Will Smith & Co GO NUTS After Jim Carry & Eddie Murphey Said This
Reading Maddie Levine’s article about comedy superstar Adam Sandler coming to Boston brought back memories of my friendly dust-up with the world-famous actor and comedian.
A group of us talk show hosts at the Talk America Radio Network and our spouses were treated to a taping of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Standard operating procedure was to have a warm-up act before Leno appears. It just so happened that Adam Sandler was the supporting player that afternoon (NBC taped the show in the afternoon for replay in late night).
It wasn’t long after Sandler appeared that my good-natured scoffs and hollers began – which gave him reason to return the sentiments.
“Hey, what you are you trying to do? Take away my job?” yelled Sandler. “Where are you from?”
“Boston,” I yelled back.
“Oh, you’re one of those chowderheads,” he replied. At the time, I thought Sandler was making a regional food reference, but no – a chowderhead is a doofus!
“So, Boston, think you can do my job better than me?” he asked.
The audience roared into a cacophony of sneering, laughter and lampooning, while Sandler, holding a stack of Tonight Show frisbees, flung one perfectly over the reach of the audience, and like a hovercraft, it lowered to me. The audience went nuts!
Then Sandler ran up from the stage, shook my hand and autographed the frisbee. He was genuinely warm-hearted, where he’ll always have a special place.
From his early days with Saturday Night Live to his acting and filmmaking, Sandler’s funny and charming personality has made movie-lovers and chowderheads alike be taken by him.
Sandler, after a three-year intermission, brings his tour to the new MGM Music Hall at Fenway on October 23 and Mohegan Sun on Oct 29. Tickets go on sale this Friday, September 16.
‘Saturday Night Live”s Original Cast: Where Are They Now?
What’s happened since that first episode in October 1975?
Dan Aykroyd
Warner Bros. / Mike Coppola, Getty Images
Dan Aykroyd
In his early 20s when hired on as one of the original Not Ready For Prime Time Players (and a member of the writing staff), Canadian prodigy Dan Aykroyd broke through by virtue of technical precision and singular originality. Frequent host and friend of SNL Eric Idle once opined that Aykroyd was the only cast member who could have been in Monty Python because of the young Aykroyd’s versatile ability to both create and perform offbeat characters that no one but he could have thought up. Indeed, as seen in Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s seminal book about the early days of the show, Saturday Night, the collective sentiment in the writers’ room was that no one, even in that hypercompetitive environment, could be jealous of Aykroyd’s successes, since nobody else could have come up with them. Aykroyd’s eccentric energy meshed immediately with John Belushi’s equally exuberant (if more anarchic) sensibilities, with the two forming an inseparable team, both onstage and off. Meanwhile, Aykroyd left audiences’ jaws on the floor with sketches as varied as his manic, staccato pitchmen (one memorably dropping whole fish into a waiting blender), the doomed and ranting Richard Nixon and all manner of outsized but meticulously observed sleazeballs, such as noted huckster Irwin Mainway (the marketer of children’s Halloween costumes such as “Invisible Pedestrian.”) He and Belushi also teamed to create what became an unlikely runaway success as the Chicago blues-playing Blues Brothers, all while the prolific Aykroyd filled countless legal pads with scripts and ideas for their post-Saturday Night Live career.
After he and Belushi left Saturday Night Live together after the show’s fourth season to film the Aykroyd-penned Blues Brothers movie, it seemed as if their partnership would spin out a matched career’s worth of projects. Their follow-up film, the against-type black comedy Neighbors, flopped, but it was an ambitious flop, and the industrious Aykroyd had many more team-ups plotted out before Belushi’s overdose death in 1982. Akyroyd, whose bond with Belushi never extended to Belushi’s use of hard drugs, plowed ahead with smash comedy hits like Trading Places, Dragnet and Ghostbusters, while less fruitfully expanding his outre comic premises into feature-length oddities like the grotesquely offputting passion project black comedy Nothing but Trouble. Along the way, Aykroyd also proved himself a capable character actor in Hollywood, even scoring an Oscar nomination in Best Picture winner Driving Miss Daisy, and becoming an entrepreneur, opening the House of Blues music venues and producing a brand of vodka, which, in keeping with Aykroyd’s long and storied belief in the supernatural, is bottled in a crystal human skull. Long married to his Doctor Detroit co-star Donna Dixon (the couple separated in 2022), the 70-year-old Aykroyd lives in Ontario, Canada.
