5 Things We Learned About 'SNL' From Marc Maron's Interview With Lorne Michaels

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Longtime listeners of Marc Maron’s blockbuster podcast, WTF with Marc Maron, know that the host has a few obsessions in life: his eating habits, his cats, his guitars…and Lorne Michaels. The Saturday Night Live guru has loomed large in Maron’s life, ever since a disastrous meeting in 1995 that spiked any hopes the then-struggling comic had of joining the show. And even though Maron is enjoying the success that comes with having a hit podcast, a cult TV series (IFC’s Maron) and a steady stand-up career, he still hasn’t been able to let go of his brush with Michaels. In fact, whenever he’s welcomed a current or former Not Ready for Primetime Player into this garage/recording studio (past guests have included Jason Sudeikis, Amy Poehler and Kenan Thompson), he has to spend at least a few minutes — and, oftentimes, a lot more — reliving his failed audition and his complicated feelings about the SNL Svengali.

After today, though, it appears that Maron’s gonna have to find a new obsession. The Monday following Donald Trump’s controversial hosting stint awarded SNL its highest ratings in four seasons, the host released an episode many listeners — including Maron himself — assumed would never happened: a one-on-one conversation with Lorne Michaels. Recorded over two nights in mid-October while the SNL cast and crew were prepping for the Amy Schumer-hosted episode (that timing is why the subject of Trump never comes up), this plus-sized WTF conversation is the wide-ranging, soul-cleansing chat fans hoped it would be, touching on that legendary first season of SNL as well as Michael’s own early years as a writer and performer.

Direct as ever, Maron doesn’t wait to bring up the infamous 1995 incident: right off the top, he asks Michaels about their past meeting and learns that the real reason he didn’t land the job at the time wasn’t due to any personality clash — just a simple case of him not being the right fit at the time. By the end of the podcast, Maron sounds at peace with that explanation and with the man who he spent so many years obsessing over. “Lorne Michaels is a good guy,” he remarks as the episode draws to a close. “He has a job, he loves his job and he’s been doing it 35 years. He loves what he’s doing and is totally engaged with his work.” So that’s Maron’s primary takeaway from a conversation two decades in the making. Here are the five things that we learned.

Lily Tomlin is the Reason SNL Exists
Long, long ago (specifically 1973) in a town far, far away (Los Angeles), Lorne Michaels was a young Canadian comedian trying to break into show business on this side of the border. Although he’d landed writing stints on variety shows like The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show and Laugh-In, his career was a gig-to-gig situation that was steadily wearing him down. By the early ‘70s, we was seriously weighing a return to his home and native land, until Laugh-In cast member and rising star, Lily Tomlin, invited him out for coffee. “She was a kindred spirit, and braver than I was,” Michaels tells Maron.

At the time, Tomlin had booked a TV special with CBS and was looking to assemble a crew. She enjoyed the material that Michaels had written for his various projects in America and Canada and brought him aboard, giving him his first producer credit on American television. That special, Lily, went on to win two Emmy awards the following year, and having that credit on his resume gave him instant credibility…the kind of credibility that made NBC feel a little less nervous about handing him their Saturday-at-11:30 p.m. timeslot and letting him run with it. (Tomlin also introduced Michaels to Richard Pryor, who memorably hosted the seventh episode of SNL’s first season. Meanwhile, Tolmin herself hosted that season’s sixth episode, as well as the Season 2 premiere.) Says Michaels, “I’ve thanked Lily for that many times.”

Steve Martin Changed SNL Forever
The first season of Saturday Night Live is deservedly celebrated for establishing an institution that continues to this day. According to Michaels, though, the show likely wouldn’t have lasted had he not learned a key lesson in Season 2. The network had been pushing him to book superstar comic, Steve Martin, as a host, something that Michaels had strenuously resisted. “What he was doing was so different than what we were doing,” he says. “We were starting to take ourselves a little seriously.” That seriousness directly contrasted with Martin’s penchant for making balloon animals onstage or trying out wacky voices and characters.

Finally, Michaels relented and Martin made his hosting debut Oct. 23, 1976, and ratings shot the roof. “[Steve] changed the show,” Michaels explains, matter-of-factly. “That, in a certain sense, was the first real big reinvention after the first season. It was another kind of sensibility.” Martin went on to become a frequent SNL host — 15 shows in total, the all-time record until Alec Baldwin hit number 16 in 2011 — and opened the door for the broad mix of comic stylings that define the show today.

Michaels Can’t Take the Credit for Eddie Murphy
In the wake of Michaels’ departure from Saturday Night Live in 1980, the struggling show was searching for a savior and found one in the form of then-19-year-old, Eddie Murphy. Over the years, many have said — and Michaels agrees — that Murphy is probably the biggest star to ever come out of Studio 8H. “There’s a thing you learn [doing this show]: if the audience loves someone…they’ll show up and follow them anywhere.” At the same time, he acknowledges that a performer can also lose that audience over time if they don’t put in the proper career maintenance. Without mentioning Murphy directly (although Maron makes the connection for him) he points out that if a star “makes six movies in a row where they don’t bring the thing the audience loves them for…it sends a signal that what they love you for here [at SNL] doesn’t much matter to you anymore. They may feel like they made a mistake.” Not to put words in his mouth, but “mistake” is certainly an appropriate word to describe Norbit. Or Meet Dave. Or Vampire in Brooklyn. Or…well, you get the idea.

Michaels First Sat in The Tonight Show Studio Five Decades Ago
Before Jimmy Fallon, Conan O’Brien, Jay Leno (twice) and Johnny Carson, NBC’s late night staple, The Tonight Show, was anchored by Jack Paar from 1957 to 1962. And Paar taped his show in the very same 30 Rock studio that Fallon currently calls home. Michaels knows this because he was in that studio as an audience member back in the early ‘60s. During a December trip to New York, he secured tickets to a taping thanks to an actress friend who happened to be dating Dick Cavett. “I went into what is now Jimmy’s studio,” Michaels remembers. “Betty White was a guest. Coming by the skating rink and the Christmas tree and coming into that building [inspired] pretty much the same [feeling] for me now as then.” Recapturing that feeling was one of the primary reasons he decided to move The Tonight Show back from L.A. to New York when he took over the show as the executive producer. Of course, Paar’s old digs did require some refurbishing by then, a multi-year construction project that Michaels describes as “magical.”

Don Pardo’s Death Was a Wake-Up Call
When Michaels received word that longtime Saturday Night Live announcer Don Pardo died in 2014, the loss finally motivated him to say “Yes,” to a project he’d been resisting committing to: a special commemorating SNL’s milestone 40th anniversary. “Don had retired a couple times [before his death], and I said that was unacceptable,” Michaels remembers, adding that even after Pardo moved to Tucson, Arizona, they continued to record his voice remotely. “[I realized] that if I don’t do this 40th show, this will be the last time that the founding generation [of SNL] will all be there.” And any lingering resistance vanished when SNL 40 aired live in primetime on Feb. 15. “I doubt I’ll do another one, but it was an amazing night. Watching all the people who created and built the show working together and also being the audience for each other was as close to perfect as I was going to get. You realize, in the cliché sense, that it’s a family.”

WTF with Marc Maron is available for download here. Saturday Night Live airs at 11:35 p.m. on NBC.