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: Where do you get those sweet ideas? Where does your sense of humor some from?

Aykroyd: Fiberglass.

Playboy: Fiberglass?

Aykroyd: We take fiberglass tablets, but I wouldn't recommend them to everybody.

Playboy: Let's rephrase the question. When did you first know you were funny?

Aykroyd: I was a month old. I was a riot.

Zwiebel: It comes out of nowhere.

Shuster: Sometimes it comes from catching images off the tube. I was always transfixed by the cat-food commercial where you see a line of nine cats nudging each other from bowl to bowl. So I wrote a "Purina Rat Chow" ad. I don't want to sound like Sammy Davis, Jr., but it was a tremendous thrill to see nine rubber rats rigged up to nudge each other from bowl to bowl.

Beatts: I think we're all misfits. Everybody on this show is a misfit and some of the humor comes from that.

Playboy: In what way do you consider yourself a misfit?

Beatts: I mean, do I look regular? I wasn't the class clown, but certainly was the class freak in some sense in high school. Being an alien helps you develop a satirical viewpoint. That's the basic ABC of humor. Some of my humor comes out of the fact that I come out of an advertising background, so I know how commercials work and how they ought to be. The first thing I did for the show was my speed commercial--I wrote it and performed it.

Playboy: Can you remember how it went?

Beatts: "Hi, I'm Mrs. Ellen Sherman, Cleveland housewife and mother. I'm an astrophysicist and Commissioner of Current Affairs. In my spare time, I do needlepoint, sculpt, read, brush up on my knowlege of current events and take riding lessons." And she goes on and on like that and the voice-over says, "How does she do it? She takes speed." There are still people who think that it was a real commercial for speed.

Playboy: Is your humor motivated at all by revenge?

Beatts: Definitely. There's a certain satisfaction to be derived from the fact that the people who made you miserable in high school are now alcoholic housewives married to insurance salesmen. But, on the other hand, that night not be such a bad life, so you can't go back and say, "Hey, I've made it." But it's always a fantasy to feel that.

Zwiebel: I once tried to get even with my old rabbi in a thing I did for "Update" recently. Thi guy with a hammer and chisel breaks into a museum in Italy and circumcises the statue of David and we show the statue with a bandage over the groin--

O'Donoghue: That would have been a great part of Laszlo Toth.

Zwiebel: Right. Anyway, then I can in--I performed in this one--as a rabbi and somebody asked me, "Rabbi, what do you think of what the culprit has done?" And I said, "In my opinion, he did a beautiful job." The name I used was the actual name of my old rabbi, who ten years ago wouldn't let me go out with this girl who wasn't Jewish. I've had this vendetta against this rabbi ever since. And Christ, if I can't work his name into a piece... Playboy: You want to work his name into this interview?

Zwiebel: Uh, no. Funny--the next day was Yom Kippur and I went to temple. When I got home, my cat was dead.

Radner: It's not really revenge. Here's this thing I figured out the other day; here's my definition of comedy: When I was a little girl, seven years old, this kid who lived nearby came over and said, "Yesterday morning, I saw you outside in your underwear." I said, "I didn't go outside in my underwear." And he said, "Yes you did." And I went into the house and cried and cried. And I thought, what happened? Did I got out of my mind? Did I go out in my underwear by mistake? Did I mistake the front door for the bathroom door? You know, something like that can hurt you when you're a kid? I'm not sure to this day whether he really saw me outside in my underwear. But anyway, I decided that this is what comedy is: If you do go outside in your underwear, when you get out there, you yell, "Hey, everybody, "I'm outside here in my underwear!" So they can't get you, like that kid got me.

Zwiebel: You turn what you're defensive about into the offensive so people can't touch you.

Playboy: It's been said in the press that for a lot of you, the Saturday Night show is just a steppingstone to bigger and better things. What is the next step?

Zwiebel: Possibly junior high.

Aykroyd: A featured panelist on the $20,000 Pyramid.

O'Donoghue: The movies, I hope, and ditch this fucking show behind me. It's 110 hours a week--it's a realy annoyance. It's not much of a life. I'd like to do heavy drugs, I'd like to go out, got to fancy parties, restaurants, dress, change my clothes a lot of times a day, drive fast...