Chevy Chase
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Chevy Chase
The undisputed breakout star of Saturday Night Live’s first season, lanky, handsome Chevy Chase was never even technically a cast member on the show. Originally hired as a writer, Chase’s quick wit and nimble pratfalls quickly made him a Lore Michaels favorite, but Chase resisted signing a performer’s contract and was paid on a per-show basis on his first and only year as a Not Ready for Prime Time Player. Chase had plenty going for him in becoming the initial season’s star, from his memorable name to his one-person showcase as anchor of SNL’s fake news segment “Weekend Update,” to his fearlessness as a physical comedian. (Chase’s show-opening falls resulted in several injuries, including a pair of bruised testicles that caused him to miss several shows.) Meanwhile, Chase had a similarly intrepid manner in front of SNL’s live cameras, an ability to stare down an audience that helped steady the young show’s rocky first episodes. Breaking out with his stumblebum impression of then-president Gerald Ford, Chevy Chase was always Chevy Chase, his turn as the klutzy, dimwitted Ford so superseding the actual president in the public consciousness that Ford himself unsuccessfully attempted to steal focus back, appearing in several pre-taped segments on the show and inviting Chase to impersonate him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. After parlaying his popularity into a lucrative deal with NBC for solo comedy specials after his first season, Chase appeared in only the first few episodes of Season 2, with Michaels reportedly stunned that his most trusted confidante and biggest star would strike out on his own.
After Saturday Night Live, Chase, indeed, rocketed to enormous success — for a time. Alternating big hits (Foul Play, Caddyshack, the National Lampoon’s Vacation series, Fletch, the Michaels-penned Three Amigos!) with increasingly spotty misses (Oh! Heavenly Dog, Under the Rainbow, Modern Problems), Chase’s star gradually waned until he was considered something of a Hollywood punching bag. (An infamous, sparsely attended Comedy Central roast of the humiliated Chase is one of the most uncomfortable viewing experiences ever.) An unlikely career resurgence came when, in 2009, Dan Harmon cast Chase in his cult TV series Community as wealthy, elderly college student Pierce Hawthorne, whose prickly, semi-lovable egomania served as both Chase’s final good role to date, and a canny encapsulation of Chase’s reputation as, well, a prickly, semilovable egomaniac. When Chase, unsatisfied with the one decent role he’d had in decades, acrimoniously left the show, it felt only fitting for a brilliant but difficult comic performer seemingly predisposed to shoot himself in the foot.
Jane Curtin
NBC / Nicholas Hunt, Getty Images
Jane Curtin
Cool, pretty and respectable-looking, Jane Curtin may have been hired to present a comforting presence amid what was a revolutionary, risky and ragtag venture in Saturday Night Live. But the talented and formidable Curtin was nobody’s straight-woman, her skills as a character actor and her increasing fearlessness in sketches marking her out as one of the show’s stealthiest comedy weapons. When called upon to play it straight opposite one of her cast members’ more outrageous characters, Curtin’s unshakeable composure was the wall her castmates’ bounced off of. When riled, finally, to icy disgust, by Belushi’s ranting news commentator or Gilda Radner’s similarly off-topic Emily Litella or Roseanne Roseannadanna, Curtin’s interviewers, talk show hosts and “Weekend Update” anchors soared with imperious dudgeon. In her point-counterpoint debates with co-anchor Dan Aykroyd, Curtin gave as good as she got, responding to faux-conservative Aykroyd’s catchphrase opener, “Jane, you ignorant slut” with unruffled contempt and vicious comebacks. And, when given broader material to work with, the outwardly placid Curtin could throw down with the wildest of them, her emergence as the hard-bitten barfly Iris de Flaminio or Coneheads matriarch Prymaat all the more effective from Curtin playing against type. As upright behind the scenes as her characters often were onstage, Curtin was the lone Not Ready for Prime Time Player not swayed by growing fame and its attendant excesses, routinely calling out John Belushi for his atavistic “women aren’t funny” chauvinism and the pervasive boys’ club mentality of early SNL.
Curtin’s lower-wattage stardom might not have suggested a major movie career like most of her co-stars, but she quickly established herself as queen of the TV sitcom, with long-running and award-winning stints on shows like Kate & Allie and Third Rock From the Sun. Maintaining the stable personal life she’s shared with her husband (since 1975), Curtin continues to live the good life in Connecticut while being called on by famous comedy admirers to do supporting work in various TV and movie projects.
