Eddie Murphy: The Rolling Stone Interview

Brian Hiatt: You also had some problems with Saturday Night Live.

Eddie Murphy: Yeah, because they were shitty to me on Saturday Night Live a couple of times after I'd left the show. They said some shitty things. There was that David Spade sketch [when Spade showed a picture of Murphy around the time of Vampire in Brooklyn and said, "Look, children, a falling star"]. I made a stink about it, it became part of the folklore. What really irritated me about it at the time was that it was a career shot. It was like, "Hey, come on, man, it's one thing for you guys to do a joke about some movie of mine, but my career? I'm one of you guys. How many people have come off this show whose careers really are fucked up, and you guys are shitting on me?" And you know every joke has to go through all the producers, and ultimately, you know Lorne or whoever says, [Lorne Michaels voice] "OK, it's OK to make this career crack..."

I felt shitty about that for years, but now, I don't have none of that. I wouldn't go to retrospectives, but I don't let it linger. I saw David Spade four years ago. Chris Rock was like, "Do you guys still hate each other?" and I was like, "I don't hate David Spade, I'm cool with him."

BH: You're still the biggest star who came from the show.

EM: That's only because John Belushi's dead. Belushi's like Spanky of the Little Rascals series. I guess that makes me Stymie, but that's cool. I'll be Stymie. Think of all the people who came off that show. I bet you could figure out the combined grosses of people who came off Saturday Night Live in the movies – me, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Mike Myers, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd. I bet it's $15 billion. It's no coincidence – that show's like Harvard for a comic actor. When you come off the show and get into the movie business, it's like you're moving in slow motion for a couple of years. You've been working like a crazy person in a pressure cooker, then you're in the movies, just sitting in your trailer.

Eddie Murphy: The Rolling Stone Interview / by: Brian Hiatt / November 9, 2011

A Chat with Rob Schneider

Will Harris: During your time on “Saturday Night Live,” were there certain sketches that made you twitch when they were pitched to you for the umpteenth time?

Rob Schneider: Well, the thing that drives you insane…you’re watching, but if you’re on the show, you see these fucking characters too many times, but you can’t bite the hand that feeds you. I was tired of “Wayne’s World” after the third time I’d seen it, but fucking people went apeshit for it, so those are the things that keep the show fucking going. You can’t hate those things. I only did, like, six Copy Machine Guy sketches in four years. Maybe I did seven, at the most. When Al Franken wanted to do Stuart Smalley for the 80th time, I was, like, “That’s enough!” 

Any griping about that show is a quality problem, because it’s a great show. 90% of the stuff that got on the air was what got the biggest laughs in the read-throughs. If you wrote something that got read in front of anybody…it was so democratic that you got spoiled after awhile. But people complain wherever they are. All in all, I had a great experience at “SNL.”

A Chat with Rob Schneider / by Will Harris / Interview date: 03/23/2009 / Run date: 03/30/2009 / www.bullz-eye.com

FADER: Interview: Hannibal Buress

Naomi Zeichner: When did you start doing standup?

Hannibal Buress: Almost nine years ago. At first I was doing it as an amateur and really trying to be a professional comedian. Now it’s my job and people pay me to do it, so I keep that in mind and approach it like that. I wasn’t super into comedy when I was young. My interest in comedy really happened right before I started. I guess when I was young I watched “The Cosby Show,” so Bill Cosby and Eddie Murphy and those guys. I wasn’t a big comedy fan as a kid; I didn’t really study it like that.

NZ: But people must have let you know you were funny—

HB: I think Seinfeld said this: “When you’re a kid, everybody’s funny.” Who had a friend that never said anything funny? I was funny with my friends and in class sometimes, but it wasn’t anything I decided to pursue until college. I saw that some people weren’t that good at it so I tried it.

NZ: And your move to New York worked out well.

HB: It’s going pretty well, I write at “30 Rock,” and I used to write at “Saturday Night Live.”

NZ: What’s the difference between the two?

HB: It’s two different formats, a sketch and a sitcom. I put a lot more work into the writing of a 30 minute show. SNL is written the week of the show with some pieces even being written on Friday, so it’s more of an against the clock type of thing, whereas at “30 Rock” you’re working on it for a while, and it’s rewritten and written.

FADER: Interview: Hannibal Buress / BY: NAOMI ZEICHNER

Oprah Presents Master Class with Lorne Michaels

Lorne Michaels: Everyone knows when it matters. The brilliance of the show (SNL), and I don’t mean the on-air brilliance, I mean the brilliance of it as a form, is that everyone is necessary till the end. If that guy isn’t there to put that prop in your hand or that music cue comes in late or the writer didn’t get those changes to cards… everyone needs everyone else.

