In honor of SNL's 50th anniversary celebration tonight, I thought I might quickly round up some of my writing on the show. If you find yourself hankering for a break from the glut of otherwise hagiographic coverage floating around right now, please dive on in:

Who’s Afraid of Lorne Michaels?

This is what I mean when I talk about costs. Every year Michaels chose not to hire a person of color, or hired only one, is a year he could have given the world any number of artists on par with the ones he did hire, potentially changing the face of comedy as we know it today. If he couldn’t find any, that’s only because he sits atop a system designed to prevent them from reaching him. The same is true for subversive, form-bending comedians who always seem to be outside the white-bread norm at SNL, even as they make some of its most lauded work. Comedy is full of Sarah Shermans and Bowen Yangs, writers like Celeste Yim and Jack Handey. They’re out there right now, grinding themselves to the bone making weird, funny work for drink tickets or cab fare or nothing at all. SNL’s function—the system’s function—is to keep them there.

Then there are the other costs. If what we’ve heard is true, many people have been hurt by this show. They’ve been tormented and harassed, abused, degraded, made to believe in their own disposability, used up, and tossed aside. And for what—comedy skits? For the Blues Brothers, for Church Lady and Stefon? For David S. Pumpkins? For a hundred or so people to live like royalty? For one man to rule an empire?

This is the question that matters most about SNL, an institution best regarded not as a comedy series but as a machine that makes people famous. For decades, Michaels has masterfully optimized it for this purpose, consolidating vast swaths of cultural production in a relatively small group of people he personally anointed. This is an astonishing achievement and a horrifying one. Whatever you may think of individual celebrities—I certainly admire a few—the phenomenon of celebrity is a grave social ill. To be a star is to lose something essential of yourself, to become divorced and insulated from the world as most people live it; to commit to a life of moral compromise and complicity in fundamentally destructive systems. 

A Long Post About SNL

This is something I talk about a lot with my friends in comedy, who do genuinely wrestle with their ethical duties as workers in an abusive system whose output is often, how do I say this, garbage that everyone involved knows is garbage. I have a few thoughts. The first is that yes, I do generally think that if no one’s getting hurt, nothing’s getting whitewashed, the money’s not coming from Jeffrey Epstein or whoever—yeah, take the job, do whatever, I don’t give a shit. The second is that I don’t think “exposure to larger audiences” is ipso facto a good thing. The longer I write about show business, the more convinced I become that fame is really, really bad. Very few people seem able to gracefully withstand its pressures—that’s not a failing, it’s just a fact. The thing changes people and those changes aren’t always good.

SNL’s a great example of this. The show has a long history of cast members struggling under its spotlight. It also has, frankly, a history of exacerbating those struggles. I can think of a few obvious recent examples but I’ll just point to that John Belushi documentary on Showtime last year. Lorne talks about this one time in 1979 when Belushi had been partying too hard and was in bad shape before a show. His doctor told Lorne there was a 50% chance he’d die if he went on that night. Lorne was out of sympathy for Belushi; he was angry at Belushi. He told the doctor he could live with those odds.

Anatomy Of A Sellout

I don’t know Colin Jost. My understanding of the man is based on his work and the few stories he chose to make public in his memoir. I don’t know if he entered SNL with beliefs, principles, and integrity, only to compromise them bit by bit as he ascended the ranks. Or if he entered as a blank slate, perfectly suited to do whatever the job required because he had nothing to give up.

What I do know is that SNL is designed to extinguish the beliefs, principles, and integrity of its workers, and that Lorne Michaels personally executes this design. This is the unintended message of Jost’s memoir: that you cannot get to his position if you are unwilling to sacrifice your conscience. Late in the book, he describes a series of nettlesome notes from one of the show’s advertisers, Volkswagen. The auto giant repeatedly told him to nix jokes about Hitler and Nazi Germany, afraid they’d remind people of Volkswagen, which was founded in the Third Reich. Jost balked at the idea that anyone would make this connection. Some time later, the Volkswagen emissions scandal came to light. Jost and his colleagues wrote and produced a commercial parody reminding viewers that Volkswagen was founded “on the vision and values of Adolf Hitler.” From his description, it sounds like honest, funny, truth-to-power comedy that told a major corporation to go fuck itself. But NBC was about to close a major ad deal with Volkswagen, “so we were never allowed to air it.”

Jost relates this story with no trace of irony or regret. He does not seem bothered that his sponsor perpetrated massive fraud, that his work lampooning this fraud was censored out of deference to the sponsor, or that his employer continued taking (and paying him with) the sponsor’s money after its fraud came to light. He concludes with a joke: “All that said, I’ve heard the 2020 Volkswagen Jetta is remarkably fuel-efficient. And it was just rated ‘Best in its Class’ by JD White Power and Associates.”