Garrett Morris
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Garrett Morris
In an infamous “Weekend Update” piece, ascendant ’80s SNL star Eddie Murphy held up a picture of Garrett Morris as an example of the sort of role he refused to be saddled with on the show. Garrett, indeed, had it the roughest of any of the original cast and found himself paying a hefty price. Apart from being significantly older than most of the other Not Ready for Prime Time Players, and not coming from a sketch or improvisational background like them (Morris was an accomplished, Julliard-trained theater and film actor), Morris was the only Black person either in the cast or the early SNL writers room. Out of his element and at the mercy of white writers whose idea of “edgy” often meant “tone deaf,” Morris suffered myriad indignities in his five years on the show. Uncertain what to do with him, writers would put Morris in a dress, or undercut Morris’ soaring performance of a Mozart aria with an onscreen crawl complaining that the writers have no idea what to do with him. Morris got his moments (his Dominican Update commentator and former baseballer Chico Escuela was one of Morris’ few breakout recurring bits), but, more often than not, he was sidelined into menial (if not outright insulting) roles, a situation only exacerbated when he, like several of his castmates, increasingly succumbed to backstage drug abuse. As a performer, there’s a looseness to Morris that works against the tightly timed, no-mistakes necessities of a show like Saturday Night Live, and that, coupled with the cultural blind spots riddling the show, left Garrett on the margins.
After Saturday Night Live, Morris became a busy character actor in television shows like 2 Broke Girls, The Jamie Foxx Show, Martin and others, while turning up on the big screen supporting everyone from Hulk Hogan to Ice Cube (with a pair of fine dramatic turns in two films from indie directors the Polish Brothers, Jackpot and Twin Falls Idaho). Recovering from the drug problems that Hill and Weingrad chillingly document in their book, Morris also survived a life-threatening gunshot wound in a 1994 mugging. Still working at age 85, Morris obliquely responded to Murphy’s long-ago mockery in the SNL oral history tome Live From New York, saying of his time at Saturday Night Live, “I had five years of building what everybody knows is a chair there, the only nonwhite chair in that whole thing, and I shed the blood for that.”
Laraine Newman
NBC / Jerod Harris, Getty Images
Laraine Newman
Just 23 when Saturday Night Live premiered, Los Angeles-born Laraine Newman had already studied mime with Marcel Marceau, helped found legendary improv troupe the Groundlings and appeared in a Lorne Michaels-produced Lily Tomlin TV special, co-written by Michaels. With her wisp-thin frame and frizzy hair, Newman threw herself into creating as many disparate and striking characters as possible, eschewing the fan favorite recurring bits that quickly became other castmates’ bread and butter. Newman was a bold but stumble-prone live performer, something that gradually estranged her from some writers, while her ability to play everything from strait-laced news reporters and vapid sexpots to the Coneheads’ assimilated and oversexed teen daughter Connie and terrifyingly strange cult members (and The Exorcist’s possessed Regan MacNeil) never clicked with audiences the way her friend and perpetually rival for characters and screen time Gilda Radner did. As good as Newman was at channeling some of the counterculture types SNL relied upon, Newman also developed debilitating drug and eating disorder issues, which further shunted her, alongside Garret Morris, to the sidelines, as their increasing instability made putting either on live TV a perilous proposition.
After Saturday Night Live, Newman took her shot at Hollywood stardom, but her would-be breakout film as leading lady to Dudley Moore in biblical comedy Wholly Moses tanked. Dealing with chemical dependency and mental health issues until getting sober in the late ’80s, Newman appeared in supporting parts in films like Problem Child 2 (playing the villain), and here and there on TV shows from Amazing Stories to St. Elsewhere. It was in voice acting that Newman truly found her most consistent success, starting in the ’90s with The Tick and Rugrats, and continuing to the present day in major animated films for Pixar and elsewhere, amassing over 200 credits to date. She is the mother of Hacks star Hannah Einbinder, and, in 2021, published an audiobook memoir fittingly titled, May You Live in Interesting Times.