It’s a team sport. Its one of the reasons why I so connect to baseball. You play a whole season. You know, it starts in spring and its still cold, and the it ends up in… now it ends up pretty much close to winter and it gets cold again. During that time there’s a rhythm to it. You get use to the rhythm of it and you know that its incremental. And that there’ll be slumps and there will be periods where you’re not hitting. And everybody understands the off day.

When the show isn’t good, its not as if we don’t know it. It isn’t as if we just love them all. That audience just becomes quiet… you’re taking full swing at the ball, and if you miss, you know you missed. And performers will come off after a piece where there were misfires and you will see… just the look on their face. And quite often you will make eye contact. I see what they see and you don’t go, “Oh, it was way better than you thought it was.” You go, you don’t say the word ‘shake it off’, but that is what it is. Its like, you know, you’ll get ‘em the next time. And hopefully they do. 

Oprah Presents Master Class with Lorne Michaels / Aired: 01/30/2011

Oprah Presents Master Class with Lorne Michaels

Lorne Michaels: Fatigue is your friend. Through exhaustion and through people just being so depleted, the stuff around the nerve endings gets worn away and other things begin to emerge and you take way bigger risks. Whether its through impatience or the inability to, you know, just defend your game, things that you would normally not write or normally not say get written down or spoken. Its coming from the unconscious. Its not so much thought through as instinctive. It’s the closest they are to their core sensibility, to who they really are, at least in comedy.

Oprah Presents Master Class with Lorne Michaels / Aired: 01/30/2011

Julia Louis-Dreyfus: From 'Seinfeld' To 'Veep'

Dave Davies: But I gather ‘the ball’ wasn’t so much fun for you? (referring to being a cast member on Saturday Night Live at age 21)

Julia Louis-Dreyfus: Yeah, it wasn’t that great.

DD: Why not?

JLD: Well, I was very young. Okay, and I was very, very naïve. And I was coming from college and doing theater work with my friends and we would all work really hard as an ensemble to make the best possible show so there was a sort of an earnestness that I took with me to doing SNL that really had no place. I didn’t understand the politics and the dynamics of the show. I also went in thinking that I would just work with writers and you know, you just sort of… I didn’t go in with characters that I had worked and worked and worked on. I was not a writer myself. I was somewhat unprepared. Larry David was there my third year… he was a writer on that show for my last year and it was his only year. And we became friends during that period of time and we sort of… he was miserable. He didn’t get a single sketch on… he did get one sketch on but it was cut between dress and air. And so we sort of bonded in misery and there you go.

DE: And that’s what led to Seinfeld, right?

JLD: Yeah, pretty much. I mean there was a period of time in between, but yeah, it did.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus: From 'Seinfeld' To 'Veep' / NPR Fresh Air Weekend / Interview by Dave Davies / May 5, 2012

Butts Below the Border

Growing up in Southern California in the late seventies with a single mom (although in regular contact with a dad who was an accomplished musician), he played sports, made crank calls, and gravitated to comics like Steve Martin. “Putting an arrow through his head and playing the banjo and always going for the non sequitur, that’s what I loved,” Ferrell says. “He obviously became gigantic, but I’m sure there was a big portion of that audience that was, like, ‘What is he doing? I don’t get it—it’s not a setup, punch line, or storytelling.’ ”


Ferrell actually strives to produce that disorientation. “I’ve never been afraid of silence,” he says. “Silence and listening in comedy are big things that are overlooked.” If you don’t get the joke, he can wait. Like a musician (it’s no accident his films are filled with musical numbers), he thrives on changing the beat and riffing on a theme, letting the gag go on “and on and on and on and start to dip, but then because it’s going on so long it starts to get funny again.”


The approach goes back to his long stint on Saturday Night Live, where he’d double down on sketches that were dying in front of the audience—unlike some of his plainly miserable co-stars. “If something wasn’t working, the tendency would be to speed up and get through it,” he says. “But I would slow way down, and I would have this thing—I don’t know why, I love the audience, I want them to laugh, and yet something would kick in like, ‘Okay, you don’t like it, I’m going to make sure you really hate it,’ so I would just take my time. I don’t know, it was like a perverse joy in the agony of it being so painful. I can’t explain that.”


Butts Below the Border / David Edelstein / New York Magazine March 2012