While much credit for the enduring success of Saturday Night Live goes to the stars over the years, what made the show live and die throughout has been the quality of the writing. When the writing is good, the show soars; when it's bad, oooof. (It's why I DVR the show so I can skip bad musical acts and tedious sketches.) Now in its 51st season, the writing was deadly bad early on, but things have improved with more adventurous writing.
But while some writers like Al Franken and Tom Davis in the early days or Seth Meyers and Tina Fey have crossed over into general public consciousness, one who has been more of a legend to writing nerds who actually care about this stuff than to the rubes is Jim Downey, who joined SNL in 1976 (sharing an office with fellow rookie Bill Murray) then proceeded to work for 30 non-consecutive years before retiring in 2013 as the longest-running writer in show history. During an early break from the show when he left along with nearly everyone else when creator Lorne Michaels stepped away in 1980, he was the head writer for Late Night with David Letterman, helping form his subversive & influential brand of comedy.
Thus we have the Peacock Original documentary Downey Wrote That, which follows along the series of docs produced earlier this year in conjunction with the 50th Anniversary of SNL by gathering a bevy of past writers and cast members including Adam Sandler, David Spade, Maya Rudolph, Bob Odenkirk, Ben Stiller, Conan O'Brien, David Letterman, and Lorne Michaels to sing their praises of Downey's oddball & specific wit. They reminisce about how they'd line up outside his office to have their scripts appraised and how to have his blessing meant everything.
The amount of memorable sketches over the decades is amazing. Fred Garvin: Male Prostitute, Lord & Lady Douchebag, The Change Bank (in which he appeared as the bank spokesman), The People's Court with Satan, Colon Blow, the coining of the word "strategery" which people believe is something George W. Bush actually said (like how people believe Sarah Palin said, "I can see Russia from my house," because Tina Fey did it in a sketch), the legendary Chippendale's audition with Patrick Swayze versus Chris Farley, and so many more.
The time he focused solely on doing the Weekend Update segment when Norm MacDonald was the anchor gets its own segment and they include one of my two favorite Norm Update jokes, "And in music news, #1 on the college charts this summer was Better Than Ezra. And at #2...Ezra." Seth Meyers tells of, and we're shown, a joke about a birthday party for the world's richest girl, to which Meyers admits, "My favorite joke is one which didn't land but I still thing about 30 years later." The infamous way MacDonald & Downey were fired because they took NBC President Don Ohlmeyer's offense at their jokes about his best friend O.J. Simpson as a sign to quintuple down on the savagery towards Simpson. (Look up the compilations on YouTube sometime. It wasn't a few jokes. It was years of brutal stuff flat-out calling Simpson a murderer.)
His film appearances are also touched upon including his small role in There Will Be Blood and as the quiz host in Billy Madison who berates the stupid answer Billy gives - "We are all dumber for having listened to it" - which Sandler admits was all Downey's writing, becoming "the most quoted bit of the movie."
While the general interest in comedy writers may be debatable, if you're an fan of creativity and SNL and you happen to have Peacock, take 66 minutes and watch Downey Wrote That to see how many of your Gen X/Millennial laugh memories he's responsible for.
Score: 8/10. Catch it on Peacock.
0 comments:
Post a Comment