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: Do any of you write or perform under the influence of--

Belushi: No!

Playboy: Never?

Aykroyd: I would lodge a personal protest if I knew anybody was working under the influence. I would refuse to go on camera with him. That's the way I feel about it. It's a matter of breaking the law that's there to legislate physical purity, which is all we have to work with, this body.

Belushi: It's a discipline. It's like Muhammad Ali when he trains for a fight. He's been in this long because of discipline. If we burn ourselves out with drugs or alcohol, we won't have long to go in this business. You can't work with an alcoholic or a drug addict.

Aykroyd: It's a mix of exercise, theater and robotic function. At show time, there are five or six red tape marks on the floor. The camera shoots you at one and you move on to the next mark and read off the cue cards, because everybody is changing--you can't memorize your lines, because later, things get cut or changed.

Belushi: You want to be your brightest then.

Aykroyd: If they could build humanoids or clones to do what we do, then they'd have the cast of Saturday Night.

Belushi: Except they wouldn't have the talent or the likeability.

Aykroyd: Discipline, exercise and talent channeled into a robotic function.

Belushi: If you want to compare it to anything, compare it to athletics.

Playboy: OK. Using that as a springboard, do you think a performer should abstain from having sex before a show?

Belushi: There's no time.

Aykroyd: Right. For a fulfilling sexual experience, I require at least 25 seconds.

Belushi: I think it would hurt. The night before, maybe, but that day you're just too busy. But I want to stress this point and make it perfectly clear. You can't perform under the influence of any drug to your capacity. John Barrymore could do Hamlet drunk and get great reviews, but that's what eventually turned him off acting.

Aykroyd: I've written letters to the United States Treasury Department, asking whether I could be of help in informing on anybody in the entertainment industry who uses drugs. I'm quite happy to cooperate with the Federal Government.

Belushi: Two or three vice-presidents at NBC are not here now because of Dan's undercover work. You're going to blow your cover, Dan.

Aykroyd: No. Right now I'm not much good to the Feds, because the people I've informed on know about me. I can never be in law-enforcement officer--my right eye is bad, I've got webbed toes on both feet, both eyes are a different color, curved spine, sway-back. I'm a genetic mutant.

Belushi: Gentically, I'm perfect.

Playboy: From what you say, Dan, it sounds as if you once considered being a cop.

O'Donoghue: He just likes to wear the uniforms. If he weren't in Saturday Night, he'd be in some fetish show. We're paying him big bucks to put on a state-police uniform.

Aykroyd: Yeah, there was that one cop sketch on the show that Michael wrote--

O'Donoghue: It was a parody of those Southern California cop shows. We had a couple of midless robot cops going around saying, "What do you want to eat tonight, Mexican or Chinese? We ate Chinese last night." Then they'd just kill people and you'd see cars crashing into each other and squeal and shots, and now they're saying, "You want to kill Mexican tonight? No, we killed Mexican last night. How about Chinese?

Playboy: Let's backtrack for a while. Can you tell us how some of the regular bits on the show originated? Things like the bees, the samurai, Emily Litella, "Weekend Update"?

Chase: Tom Schiller thought up the samurai thing. It came out of nowhere, really--he just said, "Samurai Hotelier," and I said, "That's great!" We'd seen Belushi do a samurai imitation at his audition and we always wanted to do that character. We changed it to "Samurai Hotel," because we thought nobody would know what a hotelier was.

Playboy: How did you get into that whole samurai thing, John?

Belushi: I studied kendo in Japan for three years. Under the master, Tochiyama.

Playboy: Really?

Belushi: Actually, I saw it on TV and I was blown away by it. I saw it three times in one week and I started doing it at home. I had a pole like a ballet bar and I put a robe on and put my hair up and I walked around doing that voice.

Playboy: You've cut through a lot of things--sandwiches, tomatoes--with that samurai sword. It must take practice.

Belushi: No. I never knew I could cut through that tomato until dress rehearsal. You have to think the tomato. It's a Zen discipline.

Radner: I knew Belushi long before that and he'd cut anything in half with that sword. He's really an accomplished samurai. Playboy: Does he cut his furniture in half?