The Horatio Sanz Lawsuit Is an Explosive Story About SNL, NBC, and Jimmy Fallon

I am obviously a vocal critic of SNL. While I would love to see what litigation reveals about it, I have to imagine that a settlement is much more preferable to the plaintiff than years of painful, public legal proceedings. Should the case go away quietly, it will fall to the rest of us—comedy fans, comedy workers, comedy journalists—to make sure it does not go forgotten. It is all too common in this line of criticism to encounter people, even serious people, who respond that SNL is just a comedy show, it doesn't matter, don't take it too seriously. I have been trying for several years now to shift the popular conceptualization of SNL from "comedy show" to "comedy workplace." This is an almost 50-year-old machine that determines who gets to be rich, famous, and powerful for the rest of their lives. For almost its entire existence it has been run unilaterally by the same person. For decades its employees and former employees have been telling us what a nightmarish hellhole it is. Some have openly admitted the abuse that goes on there, like in the 2008 oral history where Jim Downey and Mike Shoemaker—both on staff when Sanz allegedly groomed a teenager—amusedly described Chris Farley sexually harassing women, which they said wasn't actually sexual harassment because he didn't mean it that way.

It's easy to forget that most of what we know about abuse in Hollywood has come from people who took the Herculean risk of going public, whose stories rarely even get reported if they do not involve numerous survivors alleging undeniably monstrous conduct. This should give us a sense of how little we actually hear. Once we force ourselves to stop measuring SNL by its entertainment value and start centering its function as a workplace, things suddenly get very scary. We're talking about an abuse factory with almost 50 years of untold horror stories involving waitresses, extras, interns, teenage fans—powerless, vulnerable people with no one looking out for them in a world before social media could amplify their voices. The question we have to ask now is the same question we've always had to ask in the wake of these revelations. What else don't we know?

A Look Back at Tracy Morgan's SNL Sex Parties

I'm sharing these passages because they provide important context for the Horatio Sanz lawsuit, which SNL has left unacknowledged even as it trotted out one of its new stars to joke about trumped-up sexual harassment claims. (Sanz’s lawyer, Andrew Brettler, who also represents Prince Andrew, Danny Masterson, and Armie Hammer, called Jane Doe’s allegations “ludicrous.”) To put too fine a point on it: during the period in which Horatio Sanz allegedly abused Jane Doe for his own sexual gratification at an afterparty thrown by Tracy Morgan, Tracy Morgan is widely known to have thrown afterparties that deliberately catered to men seeking sexual gratification, including Horatio Sanz, who stayed at at least one such party until after the sun rose.

Horatio Sanz Used to Call His Fans "Horatio's Kidz" and Solicit Feet Pics on Twitter

[A former FalPal writes in:] A big chunk of that original fanbase drifted away from Jimmy as we got older and realized it wasn't actually that good. But a large percentage of his fanbase today is still really young, and what can only be described as thirsty. It is extremely weird.

As for SNL—you know as well as I do that they've been getting the "it's not as good as it used to be" response for actual decades at this point. But it still has way more power than people realize. Their dedicated fans are fucking insane. They know it, and they love that power. The ticket system is one of the dumbest and most degrading processes I'm aware of, but they keep it because they know people eat it up. I entered the ticket lottery for years and when I finally won, they emailed me on a Wednesday to give me tickets for the show that Saturday. I was an unemployed college kid in [redacted Southern state] at the time and booked a trip that day, along with my +1 who lived in [redacted other Southern state] and did the same thing. We knew we'd never get that chance again. SNL knows they have that mystical image, and they've used it to their gain this whole time.

A Few Thoughts About Laughter

I think he’s right that laughs are a clear indicator, but it seems to me that what they indicate is how untrustworthy they are. I would hope that everyone involved in the Pesci monologue has the perspective now to recognize, how do I say this politely, that it was wrong. The joke may have been honest, but it was certainly not true. What it tells us three decades later is that laughter can be a form of mass revelation as surely as it can be a form of mass delusion. People laugh at the truth; they also laugh at lies they believe in. Dave Chappelle famously quit comedy over this realization years ago, which, oh well.

It’s often said that comedy ages poorly. I wonder if this is because so much comedy plays to its era’s basest instincts, naive or willfully blind to the fact that we don’t live at the end of history. If popular approval is your avatar for truth—if instant gratification is what you're really after—then you can only ever speak to the audience right in front of you, the one future audiences will look back at the same way we look back at Joe Pesci's. The pursuit of truth, I think, requires the humility to accept that it's hardly so easily found.

