A New Book Gives Lorne Michaels the Founding Father Treatment

LORNE: The Man Who Invented “Saturday Night Live,” by Susan Morrison

Gerald R. Ford, the 38th president of the United States, was a football star at the University of Michigan and, as Susan Morrison puts it in “Lorne,” her new biography of Lorne Michaels, the creator of “Saturday Night Live,” “a man of some physical grace.” If he’s remembered otherwise, as a singularly clumsy occupant of the White House, it’s because his brief administration happened to coincide with the first seasons of the show, in the mid-1970s. On “S.N.L.,” Chevy Chase, a comedian with no special talent for impressions and a knack for pratfalls, played Ford as a man locked in a perpetual losing battle with gravity, crashing through a Christmas tree, a press-conference podium and his Oval Office desk.

Does that count as political satire? Ford and his family are known to have appreciated the joke, and most American presidents since then have at least pretended to laugh along with their “S.N.L.” treatment. Donald Trump has been an exception, but on the other hand he is the only successful presidential candidate ever to have hosted. Answers to the trivia question implied in the last sentence include George McGovern, Jesse Jackson, Steve Forbes and John McCain.

For most of its 50-year existence, “S.N.L.” has walked the fine line between provocation and caution, aiming for a sweet spot of non-bland consensus. It arrived at NBC in the wake of the cultural and social rebellions of the 1960s but attempted from the start to shed both the pop fizziness and the countercultural earnestness of that decade. What made it radical was that — in the words of Michael J. Arlen, The New Yorker’s astute TV critic — it seemed “to speak out of the real, non-show-business world that most people inhabit.”

Through good and bad seasons, Republican and Democratic administrations and countless personnel changes, “S.N.L.” has served as a barometer of comedic normalcy, which is no small achievement. It’s been cool and cynical, surreal and silly, bold enough to make adolescents of all ages feel daring for staying up past 11:30 (or catching up on YouTube the next morning) and safe enough to keep advertisers and network executives happy.

The sketches have refracted the comic sensibilities of hundreds of writers and performers, many of whom have graduated to movie and television stardom. But most of those alums would agree that “S.N.L.” is anchored in the personality of one man: Lorne Michaels.