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: Before we go on, there's one crucial question our readers must have answered. What's your announcer, Don Pardo, really like?

Aykroyd: Don Pardo is a 15-year-old boy who has a very deep voice.

Chase: Actually, Don's half Chinese and also has only one arm. He's a very interesting guy. He's been doing methadone for years now, to break him of his awful smack habit. You have to carry him in and put him there, sit him there, because he's always nodding out.

Zwiebel: He's great. He's a regulation-looking guy, grayish hair and he likes very, very young girls. Playboy: Speaking of girls--are there any Saturday Night groupies?

Franken: There are these two teenage girls who hang around the studio all the time, but they're not really groupies.

O'Donoghue: Unfortunately, writers don't usually have groupies. Davis: If you want to know about groupies, ask John or Chevy.

Playboy: OK. Chevy, how do you handle groupies?

Chase: I like to fondle them between the thighs. No, there aren't really any groupies, not in the sense of jumping up and down and fucking you in the back room.

Playboy: Let's talk about guest hosts for a while. How do you go about writing for one?

Shuster: It's mostly based on preconceived notions.

Beatts: And a little research based on prejudice. Playboy: When do the hosts come in?

Shuster: You meet them on Monday, the Monday before the show, and you have to pitch your ideas Monday night. Then the show gets assembled.

Beatts: And they have their own ideas of what they'd like to do. Sometimes we're influenced by that. Some of them want to sing, like Elliot Gould. It was kind of sweet, I guess, Elliot's song. Elliot's mother probably liked it.

Playboy: You sometimes require your hosts to particiipate in somewhat compromising situations. How did you talk Ralph Nader into that "Party Doll" sketch?

O'Donoghue: I don't know if Ralph quite understood what the actual function of the doll was. The premise of the sketch was that Ralph was testing these blow-up dolls. That's what he claimed. But then he also bought them music boxes for their birthdays and treated them as real people and had forced one, because she was naughty, to sit backward on the chair. At one point, he mentions a nail test and he starts talking to one of the dolls, "Excuse me," he says, "Rita had better sit up straight. Does Rita remember what happened to Yvonne? Yvonne got nailed to the door." And a guy says, "The nail test?" And Nader says, "To test puncture resistance in vinyl." He has a consumerism-type answer to every question, but he dresses the dolls up and paints their nails. It was really pretty odd. And he did a damn good job. He really got into it. At the end of the show, he was nuts. He was throwing peanuts to the crowd. He looked like a Rose Bowl float or something at the end. He's insane.

Playboy: Did Nader ask you to change anything in the sketch?

O'Donoghue: He made us change one line in the end because it was sexist and I changed it to something equally sexist. The ending had Nader saying, "Excuse me, I'm going to have to cut this interview short. Rita is beginning to leak." And the reporter says, "Do you pump her up?" and Nader says, "Usually, but I have a headache tonight." And he found that sexist, so we changed it to, "Usually, but I have a yeast infection." I guess Ralph thought that a yeast infection was something safer, an organic kind of disease; I didn't want to disturb that belief.

Playboy: Why do you suppose Nader consented to do the show?

O'Donoghue: I don't know why he did. Everyone who does this show does it for a reason. You get paid, I think, $2500 for a really gruelling week's work, not much money, really. People do it to change their image, to show they have a good sense of humor. So, I guess Ralph did it to show he's a regular guy. Nessen did it to co-opt us and we did it to co-opt him, so that was a trade-off.

Playboy: What constitutes a good host?

Beatts: What we basically ask the hosts to do is to trust us with their lives, careers and reputations. You can see why some hosts might be a bit reluctant to let us maniacs come in and just say, "It's all right. The sketch will be there. Don't worry, it'll be fine," an it's 4:30 Friday and its' not written yet. Some people just have more confidence than others as far as saying, "OK, whatever you do, I'm with you." Those are the ones we like the best, whether they're the best hosts or not.

Playboy: Hosting the Saturday Night show has become something of a sought-after honor for celebrities. But if you could have your choice of any one person in the world as a host, whom would you choose?

O'Donoghue: Laszlo Toth. The man who took a hammer to Michelangelo's Pieta.

Playboy: What sort of sketches do you envision writig for Laszlo?

O'Donoghue: Basically, I see Laszlo breaking expensive sculpture, preferably priceless, and leaving it in rubble at the end of the show.

Aykroyd: I wanted King Olaf of Norway to host.

Michaels: We pursued King Olaf. The only reason I liked the idea was so I could say, "The king's guests tonight will be..." Also, we are talking about having a Slinky as a host and that might still happen.

