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: Sorry we brought it up. Let's change the subject. You said that most of your audience understands your reference points. Who is your audience?

Belushi: Everybody who's sick of the other things on television.

Playboy: Yes, but who are those people? Doesn't the show appeal mainly to the generation that grew up on TV?

Chase: I didn't watch any fuckin' TV. I hate TV. It stinks. It's god-awful. What I love about doing Saturday Night is the chance to be the off-broadway of television, of having a bird's-eye view, of having a perspective on it, of making fun of everything else on TV. But you can do that for just so long and then you become part of the cliche you're parodying.

O'Donoghue: Television is really low. You know the best way to measure a comic sketch on TV? In kilowatts used. Like, would my sketch light up Boulder Dam? So I'm not thinking in terms of laughs--I'm thinking in terms of kilowatts used.

Playboy: Does the show deal with real life more than other TV shows do?

O'Donoghue: No, I think the show Emergency says everything that can be said about human life. I look to it for guidance. I pray to it.

Playboy: Why is it so important for the show to be live?

Aykroyd: Feedback from the audience. All the laughs on this show are honest laughs.

Belushi: You don't have to tape it, you don't have to go through all the phoniness, there's no delay. Everything that comes out goes out.

Aykroyd: Exactly. When we get a laugh, it's a real laugh.

Belushi: And there's no going back, you have to be the best you can.

Playboy: But would it seriously compromise the integrity for the show to edit out the one or two turkeys each week?

Michaels: Absolutely. The liveness is not for the audience, it's for us. There's no safety net, and that encourages everyone to relate to one another in a truthful manner. One of the major lies told to casts on taped shows is that the mistakes will be fixed in the editing; what happens is somebody else becomes the judge of whether something works and it becomes a different process. Whereas this show is theater. When it doesn't work, it's clear that it doesn't--there's no sweetening. This show gets performances from people because they know that this is it. There's that edge. You can't do it again. When something calculated to go for big laughs gets complete silence from the audience, that's scary. You can feel it in the studio when that happens. And, for me, it has a great deal to do with the integrity of the show. In the beginning, what sometimes happened was a performer would give a great performance in dress rehearsal, and then, on the air, it would go right down the dumper. Now the cast tends to hold back more until air time. They won't give me everything at the dress rehearsal; they'll be saving it.

Playboy: How does a live audience affect you, Chevy?

Chase: Well, I've never seen a dead audience. I think that might be our next step, maybe the last taboo we can break--an entire audience of corpses.

Playboy: Which brings to mind another thing we've been wondering about--why are there so many death-related jokes on the show?

Aykroyd: Give us an example of that.

Playboy: We just talked about one. Franco's continuing death.

Aykroyd: That isn't death, that's Spanish.

Playboy: Oh.

O'Donoghue: Basically, I don't think we're living in a very healthy age. When anybody does humor, he reflects what worries and distresses people around him. And we're dying. We're second-rate, sliding into third. Death humor is popular because it releases fears and anxieties about that.

Playboy: But don't you think the show gets a little harsh sometimes?

O'Donoghue: Sometimes it gets too harsh and sometimes it gets too sweet. For example, those fucking Muppets, those little hairy faceclothes. I'd deep-six them in a second. You'd write a comedy line for them and they'd stick in three "Holy Guacamoles!" You know how they made those things?

Playboy: How?

O'Donoghue: They cleaned up after Woodstock. That was the refuse. They made the garbage into Muppets.

Playboy: Aside from death, another one of your favorite topics seems to be drugs. Chevy, you don't admit to being part of the TV generation. How about the drug generation?

Chase: Well, the generation that we happen to appeal to is the drug generation. We all grew up together. We all know what drugs are about, we've all smoked pot. Nowadays people are getting to know that being straight is a wonderful high, but they had to go through a period where they tried drugs first.

Playboy: Isn't is safe to assume that a large part of your audience watches the show under the influence of some sort of drug?

Davis: Let us say that we are aware that there are many people out there who are taking chances experimenting with uncontrolled substances and I think those people know who they are. If they want to go ahead and do that, well, that's their business. If it makes them laugh more at the show, I guess it's OK. As long as they don't go out and drive, I guess it's OK. I don't know if that stuff is good or bad, but if those kids out there, those crazy kids, want to smoke that hemp, then I think there should be less of a penalty for it.

Playboy: That's very touching, Tom, but what we were going to ask you was whether you'd heard any statistics on how many people watch the show stoned.

Michaels: It's an impossible guess. Say there are 25,000,000 viewers--if ten percent of them are stoned, that's 2,500,000 people, smoking, say, two joints each during a 90-minute show--that's 5,000,000 joints. If 50 percent of them are stoned, that's 25,000,000 joints being burned in a 90-minute slot. That's a lot of grass.

Playboy: During one show on "Weekend Update," we believe, Chevy asked viewers to send in samples of suspected killer grass. Was the response very big?

Morris: Chevy got an enormous response to that. Mostly, though, he got rolling papers. He looked sort of stupid for a couple of weeks, his eyes were glassy. But they kept sending him that cherry rolling paper, which is the worst. Of course, I don't smoke grass.

Playboy: Of course not.

Morris: But if I did, I'm sure I would find that cherry rolling paper was the worst, too.

Michaels: Yeah, we got a lot of joints as a result of that thing. I remember when the first one came in, no one would smoke it. At least for the first few weeks. It could have really been killer dope. We hyped ourselves to the point of actually believing it. Who are they out there? Why would they send us dope?