Father Guido Sarducci: Behind The Collar

Father Guido Sarducci is a late-night legend. First rising to fame on Saturday Night Live in the late 1970’s, he became a pop culture icon and a guest on talk shows across the dial over four decades. Now for the first time, Sarducci’s portrayer, comedy writer and performer Don Novello, is sharing his story. (Sarducci’s, that is.)

On May 7th, 2025, Stephen Colbert welcomed a once-familiar figure back to late-night television. The hip, laid-back, chain-smoking senior gossip columnist for the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, and the pride of the Marconi School of Broadcasting: Father Guido Sarducci.

It is a well-worn axiom that in comedy, timing is everything. So naturally, the reintroduction of Father Sarducci on the eve of the commencement of the papal conclave was perfection. (Similarly, his inaugural report on Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” occurred on October 21, 1978, just five days after the election of Pope John Paul II.)  

Equally ideal as the moment for Sarducci’s return was the facilitator. 

Because just as the virtually anonymous man behind the collar and the tinted glasses is really the gifted writer and performer Don Novello, so too did the host of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert spend many years satirically suspending disbelief playing the part of an ultra right wing pundit who just happened to share his same name.  

LateNighter asked Novello how the TV appearance, his first in 15 years, came about. Speaking from his home in Northern California, Novello said it was the byproduct of a chance encounter with Colbert at SNL50. 

“I saw him at the 50th anniversary show. I liked him and had done his show [The Colbert Report, in 2010].  We got along well. And then about a week after that 50th anniversary show, I got a call from them and they said, ‘Do you live in New York?’ And then when the Pope died, they called again. And that was it. That’s how it happened.”

At 82, Novello hasn’t lost a step. His opening gambit on Colbert was waving off a mild admonition about his cigarette smoking from the host, countering that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that menthols were actually healthy because they contained Vitamin C and were “good for Polio.” 

He then proclaimed that the film Conclave would have been better if it had been animated like Sonic The Hedgehog, veering from there down an offramp about how hedgehogs are a delicacy in Italy. Finally, he prognosticated that the next pope would be Pope Benedict XVI, who he asserted was not really dead. 

When later challenged about his prediction during an interview for this article (which transpired subsequent to the election of Pope Leo XIV) Novello cheerily replied, “It still could happen!” 

The warm, soft-spoken Novello expressed incredulity at the enthusiasm Sarducci’s re-emergence engendered. “I don’t quite understand it. I didn’t realize it had been that long. But yeah, I thought the reaction was great. I was very happy about it.”

While the outpouring of appreciation may have surprised Novello, it’s no great wonder. To this day, Sarducci still holds the SNL record for most appearances by a fictional character. For viewers of a certain age, seeing him back on late-night television as witty and eccentric as ever was akin to running into an old friend. This is the story of Father Guido Sarducci.

****

Don Novello was born on January 1st, 1943 in Ashtabula, Ohio to an Italian-American father and an Irish-American mother. He grew up in Lorain, Ohio, which Novello describes as “An immigrant town. It was a steel town and everybody’s grandparents had accents.” 

Novello adds, “My grandfather was a shoemaker and my dad, who was born in Ohio, went to medical school in Italy. Then my dad opened an office like three blocks from where he was born. And most of his patients were Italian.”  

As Novello describes his relationship to religion in his youth, “I was raised Catholic and I went to church all the time, but I didn’t go to Catholic school. If you were in public school, then you had to go to catechism, like on Thursday afternoon or something after regular school. All the Catholic kids went. And then in high school they had something else called the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine. But I never took it that seriously.” 

After matriculating all through school in Lorain, Novello attended the University of Dayton. He reflects, “It was a Catholic school, so we had to take religion and philosophy and all that. But I got more interested in it and started reading more when I started doing comedy.”

In hindsight, Novello regards the year of college he spent in Rome in a program from Loyola of Chicago as especially transformative. “That’s where I studied Italian.” He was there during the last ecumenical council, also known as Vatican II. “It was a great time to be there. We met the Pope. It was John XXIII at that time.” 

Novello says that’s also where he encountered the priest who planted the seed of Sarducci in his imagination. “Yeah. Father Felice. He was a smoker and ended up marrying a student. And then they named the school after him, which is amazing! He was from Malta, not Italian. But he was the guy that I kind of based it on.” 

Still, at that time, a career in comedy was not yet in Novello’s sights. He attended grad school in Arizona and then began down a different career path. 

“I got a job in advertising. I started in the mail room of McCann-Erickson in New York. I wanted to be an account executive. But then in the late sixties, that was a time when it was real exciting to be on the creative side of advertising. So I got a job as a copywriter and I went to Cleveland. I worked there for a year and then I worked for Leo Burnett in Chicago. I was there like three-and-a-half years. So I worked, all together, like about five years in advertising.”