Bill Murray
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Bill Murray
Initially passed over for the show’s original cast despite coming from the same comedy circles as Belushi and the National Lampoon contingent, Lorne Michaels saw the rough-around-the-edges young Murray as, well, not being ready for prime time. Being brought in after Chevy Chase’s abrupt departure did nothing to disabuse Michaels (or fans) of that notion, as in Season 2 Bill Murray was jittery and uncertain on camera, frequently blowing lines and seemingly destined for the sidelines. Even Michaels helping pen a funny midseason direct appeal for audience sympathy and patience called “The New Guy” didn’t help, until Murray, pitching an idea centered on a microphone-shaped bar of soap, showed America the real Bill Murray. The “Shower Mic” sketch was Murray, as a husband psyching himself up for his day with a bathroom singalong shmooze-fest, was an immediate favorite, and segued into the showboating, indefatigably smarmy lounge singer that quickly became Murray’s most recognizable character. Once Belushi and Aykroyd left for Hollywood, the show was Murray’s to take, and he seized it, plying his signature brand of winking, wiseass charisma to even greater stardom. A notably rambunctious (and, in retrospect, problematic) backstage drinker and brawler (he and Chevy Chase infamously came to blows when Chase returned to host the show), Murray’s comic energy was as exhilarating as it was infectious — and a little dangerous. A big-screen role playing notorious gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson saw Murray return for the show’s fifth season still channeling Thompson’s acerbic and destructive manner. (The film, Where the Buffalo Roam, bombed, Thompson hated it and Murray returned to earth with only memories of the time Thompson almost drowned him in a drunken swimming-pool prank.)
After Saturday Night Live, Murray embarked upon a still-active career as a leading man as successful as it’s been ambitious. After a series of huge hits (Stripes, Caddyshack, Ghostbusters), Murray leveraged his star power into a role as protagonist Larry Darrell in an adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, which Murray co-scripted. The unexpected swerve into drama threw fans and critics alike, although Murray’s nascent dramatic chops later came to become as renowned as his comic ones, with directors like Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola and Jim Jarmusch employing Murray’s inimitable gift for deceptively affecting deadpan to award-winning acclaim. The Harold Ramis-directed classic Groundhog Day is perhaps the finest showcase for both sides of Murray’s talents, the magical tale of a self-centered jerk learning about the true fullness of experience a parallel for Murray’s career-long, unbending quest for artistic excellence. Unfortunately, Murray’s restlessness has come yoked to an irascible persona that’s dogged his career with news of on-set feuds, estrangements (a Groundhog Day blowup between Murray and onetime best friend Harold Ramis saw them not speak until Ramis was on his deathbed in 2014) and questionable personal judgment, with the recent Aziz Ansari-directed Being Mortal currently shut down after Murray admitted to “inappropriate behavior.”
John Belushi
Richard E. Aaron, Getty Images
John Belushi
Lorne Michaels was hesitant about adding John Belushi to his fledgling show’s cast, which seems crazy in retrospect. Already a standout at Chicago’s Second City and National Lampoon’s Lemmings and Radio Hour, the boisterous and charismatic Belushi offered infinite possibilities for a late-night sketch show determined to shake up television. But, as Belushi’s obstreperous initial meeting with Michaels (in which Belushi sneered that his own TV was covered in spit) demonstrated, Belushi was as strong-willed and unpredictable as he was undeniably talented. Less wary fans like the already-hired Gilda Radner prevailed, however, and Belushi, after a first season where he was overshadowed by immediate fan favorite Chevy Chase, exploded as SNL’s guaranteed scene-stealer and star. A committed (if unpolished) blues singer as well as comic actor, Belushi hurled himself into Saturday Night Live stardom with a rock star’s gusto, establishing his brand as the stoned, uncontrollable wild man of TV, a role he took to big-screen success as ultimate frat-boy party animal Bluto in John Landis’ 1978 comedy hit Animal House. Behind the scenes, Belushi was as much of a hassle as Michaels had feared, his increasing drug use only exacerbating Belushi’s brash and sometimes abusive behavior toward his castmates and writers. Still, before he and Aykroyd departed after SNL’s fourth season, Belushi was the show’s irresistible focus-puller, whether belting out Chicago blues alongside Aykroyd as the sharp-suited Blues Brothers in manic precision or barreling around the stages of 8H as everyone from a Toshiro Mifune-esque samurai, to a snuff-sniffing Beethoven, to Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, his contained and spot-on William Shatner showing that, despite what legions of hooting fans might think, John Belushi had levels.
