The one ‘Saturday Night Live’ episode Lorne Michaels hates more than any other
Almost 1,000 episodes of Saturday Night Live have aired since the show premiered in October 1975, which means that there will be quite a few that Lorne Michaels doesn’t remember at all. That said, he’ll never forget the one that infuriated him to his core, and it was all because of the guest host.
Apart from a five-year sabbatical in the 1980s, the co-creator and executive producer has been a constant presence behind the scenes for the last 50 years, and in that time, SNL has played host to the good, the bad, and the ugly of one-off comperes, some of whom were never invited back again.
For every John Goodman or Tom Hanks, there’s a Steven Seagal or Frank Zappa, and since SNL has been so reliant on the guest star for so long, unless they’ve done it before and did a great job, it’s a total crapshoot. The weakest ones are often non-actors or non-performers, but someone who spent their life making people laugh turned out to be the ultimate thorn in Michaels’ side.
When Milton Berle hosted in April 1979, his glory days were pretty much behind him. He was a huge deal in the 1940s and 1950s, to the extent that he earned the nickname ‘Mr Television’ for becoming the first breakout small-screen superstar when the new-fangled technology started making its way into homes.
At the time, though, what the generation who tuned into Saturday Night Live every week probably knew him best from was rumours that he had the biggest cock in the business. Berle was a man out of time, and he also had a reputation for hijacking anything he appeared on and making it all about him, making it a recipe for disaster when he did exactly that.
There have been plenty of shoddy, shitty, or unqualified hosts in the last half-century, but ‘Uncle Miltie’ got under Michaels’ skin the most. “Lorne disliked the show to such an extent that it’s never been seen on Comedy Central, it’s never been seen anywhere since,” former NBC vice president Rick Ludwin shared in the book Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live.
“Lorne was so upset with the way that Milton steamrolled over everyone that he never wanted that show to see the light of day again,” he added. It wasn’t just a bad episode; it was so egregiously awful that SNL‘s head honcho went out of his way to wipe it from both his memory and the history books, which makes sense because he was never convinced that Berle was a good fit.
He revealed that he was talked into it, and even after he relented, he “knew we were heading for disaster from minute one.” Berle’s ego was running so rampant that he’d even pre-arranged a standing ovation for himself with the audience members sitting in the balcony, which didn’t sit well with the show’s orchestrator, who never wanted the focus to fall on the host instead of the cast members.
“The only time it’s ever happened,” he recalled of the staged ovation. “I was quite clear in the booth about not cutting to it. We don’t do that.” The Berle experiment was a disaster, and Michaels loathed it so much that he did his best to pretend that it never happened.
