The date on the script suggests it was originally planned for the Donald Pleasence episode... but there's no role for him either! John Belushi did appear (briefly) in that episode though, so it's not entirely unrealistic that he was expected to play Silverman.
I know that it was at least considered for Curry - that sketch being dropped is why the extremely long "Mick Jagger Variety Show" sketch was written.
I've recently been watching (re-watching, in the case of ones I remember) most of the live-broadcast episodes from 1990-91, 1991-92, and now I'm late in 1992-93 (I'm currently up to the classic, first Matt Foley appearance). This is my favorite era of the show, by some distance. I just love the cast. The 1990-91 cast is the all-time best, I think, but the next couple of years are great, too (Dana Carvey disappears halfway through 1992-93). That said, you can start to see some downward trends approaching as early as 1992-93, which is generally a great season, but there's an over-reliance on recurring characters, which starts to get a bit tiresome. When a new character succeeds (Sandler's Opera-man, for example), it quickly gets beaten to death from overuse. Kevin Nealon's Weekend Update seemed great when I was 15, but looking back at it now you can see how awkward he sometimes was, flubbing lines, or just weirdly delivering some jokes as if he himself didn't get the punchline. Mike Myers was on good form, but again there were far too many Coffee-Talk sketches, and after summer '92 (Wayne's World movie) you have to wonder if he was fully committed to SNL anymore. Carvey's exit was hard on the show, though it carried on well for a while without him (and without Jan Hooks, who was missed but made occasional guest appearances), but the fatal body-blow was likely the post-1992-93 reduction of Phil Hartman to what seemed like a disinterested bit-player (he left after 1993-94, but he seemed to have had one foot out the door by '93). In 1993-94, it started to suck a bit, and famously 1994-95 was a train-wreck.
It's funny how Dana Carvey often indicated in interviews that he wasn't really happy with his most famous character on the show being him in drag, and he retired Church Lady years before he left the show (until bringing her back when he hosted), but Mike Myers just went crazy playing Linda Richman. I don't think Mike had his eye on movies as much as Dana did. Dana left the show within a year of Wayne's World's release, and had 4 movies come out within 2 years of his leaving. Myers had Axe Murderer come out within 6 months of Dana leaving (it looks he was on leave until December of season 18 filming it), and then Wayne's World 2 with Dana later that year, both commercial disappointments, then nothing else for 4 years. So for at least the last 13 months of Myers' SNL tenure, he didn't have any movies upcoming, and nothing in development that came to fruition. We know Austin Powers wasn't conceived as a movie until after he left SNL. And Myers' movie stardom wasn't even assured then, as Austin was just a middling performer theatrically (outgrossed by Jungle 2 Jungle, Flubber and In & Out). I see on YouTube the SNL channel is doing something new. They have "Every Coffee Talk Ever" in two videos, as well as every Wayne's World ever, or so they claim. It appears to be not actually true though. The Wayne's videos definitely don't start out with the first two that have Jan Hooks. So they're taking this posture that they're curating the ultimate library of SNL content while providing woefully incomplete videos, and outright lying about it.
I'm watching season 19 and I had forgotten how much Adam Sandler had taken over the show. It seems like every other episode has him with a guitar singing a goofy song in the exact same style (random things that rhyme). Some people say his "Lunchlady Land" sketch was a classic but I couldn't find anything funny about it. A perfect example of bad season 19 is the "Herlihy Boy Dog Sitting Service". Sandler is playing Canteen Boy (one of the six or seven characters just like it anyway) and Farley is screaming every line. They did this sketch two episodes ago but they couldn't pass on doing it again because Sandler and Farley could do the few things they're good at. I've noticed that as soon as he flubbed one word, he would immediately give up on the joke and no one would laugh. Also he had a habit of adding an unfunny comment to about half of the jokes like, "Isn't that something?" or "I didn't know that." He seemed like his own worst enemy. Yes, the fading of Phil Hartman is very clear in season 19. Where was this guy? To make it worse, we already have Sandler singing goofy songs, Farley screaming his jokes (and if he isn't screaming yet, you know he will by the end of the sketch), and Spade with the same condescending tone in every sketch. Rob Schneider was never my favorite, but now I see he was doing characters in sketches instead his standup act so I'm somewhat impressed by him. I can tell the most popular players were already being boxed in by the one or two things they did best. They really needed to expand what they were doing and find new ways to make people laugh. Of course we know in season 20 they never did that.