After Saturday Night Live, Belushi and Aykroyd starred in a blockbuster Blues Brothers film, running alongside a shockingly successful musical career, with the Blues Brothers (backed by a stellar band handpicked by Belushi, Aykroyd and SNL musical arranger Paul Shaffer) selling millions of albums and selling out massive concert venues across the country. Belushi’s career stumbled after the bewildered reception to the duo’s follow-up, Neighbors, while his solo turn in the Chicago-set romantic comedy Continental Divide similarly puzzled audiences looking for the Belushi wild man of old. Still, these films hinted at Belushi’s ambition as an actor (his Mike Royko-patterned Chicago newsman in Continental Divide remains an underrated character turn), and only his death at the young age of 33 kept Belushi from further expanding as a performer. Now recalled as a cautionary tale as much as for his role in making Saturday Night Live the cultural juggernaut it became, Belushi’s struggles with addiction culminated in a 1982 overdose death at L.A.’s Chateau Marmont, the seemingly indestructible comic’s passing a bracing wake-up call to many in his wide and loving circle of famous friends. (Bob Woodward’s tell-all biography of Belushi, Wired, and the subsequent feature film starring Michael Chiklis were both lambasted for sensationalism by Aykroyd and others.) SNL filmmaker Tom Schiller’s 1978 short “Don’t Look Back in Anger” remains the most rueful epitaph, as an elderly Belushi somberly reminisces about the fates of his deceased Not Ready for Prime Time Players, and finally, after raising a famously mischievous eyebrow, doing a gleeful dance on their graves.
Gilda Radner
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Gilda Radner
There may have been more talented performers in Saturday Night Live’s long history, but none as adored as Gilda Radner. Having met Lorne Michaels during her time in Canada (as part of the now-legendary Godspell production that also starred Eugene Levy, Victor Garber, Andrea Martin, Martin Short and Paul Shaffer), Radner was Michaels’ first cast hire for his new show and almost immediately emerged as a fan favorite. An irresistible mix of broadness and sweetness, Radner turned out guaranteed laugh-getters like the grossly discursive news commentator Roseanne Roseannadanna and the hearing-impaired little old lady Emily Litella, whose response to “Update” anchor Jane Curtin’s exasperated lectures was a primly hilarious, “Bitch.” “Nerd” Lisa Loopner was Radner’s way of turning her real-life tumultuous relationship with Bill Murray into outrageous laughs, Murray’s handsy and inappropriate Todd alternately pawing at and making fun of his would-be girlfriend. Gilda went huge when belting out punk anthems as the Patti-Smith-inspired rocker Candy Slice, and came out as herself in segments where, for example, she told her mother not to worry about watching that night’s show, since she didn’t have much to do. She and Belushi worked well together, too, with the tiny Radner often being hurled around the set, caught up in Belushi’s comic whirlwind. (Radner once wrote an inscription, “In loving memory of John Belushi, who can hit me without hurting me, and who can hurt me without hitting me.”) Largely free from the drug issues that plagued others at SNL, Radner’s struggles were, instead, with bulimia and heartbreak, her time on the show seeing her enter into ill-fated relationships with both Murray and Aykroyd, and eventually a short-lived marriage to SNL bandleader G.E. Smith. Still, for those first five years, Radner was everyone’s unquestioned sweetheart, her seeming fragility at hilarious odds with characters like her hyperactive pre-teen Judy Miller, whose lonely but boundless imagination invariably saw Radner crashing into the walls.
After Saturday Night Live, Radner’s lack of show business success is the most puzzling of all. Unsuccessfully once courted by then-NBC president Fred Silverman for an all-Radner prime-time variety show (which would have stolen her away from Michaels and SNL), Radner was often compared to Lucille Ball in her uncanny and undeniable rapport with audiences and her comic fearlessness. A Michaels-produced Broadway showcase, Gilda Live!, premiered between seasons 4 and 5 of Saturday Night Live, and garnered affectionate, if not glowing reviews, with the resulting theatrical film version flopping badly. Whether shoehorned into unsuitable projects or lost amidst scripts unable to recognize her unique gifts, Radner’s subsequent film career was a series of disappointments, even when she teamed with her second husband Gene Wilder in three underwhelming films (Hanky Panky, Haunted Honeymoon and The Woman in Red). Radner’s career was irrevocably derailed by her diagnosis of ovarian cancer in 1986. Becoming an inspirational and influential figure in the cancer survivor community saw Radner raising awareness, providing support by opening a network of “Gilda’s Clubs” for cancer patients and their families, and eventually writing a memoir about her ongoing battle, its title, It’s Always Something, taken from Roseanne Roseannadanna’s beleaguered catchphrase. With Wilder at her side, Gilda Radner died on May 20, 1989.
