Check Out Buck Henry’s Brutal Roasts of the Original ‘SNL’ Cast Members
Of all the members of Saturday Night Live’s Five Timers Club (those celebs so hilarious that SNL asked them back to host at least five times), Buck Henry is clearly the most obscure. While Henry did his share of acting, he’s most well-known as a comedy writer, the pen behind classics like The Graduate, Catch-22 and Get Smart. But besides Steve Martin, Henry was the original cast’s most popular host, headlining the show 10 times between 1976 and 1980.
In 1979’s Rolling Stone Visits Saturday Night Live, Henry introduced the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. “Personally, I have never thought that they were very funny,” he explained. “What they have engaged, by doing whatever it is that they do, is not so much my admiration as my sympathy.”
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Here are Henry’s scorching-hot roasts of each of the early SNL comedians…
Dan Aykroyd
“I did not believe in extraterrestrial life until I met this thing. I had never come face-to-face with a mutant. In short — I had never stared into the face of hell.”
Chevy Chase
“What was his name? Chevy. Chevy Chase? Well — let’s face it — cuteness is its own worst enemy.”
Laraine Newman
“Hopelessly, hopelessly, indecently thin. Thinness that virtually gives the finger to any normal person’s idea of physical, hence mental, health.”
Garrett Morris
“His own personal racial burden will never be lightened by an all too consuming interest in women’s clothes.”
Jane Curtin
“Pretty? Not when you’ve seen her face twisted by some unaccountable existential agony as she sits alone, so alone, waiting for the little red light on the top of the camera to go on. The smile that you see? That’s the smile of a breaking heart.”
John Belushi
“A masterpiece of physiological debris. Everything in excess with the exception of simple human dignity.”
Gilda Radner
“Did she invent the word neurotic? No. But she crystallized it.”
Bill Murray
“No one’s home. It’s a shell, a husk, an empty room populated by only the voices of those pathetic characters that are invented out of some residual psychic desperation.”
Lorne Michaels
“What can one say about a producer — in this case, one named Lorne Michaels — who persisted in bringing all these rejects together and encouraged them to trample, week after week, on everything and everybody that Americans respect and revere. To be Canadian is not an excuse. But one must suppose that, when the final cue card is turned over, he will have a higher network to answer to.”