Playboy: What about you, Rosie? Where do you go from here?

Shuster: I'd like to go to the Caribbean.

Playboy: How about you, John?

Belushi: Who knows? I've got a long life ahead of me. I might just do anything.

Aykroyd: I heard John whistling around the office the other day, thinking, Governor of New Jersey. It ain't that far off.

Belushi: Who knows? Ronald Reagan did it.

Aykroyd: It's a marvelous country, a fantastic planet--you can do anything. Christ almighty, there's a universe waiting out there. Duality, yin and yang, positive, negative, male, female, there are two hemispheres, two poles...

Belushi: There's gravity out there, don't forget. Gravity that holds you down.

Aykroyd: The next step? You want to know about the next step? The next step is to stay away from the biological time bomb that's going to explode in this country about 1979. There's going to be about four or five weird viruses, a natural biological check. The thing to do is stay away from it.

Playboy: How?

Aykroyd: What it's going to require is the cooperation of General Motors. The Cadillac Division of General Motors. They should bring out, right now, all those old body dies from 1959. What they should do is get those body dies, get a cheaper grade of metal and produce those exact cars, exact replicas of the 1959 Cadillac and distribute them to everyone in America. Given the fact that they have the technology to produce them, I think there's hope for America.

Playboy: That's very reassuring, but we're not sure that it answers the question. Let us put it this way: Do you think you'll ever end up regularly on prime time?

O'Donoghue: I dont' mind ending up on prime time. We were talking about doing a musical comedy or something. I don't have to always take a piss on the Pope when I have something to say.

Playboy: What about you, Chevy? To start with, do you think your leaving the show will hurt it?

Chase: No. In a sense, it's good for the cast that I've left. It gives them all more of a chance to have the kind of luck I've had. That's what they want. That's what anybody wants. I was kind of overshadowing them. All the articles were coming out saying, "Chevy Chase's Not Ready for Prime Time Players" or "Chevy Chase's Saturday Night." Well, fuck that--it never was my show.

Beatts: It was always a little off kilter with Chevy there, though he was good for the show. But when Chevy was in the hospital, it gave us a preview of what the show would be like without him and it gave everybody a lot of confidence, because we got some great reaction to those shows and to Jane's doing "Update."

Playboy: Chevy, you've been called more commercial than some of the other cast members. Do you think that's true?

Chase: Who knows what's commercial.? I guess I'm commercial because I look straighter. I look preppy and straight.

Playboy: What about all the rumors that NBC is grooming you to take over the Johnny Carson show?

Chase: Absolutely true.

Playboy: Really? When do you start?

Chase: As soon as Johnny gets the balls to ask me to be a guest on the show and I can show him and everybody in this country that he's had it. He's finished. He's old and his time is up. The man is a waste. He should go home, read a couple of books and find out what it's all about. He should get a nice pad in Vegas, go buy a Buick and enjoy life.

Playboy: Assuming that you're putting us on, what kind of guests do you plan to have on the Tonight Show?

Chase: I'd have Johnny on as much as I could. We want draw, don't we? No, actually, the rumors are totally false. It's a load of shit. Everybody and his uncle who seems to be somebody new on TV this year gets slated as the next Johnny Carson. Nobody's going to take over Carson's spot until Carson is good and ready to leave. And then he won't give a shit who replaces him. Second of all, nobody does it as well as he does. He's remarkable--after 14 years, he's still fresh. But that's the worst kind of job in the world.

Playboy: Why?

Chase: Can you imagine coming out every night and having to interview people about their books--some guy who's not really a doctor who wrote a book about goiters--and interviewing your Las Vegas Connie Stevens-type night-club acts? I can't think of anything more atrophying to my brain. There's no amount of money you could offer me to take that job, and nobody has. Nobody has even suggested it. Only the press. And now Johnny Carson hates my guts and he doesn't even know me.

Playboy: Perhaps he's heard the rumors, too, and believes them. We read somewhere that he recently called the Saturday Night show "tasteless, sophomoric and cruel."

