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Lorne Michaels Is the Real Star of “Saturday Night Live”: He’s ruled with absolute power for five decades, forever adding to his list of oracular pronouncements—about producing TV, making comedy, and living the good life.

He’s ruled with absolute power for five decades, forever adding to his list of oracular pronouncements—about producing TV, making comedy, and living the good life.

In addition to Richard Pryor, comics including Lily Tomlin, Steve Martin, and Albert Brooks were beguiling club audiences with raw material that rarely made it onto the “Tonight Show.” The common ground was a worldliness about drugs and sex, and skepticism about politics and corporate America. The memo refrained from spelling out his countercultural comedy code, described by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, in “Saturday Night: A Backstage History,” as “knowing drug references, casual profanity, a permissive attitude toward sex, a deep disdain for show-business convention, blistering political satire, and bitter distrust of corporate power.” He understood what a network wanted to hear. “Animal House,” which starred Belushi, brought hordes of new viewers to the show—a frat-boy contingent that Michaels called “the undeserved audience.” In an interview with the Times, Jim Downey, one of the show’s longest-serving head writers, compared its early days to “a children’s crusade; people would camp out here and not think about anything but the show.” Since then, he said, “anyone coming here knows what the formula is: a couple of hit characters, then you get a movie.” There was more jockeying for position.

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