LORNE

How a Canadian joke writer became American comedy royalty, and worked to keep his crown.

Any book about Lorne Michaels is inevitably a book about Saturday Night Live, the comedy program he created and (excepting one disastrous hiatus) has led for 50 seasons. Few TV programs are better documented than SNL—especially its brash and druggy early years—and Morrison, articles editor at the New Yorker, covers the relevant highlights. But she also offers an engrossing story about Michaels’ rise, celebrity, and philosophy of comedy. Raised in Toronto, he married into Canada’s comedy scene—his first wife was the daughter of a top Canadian gag duo. Eager to escape the country’s provincial scene, he headed for America but chafed at working for squares like Phyllis Diller; a fortuitous connection with a rising Lily Tomlin earned him a reputation as a judge of comic talent and an eager iconoclast. Each of the book’s seven sections opens on one day in the manic life of a 2018 episode of the show, which reveals Michaels as being hands-on with every element of the show, from lighting to soothing cast members’ egos. But it also reveals him as a sphinxlike figure, an inveterate name-dropper who never fires anybody directly and makes guest-host choices, like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, that sometimes infuriate his left-leaning cast. (Michaels notes that as a national show, SNL needs to take a pox-on-all-their-houses posture.) Morrison soft-pedals some elements of Michaels’ history—whether he might have intervened more when John Belushi and Chris Farley were spiraling, the show’s weak record on diversity, his failed marriages—but the book isn’t hagiography, chronicling his tussles with network execs and various film flops. Morrison does a fine job of revealing a leader who keeps his cards close to the vest, which is both a temperament and a survival tactic.

A top-shelf showbiz biography.