How SNL Spends Its Money

Then there are the show's expense ledgers, which contain thousands and thousands of entries. Most are pretty much what you'd expect: payroll, office supplies, rights and licensing fees, cabs, wardrobe costs, props, and so on. This is a TV show, after all. At the same time, hidden among these mundane line items are occasional reminders that this isn't just a TV show. It's a Hollywood powerhouse, an elite social club designed to dole out patronages and keep its beneficiaries happy. Consider a small sampling (and note that dates refer to when payments were processed, not when they were made):

November 7, 2018: "Pete Davidson massage"

November 14 and 20, 2018: "Charter jet- Dan Crenshaw" and "Dan Crenshaw hotel" (the GOP Congressman appeared on the 11/10/2018 episode so Pete Davidson could apologize for making fun of him the previous week; SNL put Crenshaw up at the Four Seasons.)

February 7, 2019: "snl swag for host" purchased at the NBC gift shop (lol)

October 2, 2019: "Larry David private plane"

November 3, 2019: "Helicopter- Alec Baldwin"

November 20, 2019: "Charter plane- Alec Baldwin"

December 23, 2019: "Jet travel- Larry David/Maya Rudolph"

Similarly, on January 15, 2020: "Larry David/Maya Rudolph jet" and "David/Rudolph jet catering" (presumably these are all related to their appearances in the 12/21/19 cold open)

December 2, 2019, January 1, 2020, and March 24, 2020: "Meal penalty," "Extra meal penalty," and "Salad meal penalty," respectively, indicating that the production failed to provide union-mandated meal breaks.

I'm still working my way through all these files, but for now I'll make one last observation: they really hammer home how much of Lorne Michaels' life is intertwined with this show. Dinners at fancy restaurants, stays at luxurious hotels, private jet travel (the "producers travel" section of the season 44 budget contains a row for "LM jets," plural), Yankees tickets, liquor, endless meals and drinks with "clients," laundry, dry cleaning, errands, wine glasses, ear buds, an Amazon Prime subscription—SNL pays for it all.

Lorne Michaels Doesn't Want to Talk About How Powerful He Is

One of the greatest privileges power affords is the freedom to dictate your own public image. Not even Donald Trump had this freedom, though he desperately sought it, and for a time, Lorne Michaels was happy to indulge him. Perhaps this is the source of Lorne Michaels' strange perennial freedom from scrutiny: his ability to lease out that freedom to others.

Yeesh

I think to myself, this is cynical. Then I think how it’s only been four months since a former SNL cast member made a credible allegation of sexual harassment against the show’s creator. He published it in a book and it went unremarked upon for weeks; NBC made a meaningless three-word denial and the story faded away. A month before that, one of the show’s head writers said critic Steven Hyden fucks dogs—just one of many critics, including myself, he’s commandeered his sizable Instagram following against—and faced no apparent repercussions. This is the same show that suspended one of its writers over a harmless tweet she swiftly apologized for; the same show that had Casey Affleck host years after he settled allegations he sexually harassed and verbally abused production staff on one of his films; the same show that had Donald Trump host months after he said Mexicans are rapists; the same show that swatted down an extra’s complaint about noted womanizer Chris Farley, a complaint made during what is widely considered one of the show’s golden ages. These are all institutional failures of varying natures and degrees, but their effect is to paint a portrait of a workplace where toxic people thrive: in other words, a toxic workplace. Sure, you could look at the Gillis hiring and see a long series of people dropping the ball. You could also see a company hiring an employee because it likes his work and thinks he's a cultural fit.

The Defense Calls Wario

Every so often SNL does a sketch that plays beat-for-beat like an over-exaggerated parody of SNL. "Wario" is a masterwork of the genre. As a piece of writing, it's nonsense. As a performance, it's cringeworthy. As the sum of its nakedly cynical parts, it's… kind of transcendent? Here is the second richest man on earth. Here are the highest-paid sketch comedians on earth in the most prestigious comedy show on earth. Here is the set built in days by some of Hollywood's most talented artists, the costumes made to order, the crown 3D-printed for the rich man's girlfriend, the CGI Toads, the audience laughing on command. And for what? A real-life villain playing a cartoon villain on trial for murder in an aimless little make-'em-up nobody seems to be enjoying?

The pretense is so sublimely shallow it becomes translucent. You can see right through to the bloody organs underneath. Here is the way of the world asserting itself. Here are wealth and empire reaching through their mortal instruments to tell you how small you are. How little control you have. How none of it matters. Truth, beauty, justice—no, power has its own designs. Power gets what it wants. This sketch has been centuries in the making. I truly find it fascinating to watch.

SNL's 50th anniversary special airs tonight at 8pm on NBC and streaming on Peacock.