Ultimately, Novello’s creative ambitions took him to California. “I was working on a rock opera, called ‘Special Eddie.’ It was about a guy with two heads. One was a greaser and the other was a hippie. So I quit advertising to sell this rock opera,” Novello explains. 

“I had a good friend named Dave Sheridan, who was an underground cartoonist, and he did the artwork. Dave was up here in the Bay Area, so I was coming up here a lot. I thought I had sold the ‘Special Eddie’ thing and I was moving up here… but then it fell through for like the third time.”

While in Northern California, Novello met writer Matt Neuman, who later worked on a 1975 Lily Tomlin special prior to writing on Saturday Night Live, Fridays and Not Necessarily The News. But before all that, Neuman had a local Bay Area counterculture comedy TV series. 

At Novello’s urging, LateNighter spoke with Neuman. “In 1972, Stuart Birnbaum and I had a TV show called The Chicken Little Comedy Show,” Neuman recalls. “Leon Crosby, who owned the hip FM station KSAN bought KEMO, a UHF channel in San Francisco and he wanted to put on hip programming like he had on radio. So Stuart and I go down there and we convince ’em to give us a show. A friend comes to work on the show. Guy from Chicago. He has a friend who worked in advertising with Don Novello. He said,’I wanna bring the guy over. He’d like to do something.’”

That fortuitous introduction proved to be significant. “I performed for the first time in a sketch called, ‘Europe Is My Beat.’ That’s when I did Sarducci the first time. It was like the gossip columnist,” says Novello. Miraculously, Neuman preserved that very first appearance of Father Guido Sarducci. And just as astonishingly, Novello seemingly dropped into the character right away, despite having literally no experience as a comedian. 

Novello recalls, “I was in some operetta in high school. That was it. I performed like in advertising, presenting commercials and that. I mean, that’s not really performing. But I had that and I was good at that.”  

What’s also remarkable is how the signature elements of the garb were all there. According to Novello, “When I did it on Chicken Little, a friend of mine made the collar. It was made of paper. It wasn’t even real. And then he bought that hat in some costume store.” 

As for the rest of the outfit, Novello says, “I had a pinstripe suit that I wore in advertising. I always kinda liked the way it looked. More like a mafioso priest, you know? I wore that suit and this woman’s opera coat that I bought for seven and a half dollars. And I still use that. I wore it on the Colbert show. Later I wore a cassock for a while and then I had some zebra suits, so I’ve changed that a little bit. But like I say, the cape was always the same.”  

While Novello was contributing Sarducci segments to Chicken Little, he began doing stand up as the character around San Francisco. “I met these girls who were performing in North Beach called the Nicolettes. And they were doing a show like on Sundays at a place called The Intersection. It was all hippies and it held like maybe 50 people at the most. I think it cost 75 cents to get in and half the people snuck in. It was ’73, ’74 but it was really still the sixties, you know?”

Meanwhile, the lure of a slightly more legitimate form of show business drew Novello down to Hollywood. 

In 1973, a friend of Novello’s sent a tape of him as Sarducci to a new national late night show called ABC Comedy News. 

While this short-lived experiment that was part of the network’s Wide World of Entertainment didn’t necessarily create a lasting impression, it suddenly put Novello on a platform alongside comedy elites such as Richard Pryor, Mort Sahl, Dick Gregory, Robert Klein, and Joan Rivers. And the producers Bernie Kukoff and Jeff Harris suggested Novello take his act to the brand new club in town, The  Comedy Store. There he not only sharpened his act, he also forged fast friendships with fellow aspiring comedians Al Franken and Tom Davis.

Around that same time, Novello and Matt Neuman co-wrote “A European (Speaks Up For The U.S.)” a satirical spoken word single for A&M Records to parody Gordon Sinclair’s earnest, jingoistic “The Americans (A Canadian’s Opinion).” 

“It was like a Trump thing,” Novello explains.” But it was a giant hit in like ‘73, like to the world, you have to stand up for America. Listen to them both. Listen to the first one first, his, and then you’ll see it’s almost line for line.”

According to Neuman, “We wanted to do a parody of it. And Stuart Birnbaum’s younger brother Roger was just starting out in a lowly position at A&M Records. So we went over to A&M and Roger was the producer.” 

Conspicuously, when the record was released, the artist was credited as “Guido Sarducci.” Neuman explains, “They wouldn’t put ‘Father’ on the label. He obviously wasn’t a priest. I think that was something that they didn’t want to pretend he was.”

