this way. The election was so close that that had he taken New York, he would have tied the electoral vote. It's the most heinously egotistical thing to say I had anything to do with it, but I think it must have had some influence. I was clearly not a Ford fan. I was, in fact, a Udall man.

Playboy: How about after the convention?

Chase: I supported Carter. Carter was the better man. It's not that Ford isn't a nice fella. It's just that he never gave a shit about people.

Playboy: Why was Ford such a subject for parody? Was he inherently funny?

Chase: Anybody who was so guilty about being President that he kept trying to kill himself was inherently funny. It was the guilt that kept him banging his head on helicopter doors.

Playboy: When you hosted the Radio and Television Correspondents' banquet in Washington, the one that Ford also attended, what did your act consist of?

Chase: I justidid Ford. I was him. I was invited to be the host. I marched in with the President to Hail to the Chief and sat on the dais between the secretary of the Navy or somebody and the President. I was a little nervous because I didn't exactly know what I was going to do, except that I was going to stumble a lot, walk into the podium and do my terrible impression of Ford. I took John and Dan down as my Secret Service escort--mostly so they could have the experience and wear dark glasses. John, at that time, could still walk.

Playboy: Was Ford amused?

: He laughed a lot. He was gracious about it.

Playboy: When you met him later, what did you two talk about?

: Ice hockey. Small talk. Later on, Lorne went down to Washington to film Ford saying a few things for the Nessen show and Ford thought Lorne was me--a difficult mistake to make, since I'm 6'4" and Lorne's about 5'9". He had no recollection at all. But, to me, it was a revelation to look at the man in the eyes--not that he was a Nixon or some terrible guy. He never had the strength of a Nixon or a Johnson; that was Ford's problem. It was like looking in the eyes of 50 milligrams of Valium. He was a man totally sublimated by the office of President; not a guy who could come in and take over but a guy who would be totally led by protocol. His schedule was written that way. He'd look at the White House schedule for the day--"1:17 P.M., open your fly"; these were the kinds of things on his schedule. I'm sure it had to be written, "Open your fly," before he could take a leak.

Playboy: Now that Ford's out and Carter's in, what characteristics of the new President will be most open to satire?

Aykroyd: His enigma will become less and less as he begins to assume the role of President. He's going to become a wonderful target for satire.

Chase: That business about lusting after women in his heart--why didn't he just say, "I've seen a lot of ass in my day and thought about it, but I've been faithful to my wife"? You don't have to lust after women in your mind. Let's drop the rhetoric. I'd like to know what the guy's like.

O'Donoghue: Here's what I want to do with Carter. Nobody knows who he is. The secret Jimmy Carter, the one who actually gets dressed up as Eleanor Roosevelt for a state reception, that's a scene I'd like to see. I want to explore soem surreal insanity with this man.

Davis: Yeah, Jimmy Carter as the S/M pervert in the Oval Office.

Franken: The best satire we ever did on Carter was the eye-contact sketch. Carter, played by Aykroyd, is in Plains after the convention and he says [imitating Carter], "Ah just wanna tell y'all just 'sactly how ah'm gonna run mah campaign. Ah'm gonna establish this one thing througout this country. When ah'm in a crowd of 30,000 people or just seven or eight, what ah'm gonna do is establish eye contact." And then he quoted Dylan--the quote was, "Everybody must get stoned."

Shuster: There was also that Carter lust piece we did right after his Playboy Interview came out. It was Carter on a whistle-stop tour saying, "Whistle-stopping has given me an opportunity to meet women, to lust after women all over the country." Then he goes, "East Coast girls are nice, I really dig those clothes they wear, and the Northern folk..." right into California Girls.

Playboy: Do you see any source of humor in Carter's family--Rosalynn or Miss Lillian?

Shuster: Anne had an idea for a parody of the Beverly Hillbillies moving into the White House. How they'd load all their stuff on a truck--Miss Lillian could be Granny, strapped to a rocker, and maybe Billy could tap-dance like Buddy Ebsen.

O'Donoghue: Lorne killed something I wanted to do on Miss Lillian. I had Rosalynn saying that she was the one who had thought of nailing Miss Lillian to the barn to make her look weathered. She does look like barn wood, right? Can't you just see her out on the weather vane and her saying, "Oh, Jimmy, it's been months--come on, let me down, there's a storm coming!"?

Newman: And as Rosalynn Carter, I would have had the opportunity to utter that line and become enormously hated.

Aykroyd: It's our duty as satirists in America to nail Carter to the wall as much as possible. However, there's the dynamic of the fact that I'm a Canadian citizen and , at any time, he could just give the word and I'd be out of here. One phone call to immigration and I'm gone.

Belushi: Half the people on the show would be gone.

Aykroyd: That's right. You could wipe this show right off the map.

Playboy: But you and Chevy were invited to do your inauguration sketch at Carter's inaugural gala and, from what we gathered, there was no script approval by the Carter people.

Aykroyd: In fact, we did have to submit a script to Gerald Rafshoon for approval. He OK'd it with one exception: We wanted to have Carter promising to be a "lusty, sexually active President" and Rafshoon made us take out "sexually active." Instead, we got to say, "I like to wear women's clothing in my heart."

