Book excerpt: “Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live”

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“Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live,” by New Yorker articles editor Susan Morrison (to be published February 18 by Random House), is a biography of late-night comedy producer Lorne Michaels, who has guided “Saturday Night Live” for most of its 50 years. But it is also the history of a pop culture institution that has introduced phenomenal comic talents, rewritten the rules of live television, and captured or challenged the zeitgeist for a half-century.

Read the book’s prologue below, and don’t miss Mo Rocca’s report on 50 years of “Saturday Night Live” on “CBS Sunday Morning” February 16!

“Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live”

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Prologue

Every week at Saturday Night Live is just like every other week. Every week is the same because it’s always intense, fueled by insanely hard work, full of triumphs and failures and backstage explosions, and because it’s built around a guest host—Jennifer Lopez or Lizzo or Elon Musk—who often has no idea what they are doing. It has been Lorne Michaels’s job for the last fifty years to make it seem as if they do, and to corral the egos and the talents on his staff into getting the show on the air, live. Since he created the show, in 1975, he has periodically tweaked and fine-tuned it, paying attention to how the cultural winds are drifting. But the formula has essentially remained the same. Michaels compares it to a Snickers bar: viewers 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 years, like the New York Yankees, or the Dow, and the audience has come to feel something like ownership of it. Just about every person who has ever watched SNL believes that its funniest years were the ones when they were in high school. Michaels likes to say that everyone in the entertainment business has two jobs: their actual job and figuring out how to fix SNL. (When J. D. Salinger died, in 2010, letters surfaced in which even he griped about what was wrong with the show.)

The show’s cast members and writers have speculated for years about the secret behind Michaels’s extraordinary tenure. “It’s him and Hitchcock,” John Mulaney says. “No one else has had this kind of longevity.” Half of them believe that Michaels has repeatedly been able to remake the show for a new audience because he’s a once-in-a-lifetime talent, a producer nonpareil. The other half wonders whether Michaels, gnomic and almost comically elusive, is a blank screen onto which they’ve all projected a lifetime of hopes and fears and dark jokes; whether he, like the cramped stages in SNL’s Studio 8H, is just a backdrop for the ever-shifting brilliance of the country’s best comic minds.

     
From “Lorne” by Susan Morrison. Copyright © 2025 by Susan Morrison. Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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“Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live”

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