Radner: You bet he does. He's that type of guy. Belushi's one of the few people in the world I'd let beat me up. He really hits me. None of this fake stuff. But I can tell when the punch is coming and I can go with it so I don't get hurt. Most comedy shows just use sound effects and fake punches.

Playboy: John, do you enjoy beating up poor, defenseless women?

Belushi: Yes. Especially Gilda. Pain is part of comedy.

Playboy: Gilda, how did Emily Litella originate?

Radner: Emily originally came out of our Monday-night improv sessions and was later assigned to Franken and Davis, who named her. We used her in a talk-show scene in which she was a woman who wrote teeny-tiny fairy-tale books. Then Rosie Shuster had this idea about "busting school children" and we gave it to Emily Litella. That was followed by things like "Firing the Handicapped" and "Presidential Erections." To this day, I don't know how we got away with that one.

Playboy: "Presidential Erections"?

Radner: Yeah. The initial laugh is a sexual laugh, right? But then we talked about the word erect only in terms of buildings, monuments, so the censor let it by.

Zwiebel: If we had gone on about the President's sex life-- Radner: Then we wouldn't have gotten away with it. Playboy: Have you phased Emily Litella out or just given her a rest?

Radner: For a while, we didn't do her because the public got ahead of us on it. They were sending in requests. I wanted to go on Chevy's last show because he and Emily had worked together a lot, and I was going to say "Cheddar, what's all this fuss I hear about your teething? I thought you had all of your permanent teeth by now." And he said, "No, Mrs. Litella, I'm leaving. I'm leaving Saturday Night. I'm going." And I said, "Oh, that's better. At least you're not in pain." And the "never mind" thing--it used to be a surprise, but after doing it so much...

Zwiebel: I was in the supermarket once and this guy was announcing the daily specials over the loudspeaker. He said, "Shoppers, now for only ten minutes on this aisle, pork loin, 59 cents a pound." And he gives this whole spiel, and then you hear him say, "What? Oh, that was yesterday? Sold out? Not now? Well, never mind." And he said it like Emily Litella and the whole supermarket went bananas.

Radner: I love to do her. I'd do her every week.

Playboy: How about the bees. How did they originate?

Zwiebel: The bees were Rosie's idea, I think.

Shuster: I hate to blow that myth, but I actually originated the ants. I'd seen this horror movie that had the marching of the marabunta-- Playboy: The marabunta?

Shuster: The marabunta was an army of red ants and it gave rise to this non sequitur idea about what it would be like to have ants in a maternity ward. You know, congratulations, it's a drone."

Playboy: Ants don't have drones; bees do.

Shuster: Oh, then it must have been bees.

Playboy: How did "Weekend Update" originate?

Zwiebel: It was Lorne's idea. The fact that we're a live show makes it important that we do news. Things that happen on Saturday we can talk about it on Saturday Night.

Playboy: That's one of the things that's so interesting about "Update"--that you seem to do it right up to the minute.

Zwiebel: If something happens between rehearsal and air time--dress rehearsal ends about 9 or 9:30 and the show starts at 11:30--we often come up with a joke about it and you'll see it an hour or two later on the show. Sometimes we even pre-empt the real news that way.

Playboy: Isn't it difficult to come up with jokes that close to show time?

Zwiebel: When you're under pressure, you can pull it out of somewhere. I'm not saying they're always gems. Here's an example of a joke I wrote between dress and air: When Patty Hearst was caught, thenews stories said she might have had group sex when she was a fugitive. I wrote a joke saying that she admitted having group sex with the S.L.A. but only up to a point--that she was an old-fashioned girl who was saving herself for the right army. It was an immediate joke--there was a situation and there was a joke for it.

Playboy: What are some of your favorite "Update" lines?

Newman: My favorite was a joke Zwiebel and Herb Sargent wrote based on Elton John's interview in Rolling Stone, where he came out of the closet as a bisexual. The joke was related to that, but instead of Elton John, it was Speedy Alka-Seltzer coming out the medicien cabinet to reveal that he was bicarbonate. It went on, saying, "In anticipation of the criticism that he might receive, Speedy threw himself into the bathtub and his spirit effervesced. Grief-stricken friend Poppinfresh, the Pillsbury dough boy, said that Speedy left a note that read simply, 'Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is.' Memorial services will be tomorrow at ten, to be repeated every four hours."