Michael O’Donoghue
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Michael O’Donoghue
While never a full cast member, or even a listed featured player, there was nobody more influential in Saturday Night Live’s early years than Michael O’Donoghue. Hired, along with many of the show’s early stars, from successful comedy precursor National Lampoon, O’Donoghue was infamous, even in that button-pushing comic institution, for being the most brilliant, volatile and uncompromising writer in any room. A job on network television, with its Standard and Practices, wary sponsors and tight, changeable schedules might seem like a recipe for disaster — and it was, even if, before O’Donoghue acrimoniously quit the show in the third season, he made his indelible mark. Appearing on the very first sketch broadcast on SNL (he’s John Belushi’s strait-laced language teacher who dies midsession in “The Wolverines”), O’Donoghue’s penchant for dark, death-centric humor shone through, especially in his initially frequent appearances as the ominously shades-wearing Mr. Mike, who would regale audiences with “Least-Loved Bedtime Tales,” whose decidedly un-fairytale endings Mr. Mike would sum up, as he did in one graphically revisionist story about Brer Rabbit, “There’s no moral … just random acts of meaningless violence.”
After leaving Saturday Night Live, Michael O’Donoghue … came back to Saturday Night Live. Even after ripping Michaels and SNL to shreds in the wake of his first departure, O’Donoghue still turned to Michaels for help producing what would become Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video, a 1979 proposed NBC comedy special highlighting Mr. Mike’s more unfiltered, deliberately offputting and frequently hilarious mind. NBC, seeing O’Donoghue’s blackly satirical take on the exploitation “mondo” movies of the time (complete with bare breasts, Dan Aykroyd’s actual webbed toes and performances by Klaus Nomi and Sid Vicious), rejected it, and O’Dononghue (being O’Donoghue) lambasted Michaels, even as his former friend wound up losing hundreds of thousands of dollars on their partnership. After Michaels left alongside essentially everyone associated with the show after SNL’s fifth season, O’Donoghue, to everyone’s surprise, returned as a head writer under show co-creator and new producer Dick Ebersol. After the truncated debacle that was the Jean Doumanian-helmed sixth season, Ebersol was looking to rebound with some continuity to the good old days — and Michaels recommended Mr. Mike, a move that, predictably, exploded in Ebersol’s face. Introducing himself to the sheepishly assembled remnants of Doumanian’s cast and writers with a crate of spray paint and magic markers, O’Donoghue ordered all to graffiti the SNL offices in search of “DANGER,” as Mr. Mike himself scrawled in bright letters. (O’Donoghue’s theatrics immediately cost them a guaranteed star when SCTV’s Catherine O’Hara, appalled by the stunt, fled back to Canada.) O’Donoghue’s second stint was a glorious disaster, with him chafing even more under the buttoned-down Ebersol, and his even stranger and darker concepts being watered down or outright rejected. Still, we did get “At Home With the Psychos,” where a mutated family living next to a leaky nuclear plant plans for the evolution of their “blowholes,” a prop so obviously a pulsating head-mounted vagina that there was no way it would make it to air. Another elaborate sketch comparing the ratings-plummeting NBC to the fall of the Third Reich (and then-president Fred Silverman as Hitler) predictably never made it to air. After being fired (not a mutual parting, as O’Donoghue infamously wrote in a public, pithily profane farewell letter), O’Donoghue unsuccessfully wrote films in Hollywood (his never-made script of a 1950s-style sci-fi parody is infamously, if allegedly, similar to the titular segment from 1987’s subsequent sketch film Amazon Women on the Moon), and popping up in small theatrical roles, including a brief scene in Woody Allen’s Manhattan. Co-writing the now-beloved A Christmas Carol update Scrooged (starring Bill Murray) should have been a windfall, but O’Donoghue, being O’Donoghue, savaged the finished film, not inaccurately decrying the saccharine way his much darker script had been changed. O’Donoghue returned to work for the returned Michaels at SNL again in 1985, but, after hardly getting anything on the air, Mr. Mike left for the last time midway through the season, giving an interview where he said watching present-day SNL “is like watching old men die.” A lifelong victim of crippling migraine headaches, the mercurial O’Donoghue died from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1994, at the age of 54, with the subsequent wake featuring MRIs of O’Donoghue’s post-hemorrhage brain, vicious roasting of Michaels and Chevy Chase, and other such pitch-dark touches. Mr. Mike, no doubt, would be proud.