Mike Myers was making movies at a slower pace, but he was much more involved creatively, writing or co-writing those early movies himself. (So I Married an Axe Murderer was an existing screenplay he rewrote without credit.)
Yeah, but he took months off of the beginning of season 18 to do Axe Murderer. So it shouldn't have affected his attention to the show while he was actually in it. Wayne's 2 was produced during the summer hiatus after that, so he could've been writing it during season 18. His schedule would've been clear in season 19 and 20. This 1992 article talks about his leave of absence for Axe Murderer and says he had "three years on his contract." He left the show on the anniversary of his hire date, so it sounds like he got out of there the minute his contract expired. He had no other career move lined up, but I guess retreating to contemplate his next move was preferable to extending the contract on SNL for him. SNL'S MIKE MYERS IS ON LEAVE OF ABSENCE TO MAKE A MOVIE Lorne fired Lovitz when he wanted to take a leave of absence like this for a movie, but the success of Wayne's World must have granted Myers a free pass.
Yeah, good points. Agree with all. The 'Herlihy Boy' sketch was hilarious the first time (a classic!) because it was so weird and random, but that is a Grade-A example of a sketch that did NOT need to be repeated. It was only funny the first time because nobody could "get" it on first viewing, and back then we didn't know Farley would get out of control by the end. But the next two or three of it were utterly predictable and thus not funny at all. Rob Schneider was an awesome cast member circa 1990-91 and 1991-92! I've noticed that during the 1992-93 season, he started out really strong, but as the season has progressed he's gotten a bit... annoying. It's a subtle tipping point that some of the cast in this period went over, sometimes around the same period. And yeah, I've never been able to really 'get' Adam Sandler -- I'm probably too intelligent to appreciate him. He had some great moments on SNL... and an equal number of annoying moments that irk me. I agree that the 'Lunch Lady-land' wasn't funny -- I've never understood why it gets canon-ized. But for me one of the nice things revisiting this era is how good David Spade comes off. Sure, he plays the sarcastic guy in a lot of sketches, but he's really good at it and he can do subtle and restrained really well. Oh, and Tim Meadows was absolutely brilliant in his entire SNL run, and I cannot understand how/why they underused him in the early-90s. I have a theory about why the show started to suck circa 1994: I think Lorne Michaels, who was very middle-aged by then but had kick-started the show's very successful youth movement (with Spade, Rock, Sandler, Farley, etc.) did not really "get" his own show. I mean, I think Lorne knew it was working, knew that younger audiences (like me, at the time) were starting to tune in, and that he was again the Golden Boy with NBC execs. I think Lorne kind of basked in that moment (esp. after the Wayne's World movie), which is fine. But at the same time, I don't think he himself really understood the show's new-found popularity. It was too young for him. For the first time, he was the old guy trying to get in with the kids. And so he just let the show (i.e., the cast) manage itself for a while... and without Lorne as the anchor, it started to suck. Of course, it didn't help that key writers also left in this period.
It's not meant as a statement of how smart I am, but more as a statement of how dumb Sandler's comedy is. He's a talented guy, but on SNL (and even more so in most of his movies... yikes!) he was really reaching for the lower-end of the audience's intelligence.
I disagree. Sandler tended to go for absurdist stuff at times - like the Halloween bit he did about homemade costumes. Sure, he could be low-brow - I sure as heck won't defend most of what he's done, much less all of it - but Sandler often does a kind of "knowing dumbness". There's a wink there that lets you know he's in the joke, so in a weird way, the dumb humor becomes smart. Like the scene in "Billy Madison" where he leaves flaming poop on an old guy's doorstep. Sandler knows that's a dumb gag, so the scene makes fun of the notion that someone would think flaming poop is hilarious. People may not like stuff like "That Herlihy Boy" but it's not dumb. It's bizarre but it's not stupid...
