The first actor banned from ‘Saturday Night Live’: “You are writing shit”
In Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, a semi-fictionalised feature film account of the 90 minutes leading up to the broadcast of the first episode of Saturday Night Live, character actor extraordinaire JK Simmons makes a striking cameo. Playing a tuxedo-wearing comedian from the days of vaudeville and early television, this guy turns up to the opening night, argues with Chevy Chase, makes openly sexist remarks to the female comics and crew members, and then exposes himself with a shit-eating grin on his face.
Suppose you don’t know anything about Milton Berle, the comedic giant Simmons plays. In that case, you may be forgiven for thinking the character was created by Reitman and company to add some creative license to the movie. After all, he seems to embody every racist, sexist, distasteful impulse of the previous generation of comics that SNL’s young upstarts were trying so hard to be the exact opposite of. “Milton Berle represents everything that television was,” Reitman told Entertainment Weekly. “He’s the ghost of television past. He is vaudeville, he is radio, he is old variety shows, he is sexual harassment, he is all of these things.”
However, Berle was 100% real, and even though he wasn’t actually present backstage on SNL’s opening night, he did present arguably the show’s worst episode, which led to a lifetime ban from the programme. In April 1979, Berle, then 70 years old, arrived at Studio 8H in 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, for rehearsals, seemingly intent on doing everything he could to ignore every single thing SNL creator Lorne Michaels and the show’s writers wanted him to do.
In Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, Michaels admitted his associate producer had to talk him into even letting Berle host. He claimed, “I knew we were heading for disaster from minute one.” While some of the show’s cast, such as John Belushi and, ironically, Chase, were excited to be in the presence of a comedy legend, that excitement soon turned sour. Berle proceeded to hijack every sketch for his own purposes while pitching ideas to young, talented comedy writers with the preface, “Now this might be over your heads”. He kept adding spit-takes and other obvious slapstick moments to sketches, which wasn’t the vibe of SNL.
When Milton Berle hijacked Saturday Night Live
Eventually, after it became a struggle to write a good sketch that everyone was happy with, Belushi chastised his colleagues by exclaiming, “You guys are writing shit for this great man!” Suddenly, the Animal House star was met with a barrage of complaints that Berle, in fact, was the problem.
As for Simmons’ shocking moment of brandishing his penis in Saturday Night, that was also based on reality. Berle reportedly walked around his dressing room in boxer shorts, in full view of staffers of both sexes, and when writer Alan Zweibel told him he’d written a ton of jokes for Friars Club evenings about Berle’s legendarily large manhood, the elderly comedian excitedly exclaimed, “You mean you never saw it?” Then, the old man opened his bathrobe and produced “this anaconda”.
Zweibel remembered, “It was enormous. It was like a pepperoni. And he goes, ‘What do you think of the boy?'”
It all led up to April 14th, when Berle presented SNL for the first and last time. From his opening monologue to his musical finale, ‘September Song’, featuring an extended interlude where he waxed lyrical about his history in comedy and television, Berle was all wrong for Michaels’ irreverent, counter-culture show.
His monologue was a collection of dusty old bits that attempted to offend women, homosexuals, Puerto Ricans, and Arabs, and at the end of the show, only ten people in the audience stood to applaud the ageing comic. Amazingly, though, these ten people had all been given free tickets by Berle and were instructed to give him a standing ovation, which looked very strange when nobody else in the audience followed suit. After this disastrous show, Berle suffered the ignominy of being the first actor ever banned from SNL, and NBC didn’t re-broadcast the episode for decades.
Interestingly, in later years, an older and more seasoned Michaels felt he had come to see things from Berle’s perspective more than when he was a young man. “I’m more sympathetic to him now than I was then, in 1979,” he mused. “He had ruled this place for so many years, and we were these kids telling him no.”
However, this didn’t mean he’d have ever wanted Berle within a million miles of Studio 8H again.
