“Lorne Michaels wanted to stay in Canada”: This biographer is pulling back the curtain on the king of comedy

Before he was the enigmatic ringmaster behind Saturday Night Live, Lorne Michaels was a kid from Forest Hill who hoped to make it big in his home country, then headed to the US when that didn’t pan out. Now, he’s the subject of a new biography, more than 600 pages on the man responsible for fostering comedic brilliance over five decades (and the guy who inspired Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies). The book’s author, long-time New Yorker editor Susan Morrison, worked for Michaels in the ’80s and devoted the past 10 years to figuring out what makes him tick. Here, she talks about Canadian funny, playing favourites among cast members and why the dance floor may be Michaels’s cool-guy kryptonite.

There are a lot of interesting people in the world. What made you want to devote your time and talent to Lorne Michaels in particular? I’ve been an editor for 40 years, so deciding to write about anyone was a huge departure. Ten years ago, my kids had both gone to college, and I had the crazy idea that I was going to have a lot of free time, which didn’t happen, but I found myself thinking about Lorne. SNL had just celebrated 40 years at the time, and I knew Lorne. We weren’t by any means friends, but the first job I ever had in New York was working for him in the 1980s as a writing assistant. He had taken a five-year sabbatical from SNL to produce a prime time comedy hour called The New Show. I had a front-row seat to his first and only spectacular public failure, so that was an interesting vantage point. I kept in touch with the writers that I met on the show, and I kept my hand in that world. I had heard so many stories about Lorne over the years, so I knew he was a still-waters-that-run-deep kind of guy—and an object of obsession for his staff. I thought maybe the time was right for an in-depth examination. Related: Untold stories from the early years of Second City, the group that changed comedy

Michaels is famously press shy. Did you have to convince him to participate? Well, I didn’t bring the idea to him at first because I knew he would have just said no. Instead, I wrote a proposal, and my agent sent it around. My proposal did not promise that I would have access to Lorne because I knew I would be able to write a good book about him either way. There was a massive bidding war, which kind of surprised me. After I signed the deal, I went to see Lorne and said, “I’ve just signed a deal for a book about you and the show. I don’t need anything from you, but if you want to talk to me, I think it would be a richer and better book.” He was taken by surprise—a little uncomfortable at first—and he wanted some time to think about it. We met for a drink a few days later.

What does Lorne Michaels order when you meet for a drink? Lorne generally orders a Belvedere and cranberry juice. We met at the bar of the London Hotel, a place I had only been once before with my daughter because One Direction was in town. He just started telling stories.

It strikes me that maybe Michaels’s second-worst nightmare is a book about him, but his worst is a biography that he wasn’t involved in. I think that’s a good way to put it. He had an interest in wanting it to be good. I know he likes me, and he respects the New Yorker, where I’m the articles editor. We had a nice rapport, and I think he thought, Well, better Susan than some hack. That said, he never set any conditions. He never asked to see any of the book before publication. Lorne is a smart guy. He knows that having a real book written about you by a real journalist is better than some kind of vanity project.

SNL is such an American institution. It seems ironic that the brain behind the whole thing is Canadian, no? Lily Tomlin, who hired Lorne to work on her comedy special in the 1970s, told me she always liked Canadians because they reminded her of writers from the American South—people like Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty, who felt like outsiders because of the Confederacy, and that gave them a sharper perspective on American life. Lily thought that Canadians had that same ability to look at America under the microscope.

You start the book with Michaels’s years in Toronto. How did his upbringing here influence his future brilliance? He talks a lot about how comedy is polite hostility. You’re trying to get a rise out of someone or critique something, but you’re doing it in a polite way. I think he would say that is a very Canadian thing. He often describes his childhood as living next door to imperial Rome—all of the action was going on south of the border. As a young television watcher, he was really excited by the American content. He would watch these shows and then see an ad for Milky Way and Snickers, and they looked so good. Then there would be this big disclaimer on the screen: Not available in Canada. That was sort of his clarion call.

Ouch. He really admired the way Wayne and Shuster never went to Hollywood. He said that they turned their back on the Canadian Dream by wanting to stay in Canada, and that’s what Lorne really wanted—to get a foothold at the CBC and stay in Canada and raise a family. But he got so fed up by what he describes as this Canadian attitude where, even if you’re killing it, then it’s somebody else’s turn and you have to go to the back of the line. That said, he has this dry, understated manner—a little bit self-deprecating, a little underpowered—and I think of that as a hallmark of Canadian comedy. It’s very different from the brassy Catskills Jewish American comedian kind of thing.

And I guess his gift was being able to appreciate comedy in all of those different registers. He’s always looking for the mix. Dana Carvey called it the assortment pack. A lot of other people referenced the Snickers-bar analogy (the right balance between peanut, caramel, chocolate), which is something Lorne has used for years. There are a lot of stories and references that came up across generations—the same stories that he tells again and again, almost like a jukebox.

You point out the truism that most people believe the “funniest SNL era ever” was whenever they were in high school. Does that apply to you? I was in high school for the first five seasons. I actually attended a taping in the very first season, and I will never forget that experience of being in the studio and seeing Elliott Gould host. That original cast certainly meant a lot to me emotionally, but I’m kind of a freak because I’m a scholar of this stuff. I love the cast from the late 1980s: the Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, Jan Hooks years, when they were doing it at such a high level. And then I also loved the cast 15 years later, with Bill Hader, Fred Armisen, Kristen Wiig and Jason Sudeikis. They were cooler than any cast had been, they seemed like they really liked each other and they were all so great looking.

