MAKE HIM LAUGH

How Lorne Michaels's sensibility governs "Saturday Night Live."

- SUSAN MORRISON

Every week at "Saturday Night Live" is just like every other week. The weeks are the same because they're always fuelled by hard work, filled with triumphs and failures and backstage arguments, and built around a guest host—Jennifer Lopez, Lizzo, Elon Musk—who often has no idea what he or she is doing. Over the past fifty years, the job of Lorne Michaels, the show's creator, has been to make the stars look good, and to corral the egos and talents on his staff in order to get the program on the air, live. Since the début of "S.N.L.," in 1975, he has fine-tuned the process, paying attention to shifting cultural winds. What began as an avant-garde variety show has become mainstream. (Amy Poehler has characterized the institution that made her famous as “the show your parents used to have sex to that you now watch from your computer in the middle of the day.”) But the formula is essentially unchanged. Michaels compares the show to a Snickers bar: people expect a certain amount of peanuts, a certain amount of caramel, and a certain amount of chocolate. “There’s a comfort level,” he says. The show has good years and bad, like the New York Yankees, or the Dow, and the audience has come to feel something like ownership over it. Just about all viewers of “S.N.L.” believe that its funniest years were the ones when they were in high school. Michaels likes to say that people in the entertainment business have two jobs: their actual job and figuring out how to fix “S.N.L.” (When J. D. Salinger died, in 2010, letters surfaced in which even he griped about what was wrong with the show.)