Chase: I'm sure he did. And I'm sure he's felt that way from time to time. But his stadards are not my standards. I'm a younger guy, I come from a different perspective and I just don't feel the way he does. He's a very funny man, I will say that, and I've noticed that I seem to have mannerisims that are similar to his, particularly when I did "Weekend Update." I touch my nose, I play with a pencil, I have a way of doing takes when a joke is bad--those are all Johnny's mannerisms. I'm not consciously imitating him, but I must have been influenced by him somewhere along the line.

Playboy: How do you know he dislikes you?

Chase: I sent him a very nice note when he was given a special Emmy or something, congratulating him and saying, "You're the best." I never heard from him. All I heard was that he told a friend of mine, "Chevy Chase couldn't ad-lib a fart at a bean-eating contest." Which to me is an extremely funny line, Johnny. But if it's the best that you can come up with, I'm sorry for the guy. I understand that he's funny and at dinners he'll piss in ice buckets under the table and do all kinds of great outrageous things, but how many of us haven't done that? He dislikes me so intensely that he won't ask me on the show. Frankly, I think he was a lot funnier seven or eight years ago, when he didn't have to get so uptight. I honestly believe that we would get along very well, that we would like each other. On the other hand, I really don't care about him.

Playboy: Chevy, where do you see Saturday Night going from here?

Chase: The show's going to be less ga-ga ha-ha and more odd as tiem goes on. Because, first of all, people are genuinely burned out--you just can't keep it up. Secondly, because every other show on TV is copying this one, they've got to stay ahead. These are bright people, and, they're not going to put up with something that's not interesting. So what happens is, the ideas, the sketches tend to get weirder. Danny came up with this "Blog Diet" sketch in which you're sent up to Alaska and an Eskimo takes your food away from you. You're sent up there and told to catch fish. Now, that's odd to play to 20,000,000 people. There aren't going to be a lot of guffaws, but at least no one's going to say, "I've seen that before."

Beatts: Actually, I look forward to seeing more sketches involving fine food and wine.

Playboy: But don't you think a lot of the show's success comes from the shock of seeing somewhat outrageous humor on television for the first time? Stuff that nobody else is doing, that no one else could get away with?

Michaels: Yeah; unfortunately, within the context of televison as it now exists, it seems like shock value. But I don't think we ever truly shock. Who's being shocked? Are you shocked?

Newman: One thing that shocked me was Michael--naturally, Michael. He'd found this photo of a kid under a truck, crying, and it looked like half the kid's body had been run over and the "Update caption was that the truck driver got a ticket for parking on a child.

Shuster: There's something about laughing at tasteless things, though. You laugh at what you're nervous about. One of my comedic philosophies is that comedy is about flirting with taboos. You try to tickle the taboo and just turn it around a little bit more or rub up against it and that has shock value, because the taboo is something that you don't often hear mentioned.

Beatts: It's all such hypocrisy, because there's this fiction that what we all really should be doing is watching Kenneth Clark's Civilization, that that should be what we're really interested in, and, actually, we all know that what we're really interested in is sex, drugs and violence.

Zwiebel: It's never the intention of the show to shock people. It's just perceived as shocking because this kind of stuff has never been done on televison before.

Playboy: What happens when the shock value wears off?

Beatts: We'll just have to explore the limits of people's disgust.

Newman: Or we won't do it anymore.

O'Donoghue: You can get tired and ot want to keep doing it.

Beatts: It's funny that people are still shocked. I don't think you're seeing much on the show that isn't available elsewhere in our culture. It's just not available on TV.

Playboy: Some of you worked for National Lampoon. Does the show's humor grow out of that magazine's humor?

O'Donoghue: No, the show's got a lot of different elements in it. Some are a logical extension of the Lampoon, I suppose, but there's also a California sweetness about it.

Playboy: All right, here we are at the door, on the way out. Sometimes we PLAYBOY interviewers ask one final question and we don't know what the political effects will be. Anyone have anything he or she would like to say before we wrap it up?

Morris: Aw, you mean Carter at the end of his interview. You all didn't have no little Playboy Bunnies with you down in Plains? Come on man, you tellin' me you didn't have no Bunnies?

O'Donoghue: OK, it's up to me, I guess. I'll reveal something. I keep a dead collieskin on a coat hanger in my closet. Now, if that doesn't lose the election for me, I don't know what will.

Playboy
Transcribed by L. Christie