Michaeclass="underline" It’s insane. It’s like our Apollo.
Judd: Yeah, just to go in there every night and see, like, Dave Attell and then Dave Chappelle and then Chris Rock—there’s just an enormous group of talented people there every night. They kill so hard. Are there particularly special moments that come to mind when you think about that place?
Michaeclass="underline" Yeah, my first night there. I show up and the guy at the door is like, “Yo, man, you might not be able to go on tonight because Chappelle is about to get up and we don’t know when he’s coming off.” And I was like, “Damn.” But there was another slot later on and the guy said maybe I could get on that. And I was like, “All right, cool, whatever.” So you know, Chappelle’s onstage. He’s killing for like forty-five minutes. Uncharacteristically gets offstage after like forty or forty-five minutes; everyone assumed he was going to be up there all night. So the next comedian to get onstage is Chris Rock. He gets onstage, and does like forty minutes. And the next comedian that gets onstage is me. I’m like, Fuck you. But you know what? It was good. And you know why? Because that crowd had seen ninety minutes of the best comedians in the world. I could not ruin their night. There was nothing I could say that was ever going to wipe that smile off those faces, man.
MICHAEL O’DONOGHUE (1983)
Growing up, I was completely obsessed with Saturday Night Live. Scarily obsessed. How deep did the nerd-dom go? I knew who all the writers were. (I also used to record the show with a cassette recorder, and then transcribe it by hand, and then study the transcription to try to understand how it all worked—but that’s a story for another day.) I wanted to know who was responsible for making this show that meant so much to me.
There was one writer I admired above all others—he also performed on the show occasionally—named Michael O’Donoghue. He had what we used to call a sick sense of humor. He was one of those preternaturally gifted, big-brained National Lampoon guys, who went on to become one of the original writers of Saturday Night Live—and was in the first sketch ever performed on Saturday Night Live—and later wrote the movie Scrooged. When I interviewed him, he had just been fired from the show and was ready to unload. He was fucking furious, actually. It was the first time I’d heard somebody—an adult, I mean—let loose like this and insult everybody he had just worked with, and the ferocity of his rage, and the righteousness of it, definitely left an impression. Michael O’Donoghue didn’t suffer fools. He didn’t need to.
Judd Apatow: How would you describe your type of humor?
Michael O’Donoghue: I don’t know. Everybody else calls it sick or something, but I find it healthy. I think humor should deal with the tensions that are going on in society. And our society’s really different now than The Lucy Show or Dick Van Dyke, or Mary Tyler Moore. I try to deal with the tensions of 1983—and some of them are really dark. The psycho rings your doorbell, you know. So I reflect that in my humor. Some people say that’s funny. Some think it’s sick. I think it’s healthy.
Judd: What would be an example of that tension?
Michaeclass="underline" I recently flew with Eastern Airlines, which is—as I was flying, I wrote a thing called “TransEastern Airlines.” It was like flying in a cattle car with wings. It’s a line like, “You’ll feel like you’ve never left the ground because we treat you like dirt.” It was entirely based on flying Eastern, where they treated you like garbage. And so I wrote a sketch about it.
Judd: What is Mondo?
Michaeclass="underline" Mondo is so many things. Mondo Video just came out in cassette form. It just sold five thousand copies, which is very good for something that’s not a movie. Just coming out cold, it’s doing real well.
Judd: They’re going to release it as a movie in a limited—
Michaeclass="underline" It was careless, the movie, because it was spaced for commercials. It was really strange. And also they have not perfected that tape-to-film process, so it looks real mushy when you watch it.
Judd: What happened? You wrote it, and they okayed it, and then once it was made, they didn’t want it?
Michaeclass="underline" That was exactly what happened, odd as it may sound. They invested a lot of money in it—three hundred thousand dollars—which I think is a lot of money. And they didn’t even bother to look at it at NBC.
Judd: They didn’t even screen it?
Michaeclass="underline" A couple of the censors looked at it, but none of the brass looked at it. A lot of television critics really liked it. It’s very strange to me, the whole history of that thing.
Judd: And how did it do in the theaters when it came out?
Michaeclass="underline" Terrible. It looked bad. It was made for television, not for movies. When you write for late-night television, you’re fighting sleep. So the way that you program is you put your best thing first, and your second-best thing second, and your third—because you’re just trying to fight sleep. So the junk is at the end. That’s not the way to make a movie. The way you make a movie is you build to a climax—it’s a classic stage thing. Mondo was never meant to be a movie, and it didn’t do very well as a movie.
Judd: How do you write a movie like that, because it’s very peculiar. I mean, the skits—
Michaeclass="underline" Well, it was written very quickly. It was written in a couple of weeks. It was written off of a sort of video theory that it’s more fun—if you can’t be funny, be weird. It’s just as good, maybe even better. That was the comedic theory behind it. Sometimes we would just be strange for no good reason. It keeps me amused.
Judd: What kind of reaction did you expect people to have when they watched it?
Michaeclass="underline" Well, some would laugh, which happens. Some would be annoyed. Ah, more were annoyed than laughed. Whatever Saturday Night Live was when it came out, I expected Mondo Video to be, five years later. You know what I mean? It would be a different kind of comedy. I got tired of working in sketch comedy. Live television is very limiting, what you can do in it.
Judd: You’ve had enough of TV comedy?
Michaeclass="underline" I’ve had enough. It’s frustrating, live TV. Actually, there’s a different way to do live television, but—
Judd: How would you like to do it?
Michaeclass="underline" Shoot it all with creepers.
Judd: With what?
Michaeclass="underline" Shoot it all with creepers—handheld cameras. Put the cameras on the stage with the actors. Can I use obscenities in this—where is this broadcast, because I’m watching my language as I talk.
Judd: We’ll bleep it out.
Michaeclass="underline" Ah, okay. Well, then. I don’t think anybody gives a flying fuck if they see a cameraman on a stage, okay? I don’t think anybody cares. It’s the liveness of it that they like. Not how technically perfect everything is. So that frustrated me. It frustrated me when I went back to Saturday Night Live and they wanted to shoot it the same old way.
Judd: Do you think when they did the “new” Saturday Night Live they should have changed it, and tried new things instead of the same things?
Michaeclass="underline" Jesus, yes. All TV knows is winning combinations. Of course they should have been trying something new, something interesting. Something that made us, in the first two or three years, look like fools—like Red Skelton or something, you know what I mean? It’s stupid.