Sandler's comedy isn't dumb compared to whose? It certainly was dumb compared to everyone else's on SNL. Maybe not compared to Married with Children. SNL's brand was intelligent comedy for most of its first 20 years. Certainly the good writing on SNL propped up some of what Sandler did, but his movies laid bare his lack of wit and talent. He's got back-to-back entries on Wikipedia's list of the worst films ever (Jack and Jill and That's My Boy). Phil Hartman explained the problem with Sandler well in 1994: Merry Hartman, Merry Hartman Hartman does, however, criticize the show’s attempts to please its younger viewers. ”The shows are getting less sophisticated,” he says. ”There’s less political satire. The younger audience loves Adam Sandler [Opera Man]. He appeals less to the intellect and more to that stand-up sensibility of ‘Let’s go out there and be insane.’ I like Adam Sandler, but that’s not my kind of comedy, so, yeah, in a way it makes me feel like, ‘Well, it’s time for me to go.”’
"SNL" has always had plenty of dumb humor. It's not like it was all sophisticated all the time until that damned Sandler came along and ruined it. I see a level of intelligence and insight there, a meta absurdist kind of thing where Sandler is in on the joke and making fun of the dumbness of the humor. Others don't have to agree, but I don't see all of Sandler's humor as "just plain dumb". Some? Sure. He's made some terrible movies over the years with witless stabs at laughs. But he also can be clever and funny...
As soon as I posted this, I watched the Patrick Stewart episode and damned if Nealon made no comments after jokes during that Weekend Update. I wonder if someone told him to stop doing that.
I agree. Billy Madison has some very clever bits…when the old lady goes “If peeing your pants is cool, consider me Miles Davis”….just classic.
And the "meme-able" part where Billy compares the Industrial Revolution to the story about the puppy. You're all primed for the usual "wow - Billy nailed it!" moment when the moderator tells us how stupid the answer was and how everyone who heard it is now dumber (paraphrasing).
I think that's giving him too much credit. That's also a very overused comedy cheat in the last few decades. Come up with a stupid joke and then try to pretend you're making fun of people who come up with stupid jokes. That's an act I see right through. But I don't even think Sandler was clever enough to try to pull that trick very often. Of course SNL was dumb in its bad years. But during the "second golden age," Sandler was the dumbest part of it. All of his recurring characters were "Something-Man." He wasn't good at impressions or physical comedy. He was terrible at playing a convincing straight man. He tried to get laughs by how "silly" his voices sounded, breaking character and the believability of the sketches. And he participated in some of the most tasteless material on the show up to that point in time.
I guess you're just the king of the super-geniuses and those of us who find some of Sandler's work funny are morons who don't have the intellect to know better!
I think Sandler was funny on the show. I also think he deserved to be fired. Sandler at the time really couldn't work with women at all. He evidently didn't think they were or could be funny. Women have always been part of the SNL cast. Not everyone in his "posse" was as indifferent to the women in the cast. Spade and Schneider would work with the women. Sandler didn't. Lorne wanted the audience that Sandler and the others brought. He was also aware of the issues. That's why he brought in McKean, Garafolo, and others to try and balance the show. It didn't work until he got rid of Sandler. Sandler's issue was not his material so much, it's that his presence caused all other comedy forms to wither away.
I don't know. I've had friends who liked Adam Sandler back when he was still on SNL. My theory about his popularity was always that they thought his act was so simple that they could be cast on the show and do it themselves. So there was some kind of projection and wish fulfillment going on. They identified with him and could imagine themselves being a star like him. His lack of talent actually made that fantasy accessible to them because they now realized they didn't need to have any talent either to be that famous.
You seem utterly unable to accept that maybe - just maybe - some people think Sandler is talented. Seriously - I laughed at Sandler's Halloween bit or "Billy Madison" only because I fantasized about a TV/movie career?
I'm in the middle with Sandler. He's been in some very funny sketches and he was something of a wild card in season 18 in that I wouldn't know what he would do. In just one season he become a cast member that I pretty much knew what he was going to do in a sketch. My guess is that he found out what made the audience laugh and kept on doing those things i.e. the screaming emotional guy, the songs with random things, and his various characters which were all essentially the Canteen Boy and were all like Bill Murray's character in Caddyshack. When he guest starred on Undeclared (he played himself of course), the episode hinted that he was tired of doing the same stuff over and over. After a show he stopped by the dorm and the college kids all asked him to do a certain song. "But I just did that song, like, an hour ago!"