Shuster: That same line also got censored earlier on the regular Saturday Night, when we did the Carter whistle-stop piece. We had Carter saying, "As your President, I look forward to sexually satisfying each and every one of you, and the word sexually was deleted by the censors.

Playboy: Why?

Shuster: It implied that Jimmy Carter was going to fuck everyone in America, men included.

Playboy: We see. What other kinds of trouble have you had with the censors?

Zwiebel: Once we wanted to kill a baby on the air and they wouldn't let us.

Playboy: OK, we'll play the straight man. What were their reasons?

Zwiebel: It was Mother's Day. But seriously...You know those captions that got supered over people in the audience? I wrote one that got censored the first time I tried it: "Told a white lie about an albino.

Playboy: Why? Was it offensive to albinos?

Zwiebel: I guess so. I don't know how many albinos watch the show. The demographics don't show that.

Franken: Here's a line I couldn't get past the censors: If Helen Keller were alone in the forest and she fell down, would she make a sound?" Now you can't really sit there and say, "It's not really a Helen Keller joke, it's really an epistemology joke." Once we put the horny word in a piece and we couldn't use horny but we could use sexy instead. We told her that a dog humping her leg is horny but not sexy.

O'Donoghue: Actually, the network's been pretty good. Not 100 percent but not really unreasonable. I don't see it as some monolithic oppressive facist force.

Playboy: Has it ever censored any of your jokes?

O'Donoghue: It' s kept a lotof my jokes off the show.

Playboy: Can you remember any of them?

O'Donoghue: I can remember all of them. There was one about...who's the girl in a coma in New Jersey?

Playboy: Karen Anne Quilan.

O'Donoghue: Right. I wrote a piece about her that never got on. It was her birthday and I wrote that some thoughtful relative had given her some moss for her north side. Now, come on, that's perfectly simple. She's in a coma. She'll never know. Another joke that got cut was one I wrote saying that the earthquake in Italy was caused by the move Earthquake. It opened in Italy and, unfortunately, some butterfingered projectionist turned up the Sensurround a bit too loud, killing untold thousands, leveling 12 cities.

Chase: Zwiebel wrote a Karen Anne Quinlan joke for me that was simply that Karen Anne Quinlan had left a wake-up call for April. But I decided to attribute the wake-up call to Franco. The censors wouldn't allow it on the grounds that it implied resurrection and the Catholic Church wouldn't like it. Now, you don't often get censorship standards dealing with resurrection--to me, this was silly. It took a long time before they let us do that Franco thing--Franco died, is dead, is still dead. The censors put us off with it until Johnny Carson came out with a bit that clearly implied the same thing. In fact, Carson was always allowed to do more--but that's when I came down on them. I said, "Look, Carson got to do this last night. I'm doing this joke." And I did it. But it took months.

Shuster: In that Carter lust bit we were talking about before, they wouldn't let me talk about the sex life of Bess Truman. Carter was going on about the tradition of sexually satisfied women in the White House and his guess was that Bess Truman was one satisfied customer.

O'Donoghue: Oh, I remember now: Here's my favorite joke! They won't let it on. [In a typical TV announcer's voice] "What will smart, fashionable women be wearing this fall? From California comes the answer--a lovely floor-length Chowchilla coat. Chowchilla coats, made from the matched skins of 26 school children. They're not in the stores yet, but it's only a matter of time." And I kept submitting this joke in new forms in which the skins came in white and Mexican. And I had one with big Negro patch pockets after some tragic busload of kids were killed in Macon, Georgia. And they won't let it on. But I do get some amazing things on. Once I described Susan Ford wearing high heels and a Bicentennial Dog Collar with a Nazi tatoo, VOTE FOR MY DAD, all over her body. That Bicentennial dog collar--it's a curious image.

Beatts: Rosie and I wrote a piece from a Franken and Davis idea that got censored. It was on sex education for children and Miss Joan was explaining how sex worked and she said, "The man takes the lady out to dinner, then they go home and dance lying down." We eventually got that line in a piece with Ruth Gordon, but originally they objected to the idea of sex and children. The censor just read that line and said, "Uh-oh."

Franken: Something Tom and I wrote that got censored because it was supposedly in bad taste--though it was in excellent taste--was an ad for something called Placenta Helper. It's two pregnant women meeting and one says it's her first pregnancy and the other says she's had three. "By the way," she says, "are you going to eat your placenta?" And she says, "You're kidding, you mean the placenta?" And the other one says, "That's right, many mammals do it--it's completely natural and there's no cheaper source of protein."

Davis: And then there was Placenta Romanoff and Placenta Orientale and Placenta Casserole...

Franken: And it was censored for bad taste. But it was about bad taste. In advertising. What we were trying to do was make a comment about packaged products like Hamburger Helper, which is a joke phrase to about 70,000,000 people in this country, even if the other 130,000,000 people don't get it. They don't understand that we're making a comment on how 100 percent natural is used in advertising. A lot of the humor we do is aimed at people who understand our reference points.

Shuster: I just want to say that I agree with the censors about sex and drugs. I think if you do sex one week, you should wait till the next week to do drugs. Playboy: OK, we'll bite. Why?

Shuster: Because I think you'll burn out your body if you don't. Also, I find it best if you don't take uppers and downers at the same time. It's just something I've learned.