Zwiebel: George Burns would be my choice. If we got him, I'd like to see him host it standing in front of a TV set, watching the show and commenting on it like he did on the old Burns and Allen Show. Some us would love to have Squeaky Fromme host. I'd love to do a show with her and not make one mention of the fact that she tried to kill President Ford. Treat her as if she were Tatum O'Neal. I love the type of comedy where something is really evident but you don't make any mention of it. Like the debates sketch we did with Ford portraying Ford with a hypodermic needle sticking out of his sleeve during the whole thing. It was a parody of Ford's getting his swine-flu vaccination and Chevy came out and did the whole debate wearing a suit with this hypodermic just sticking in his arm. Nobody even mentioned it. If Squeaky did the show, we'd make it like she was the girl next door.

Beatts: I wanted to have Marshal Ky. Remember Marshal Ky,--the Vietnamese guy? He and his wife used to dress in those identical black-satin jump suits. We approached him, but he wasn't interested.

Playboy: One of you was quoted as saying that you'd have Nixon host the show in a minute.

Michaels: No, what was said was that we'd like him to host the show in a minute.

Shuster: You know how I'd like to have Richard Nixon? On the end of one of those two-way mirrors, so that when he thought he was looking in the mirror, we'd be looking at him through the goldfish bowl.

Playboy: Alan, you're shaking your head.

Zwiebel: No, Nixon's not for me. The only way I would do it with Nixon would be to handle it as if he were Robert Goulet. If you ask me, Howdy Doody would be a great host.

Playboy: What would you do with Howdy Doody as host?

Zwiebel: After each sketch, we'd clip another one of his strings, so that at the end of the show there's just this dead puppet lying there. We had a midget do our first show last year; he was a tall midget, but still a midget. I'd love to see him become a permanent member of the rep company. What TV show has a resident midget?

Playboy: Are there any ideas that haven't completely germinated yet that you'd like to do on upcoming shows?

O'Donoghue: I want to doa Western thing called "Ambush as Medicine Breath." Just a silly little Western parody with an Indian named Yellow Snow and these settlers who are trying to smuggle--they get it wrong--firewood to the Indians. They get out there and the cavalry catches them. The settler says, "Isn't it firewood that drives them Indians loco?" And the cavalryman says, "No, it's firewater." And there's an inept wagon master who yells, "Pull the wagons into a rhomboid!" when the indians attack. Another thing I want to do eventually is a quiz show called Begging for Dollars, in which people just plead for the money. There's no game at all, just humiliation.

Shusters: This isn't a piece for the show, but I wrote a Playboy Party Joke once. Wanna hear it? Playboy: If you insist.

Shuster: [Reading from a piece of paper] "Two imbibers were imbibing when a comely coed wiggled by, her dimpled derriere all aquiver. Needless to say, the a posteriori charms of the generously endowed young thing did not escape the by-now-aroused attention of the twin sousers. Pausing to query, the first tippler qupped with a twinkle in his by-now-not-reddened eyes, "Wanna fuck?" "Tits?" retorted his now-inebriated crony with a lascivious wink. "I thought those were grapefruits."

Playboy: You wrote it for PLAYBOY?

Shuster: Yes, after I read this incredibly complex Playboy Party Joke and just thought how stupid it was. It seemed to have that kind of language in it.

Aykroyd: Here's what I'd like to do: a full embalming on television in which you take a male teenager, 16 or 17 years old, do the V incision at the pelvis, peel it back, remove all the major organs, use an I.V. of formaldehyde, drain the blood out. An actual embalming!

Belushi: Doug Kenny's TV Dance Party is one I'd like to do. A parody of Dick Clark where you'd have these real bad groups from Long Island come on and have the kids dance and Dick Clark would say, "I don't know much about music, but you guys are really bad."

Aykroyd: Wisdom teeth removed on the air. Actually have a guy who needs his wisdom teeth pulled, have a dentist there and say, "Hi, I'm Marty Fein and what we're going to do here is actually take out four wisdom teeth. As you can see by the x-rays, we have a verticle impaction up here, and now we're going to put the patient to sleep." Franken: We wrote a piece called "The Planet of the Enormous Hooters" that didn't make it on the air but might on some future show. The Planet of the Enormous Hooters is inhabited by amazon women and all the girls, Gilda, Laraine, Jane, have these enormous prop breasts. Huge breasts.

Davis: And Raquel--we were going to use it on the Raquel Welch show--Raquel has only her normal-size breasts. And Gilda and Jane and Laraine say, "Look at her. Ha, ha, ha. Her breasts are so small, they look like melons. We are going to banish you to the planet Earth, where you will live in anonymity and your small breasts will go unnoticed." Playboy: Why did it get cut?

Davis: There were too many breast jokes that week and Raquel didn't want to do that kind of joke--it'd been done before.

O'Donoghue: Here's a sketch I want to do someday, if Stevie Wonder ever hosts the show. What I'd do is come out and present him with a painting, an original Monet. The painting is completely draped. So I pull the drape off and it's an emtpy canvas that just reads, DON'T TELL HIM, PLEASE DON'T TELL HIM. And I'm going on about this painting, describing the period, saying, "Note the attention to the water lilies; of course this was the late Monet, and you can see the subtle use of..." and just go on and on in this manner. It's a sweet idea.

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