This is an interesting clip, for two reasons.
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This is an interesting clip, for two reasons.
1) Carlin shows a lot of self-awareness here. That probably shouldn't surprise me as much as it does, he was a sharp guy. But it's rare to see people interrogate their own limitations.
2) Lorne Michaels has always had an idea in his head of what Saturday Night Live is. The actual reality of the show, though, has not always lived up to that idea. So if you're a part of the show that doesn't live up to the idea, you just get written out of the show's history. Lorne snaps his fingers and you never existed.
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@jalefkowit 3) wow, that's a lot of cocaine
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Jason Lefkowitzreplied to Blake C. Stacey last edited by [email protected]
@bstacey If you haven't read James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales' oral history of SNL I can't recommend it highly enough, not least because the first third of the book is just a parade of stories about the consumption of absolutely startling amounts of cocaine
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I suspect Carlin answers his own "why didn't they ever invite me back?" question when he mentions that he went on the show during the Dick Ebersol era.
Ebersol ran SNL after Michaels left to try other things in 1980, until Michaels came back when the other things all failed in 1985. Ebersol's SNL was the era of Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal and Martin Short. But there's no room in the Lorne Michaels legend for someone else running SNL, so that era has been pointedly played down in all the retrospectives.
It would not shock me to learn that Michaels held a grudge against Carlin for working with Ebersol.