The list of amazing interview subjects abounds for a project like this. Was anyone particularly hard to get? I went straight to Lorne, and so I mostly avoided the whole public relations snarl. I would talk to one person who would put me in touch with someone else, and I guess the feeling was, Well, if Lorne is talking to her…. One interview that took a while was Chris Rock. He has a very protective publicist, but he eventually called me, and we had a great conversation. He is just incredibly smart about human beings and what makes them tick, so he had a lot of thoughts on Lorne’s EQ. Conan O’Brien was deeply insightful about Lorne’s psychology. Talking to Dan Aykroyd was kind of mind blowing. He’s like an encyclopedia, and he speaks in these tight, controlled paragraphs filled with amazing vocabulary words. A little bit like Beldar Conehead.

A lot of famous cast members have died. Is there anyone you really wish you could have chatted with? It would have been great to talk to Gilda Radner. And I never got to meet Phil Hartman. He’s someone who brought a singular intelligence—just being that much older and a working actor, he brought a different sense of vocation. I wonder what it would have been like for him to join this band of kids.

In the book, you describe Michaels’s “emotional energy efficiency.” What do you mean by that? This is a guy who, every year, selects a handful of 20-something nobodies, brings them to New York, puts them on this stage and opens the whole world to them. And so people get very involved in him—they project a lot of their own longings and expectations on him, and I think it could be really depleting if he made himself completely emotionally available to them. That’s a shorthand way of maybe explaining why some people see him as kind of aloof. Either Tina Fey or Amy Poehler told me that very often when someone’s hired, Lorne isn’t the one to say, We’re bringing you to New York—you’ve got the job. He outsources that to somebody else, I think to spare himself the emotional investment. Like, what if it doesn’t work out and he has to fire the person a year later? As Will Ferrell said, he’s sort of like a baseball coach who keeps the highs not very high and the lows not very low. After talking to so many people, I came to see it as a reasonably self-protective strategy. He told me that he had to learn to draw boundaries. In the first five years, John Belushi would show up in his lobby at 3:30 in the morning. You can’t really have that.

Does he play favourites? He definitely has pets—different cast members and different eras. This is a generalization, but I tend to think that they’re the ones who are the least needy. SNL is kind of a wild sink-or-swim atmosphere. There are people who come in and then wait for the orientation or the instruction sheet, which never comes. You have to sort of figure it out. I think Lorne really respects the ones who can do that and don’t just say, Wait a minute, how come I’m not on TV? I know he was very fond of Gilda Radner. Tina Fey was always a pet, as were Kristen Wiig and Colin Jost. I think Pete Davidson is a pet, but maybe for a different reason. He was a troubled guy who lost his father, and Lorne related to that.

So much of the mythology of SNL is the behind-the-scenes fun: the coke-fuelled writing sessions, the endless after-parties. Does Michaels participate? He still goes to the parties, and he’s often the last to leave. He sits at his corner table, and people come and hold court with him. I was surprised when someone described him dancing at one of the after-parties, just because I see him as being very controlled in terms of presentation. I actually spoke to an SNL writer who went on to be a Seinfeld writer, and he said that Elaine’s spastic dance was based on Lorne Michaels.

Bill Hader compared him to Tom Ripley, who is a pathologically insecure and murderous psychopath. Well, I don’t think he meant Lorne is a murderer. It’s more that he is somebody who plays his cards close to the vest. He is self-invented, an ace manipulator, and he has manifested the reality that he wants.

You write about how Michaels having Trump on the show was divisive among his staff back in 2016. Do you think he has changed his mind in terms of giving people like that a platform? At the time that Trump hosted in 2016, Michaels still considered his candidacy something of a joke. He thought there was no way he would win. He’d planned on having Clinton on the show as well, at that point, so he was just looking for relevance. He wasn’t viewing Trump’s appearance as a way to boost the candidate’s ratings—although I’m sure he knew the appearance wouldn’t hurt the show’s ratings. In terms of the cast’s objections, his take was: we are non-partisan, we take on all the players, whatever their party.

So you don’t think there was a humanizing of Trump that may have helped with his popularity? I think that was more with Will Ferrell’s portrayal of George W. Bush, who he played as a frat boy but also someone you might want to have a beer with. I don’t see that with Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of Trump or with that of James Austin Johnson, the guy who does Trump now. If anything, the issue is how you do a parody that isn’t just an impersonation. I think of the skit “President Reagan, Mastermind,” which Phil Hartman did in the ’80s, which was such a high-concept way of of making fun of him. I’d like to see some of that conceptual spin on the Trump administration.

The intro of your book ends in a question: Is Michaels a once-in-a-generation cultural radar or an elusive backdrop for the most talented comedic minds to project their own brilliance? Well, really it’s a fake set-up—the former doesn’t exist without the latter. He does manage to find these people and create the conditions for them to flourish. His real achievement is that he’s created this whole culture, this big sandbox in which play in.

And the whole Dr. Evil thing, does he see that as a compliment or a diss? I think he didn’t know exactly what to make of it at first. But I think he’s secure enough to take it as homage. As he says, making fun of the boss is the most American thing there is. We don’t have that as much in Canada, he says, because nobody’s that successful.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.