Lorne Michaels’ Long History of Breaking Up Comedy Troupes
Delivering the news that Ben Marshall is joining the Saturday Night Live cast — with no more Please Don’t Destroy digital shorts as a result — must have been “fucking awkward,” David Spade said this week on the Fly on the Wall podcast.
“It’s just weird,” agreed Dana Carvey. “It’s like the Three Stooges and they take Moe Howard, but Shemp doesn't get anything.”
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Another way of looking at it: The idea that Lorne Michaels raids comedy troupes and cherry-picks the best talent isn’t weird at all. After all, it’s something he’s been doing since the very first days of Saturday Night Live. Here are five comedy groups that lost some of their best talents to SNL.
Second City
Nearly half of the original cast of Saturday Night was made up of Second City improvisers, including John Belushi from Chicago, and Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner from Toronto. After one season, Second City’s Bill Murray also jumped on board. Over the years, they’d be joined by Chris Farley, Tina Fey, Tim Meadows, Mike Myers, and Cecily Strong.
Second City got little to show for it. Bernie Sahlins, one of the troupe’s founders, decided “to compete in this really weird way with Saturday Night Live,” remembered Joe Flaherty in The Second City Unscripted. The result was Second City Television or SCTV, a successful attempt to mine its own talent for TV sketch comedy.
Dick Ebersol raided that show as well, hiring Martin Short and Catherine O’Hara (who quit once she saw what a mess SNL was in the early ‘80s.)
The Groundlings
The original cast also included Laraine Newman, a member of the not-yet-famous troupe The Groundlings. Over the years, Michaels used the Groundlings as a farm team, plucking comics like Will Ferrell, Phil Hartman, Chris Kattan, Ana Gasteyer, Jon Lovitz, Maya Rudolph, and Kristen Wiig.
“It’s funny because on the first day you teach, you have to tell your students, ‘Be here because you want to be here and you want to learn improv. Not because you want this to be a stepping stone to Saturday Night Live,” Michaela Watkins told Vanity Fair. “And then the second day I was teaching that class, I had to call someone and say, ‘I am going to Saturday Night Live. Can you cover my classes?’”
The Kids in the Hall
Lorne sent Al Franken and Jim Downey to Toronto to check out hot new group Kids in the Hall, leading to audition offers — for only two of its members. Mark McKinney and Bruce McCulloch made the trip to try out, and according to Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, Michaels mumbled to them, “So are you busy in September?”
The two didn’t know if they were hired, only finding out later that they’d be writers. They lasted one miserable year before Michaels sent them packing, and the two rejoined Kids in the Hall once again. To ease the pain, Lorne helped the group land their own show on HBO.
Upright Citizens Brigade
The Upright Citizens Brigade grew out of Chicago’s Improv Olympic, and soon delivered talents like Amy Poehler, John Mulaney, Bobby Moynihan, Kate McKinnon and Horatio Sanz to SNL.
In the 2000s, the troupe was a virtual pipeline to late-night.
The Lonely Island
There’s no better precursor to Please Don’t Destroy’s situation than Lonely Island, a successful Internet comedy group whose members were invited to audition for Saturday Night Live. To use Carvey’s analogy, Andy Samberg was Moe Howard, while Akiva Shaffer and Jorma Taccone were Shemp.
“They hired me first, and then there was a weekend where we had to wait and see if they were going to hire Jorma and Akiva as well,” remembered Samberg in oral history Live From New York. “And they—thank goodness — did, as writers.”