Playboy: Chevy, you were originally hired as a writer, not as a performer. How did you make the transition?

Chase: Lorne and I originally met in line waiting to see Monty Python and the Holy Grail and I was hot, making comments, and I guess I was funny, so a couple of months later, Lorne called me and asked me to write for the show. The transition was simple. When the Not Ready for Prime Time Players were hired, there were six--everybody except me. Then there was a screen test, not an audition, a screen test, just to see how everybody came off, what they looked like, and I got in on that. I wrote a news item on a piece of paper--the final story of the night--something about a newborn baby sandpiper--one of those sweet, sentimental horseshit stories--and, of course, at the end of the story, the baby sandpiper gets stepped on and killed by a baby hippo. It got laughs and on top of that, we were doing commercial parodies and I'd written a few and I seemed to be the right character for them.

Playboy: Which commercial parodies were you referring to?

Chase: The Geritol take-off, for one. It was Michael and I, two guys; we were clearly homosexuals, but we played it straight. I said, "This is my wife. I love her very much." And Mike said, "I take care of myself. I get plenty of rest and I take Jamitol whenever I get the chance." And then I said, "He makes me take it, too." Another ad parody I did was Tom Schiller's "Tryopenen" ad, parody, which was about those arthritic pain pills in the bottle that's so fucking hard to open--it had one those tops--and, of course, the guy's trying to open the damned thing, but he can't because he's got arthritis. The whole thing was my hands trying to open this Tryopenen bottle, banging it, hitting it. Anyway, I came off so well on those, so Lorne decided to give me a spot on the show.

Playboy: Why do you think you became the best-known performer on the show?

Chase: The fact that I used my name and said, "I'm Chevy Chase and you're not"-- the connection of this guy with the odd name--got me visibility right away. That, more than anything, made me stand out. Not that I was better than the other, which I clearly was, anyway, but...Here's the secret, and I might as well tell you, so the others can learn something from it, because even as this interview comes out, I'll be making millions while they're just trying to get out another show. The secret it the way you play the camera. You must play the fuckin' camera. You've got to look into that lens and do a job on it. I learned this early on, because I was fuckin' around for four years with Ken Shapiro and Groove Tube, and all we had were these little cameras that we played with. Basically it was mugging, but it was all connected with the camera. Anyway, on Saturday Night, I had a showcase--"Weekend Update"--and you heard my name every week and I got to play the camera. I wasn't forced into awful situations like John,, into sketches where you can't play the camera, where maybe the jokes aren't that good and you have to act the shit out of it to make it work, and boy does he do it. And he can do it--he's as good as you get.

Playboy: You also got a lot of visibility because of your impersonation of Gerald Ford.

Chase: Right.

Playboy: How did you develope that?

Chase: I used to put a card on Lorne's routine board and it said, "Trust me," and it meant don't worry about opening the show, I'll come up with something and it'll be fine. Just trust me. And Lorne would, because he knew that if I had the confidence in it, it would probably work. One day, Ford fell over a wheelchair onto a little girl with a flag or some kind of inept move, and it was just too much. It was the same week, I think, that he'd announced he was running. So I told Lorne that I had a good opening, that I'd be Ford giving his acceptance speech and then I'd fall. And that was it. I came out to the podium in a tuxedo and I said, "Good evening, my fellow Americans. I am here tonight, good, evening my fellow Americans." He'd read the line twice. I did every posible inept thing I could. I'd fall then say, "Uh-oh, sorry, no problem," get up, then fall again. For some reason, we repeated it every week--much to my pain.

Playboy: You actually hurt yourself badly once doing your Ford bit. What happened?

Chase: I broke my podium. Broken podium is no big thing.

Playboy: How long was the podium in the hospital?

Chase: Just a few days, in bed for three or four weeks.

Playboy: Didn't you hurt yourself before dress rehearsal and go on to do the show anyway?

Chase: Yeah, I didn't know till later that night that it was really serious.