Neuman continues, “The record came out on a Monday and immediately I started getting phone calls from relatives and friends in New York saying, ‘Geez, they’re playing that thing you wrote. It’s on all the time. It’s on the radio.’ And then Tuesday. And then Wednesday. Getting heavy airplay. On Wednesday night, Roger brought over the galleys of the Billboard 100. And I’ll never forget this. It was ’69 with a bullet.’ Meaning shooting up. ‘A European Speaks Up. Guido Sarducci.’ And then there’s a blurb, ‘Could be goofy gold.’ Classic billboard language for ‘could be a big comedy hit.’ We’re celebrating. Thursday morning, we check in at A&M, and Roger says, ‘It’s all over.’ ‘What do you mean it’s all over?’ Apparently the American Italian Anti-Defamation League started hitting the radio stations. The message was offensive to them. They’re right wingers. And that it was being delivered by a guy in an Italian accent made it even worse. All right. It’s over. They’re withdrawing the record. They’re asking for record stores to bring it back and they want the radio stations to return the copies.” 

“What happened next, though, is the best part of the story. It’s one of my favorite show business stories of all time,” laughs Neuman. “Billboard comes out a day or two later. A&M quickly substituted ‘The Lord’s Prayer,’ sung by this Australian nun [Sister Janet Mead]. They put that record in, in place of A European Speaks Up. ’69 with a bullet. Lord’s Prayer’ And the blurb… ’Could be goofy gold!’ They didn’t bother to change the blurb!”  

Although disappointed, Novello was able to capitalize on his three days as a hit recording artist. “I was still on A&M, so I went on a little tour. I hardly did stand up, but because of the record, I played these clubs everywhere that were like the cool places that everybody went. The Cellar Door in DC. The Main Point in Philadelphia. The Cave in Cleveland. I opened for Arlo Guthrie.”

It was during this period that Novello came to the attention of comedian David Steinberg. The Canadian, Second City-trained Steinberg had caused quite a stir in the late sixties on the popular and provocative CBS series The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour by performing satirical scripture-based sermons which supposedly led to the program’s untimely cancellation, despite high ratings. So it was prophetic that Steinberg, a yeshiva-educated son of a rabbi, would seek out and embrace comedy’s newest man of the cloth.   

Novello fondly recalls collaborating with Steinberg. “I was doing a thing in my act about a book that I made up called, ‘Oh, Those Seventies.’ The idea was looking back on the seventies [as if] the seventies were over, but this was like in ‘73. He liked that piece and he talked to me about being on a show that he was gonna do. It never happened, but that’s how I got to know him. But then we did an album called, David Steinberg, Goodbye To The Seventies from the idea that I was doing.” 

That record, written and produced by Steinberg and Novello and released in March 1975, opens with Steinberg roasting Father Guido Sarducci, who, in the conceit of the album, has been elected as Pope Pius XIII in 1979.  

“I thought it was really good,” Novello recalls. “And Dave Sheridan did all the artwork. But nothing happened much to that album. But through David, I met The Smothers Brothers, and that’s when they were just starting to put their show on NBC. And they hired me to be a regular on there.”  

It’s rather ironic considering that, following their banishment in 1969, the return of a Smothers Brothers series to primetime television in 1975 would include a comedic religious figure… via an introduction from the man whose tweaking of the Old Testament contributed to their downfall. But Novello insists he doesn’t recall any pushback from the network nor any outcry from viewers. Even when several of his segments were presented in the form of the sacred Catholic ritual of confessions, satirically positioning Sarducci as a voice of conscience.   

It was on the Smothers show where Father Sarducci received his first regular national TV exposure. And Novello enjoyed his time working alongside a writing staff with some real heavyweights including Bob Einstein, Mason Williams, Mickey Rose, Pat Proft, and Chevy Chase. 

Despite all that talent, the show was short-lived. Novello explains, “They got hooked up with a bad producer, and it wasn’t a good combination. And then they let Tommy [Smothers] produce the last four. Hoyt Axton was on it, Ringo Starr, Lily Tomlin, Linda Ronstadt, Kris Kristofferson. And they were really good. But they didn’t pick it up.”

By the summer of 1975, The Smothers Brothers Show unceremoniously left NBC’s schedule after only 13 episodes. The ground had seemingly shifted under the feet of the one-time groundbreakers. A few months later, the network would launch a late-night franchise on Saturday nights that would forever change the TV comedy-variety form. And with it, the fate and fortune of Father Guido Sarducci. But Novello would not join Saturday Night Live until its third season.  

Following his time on TV with The Smothers Brothers, Novello went on the road with them, performing as Sarducci in clubs and casinos for the next few years. And in 1976, he self-produced a Father Sarducci single called “200 Candles (On a Quarter Pounder Bun)” to commemorate the bicentennial. It’s not only a snapshot of that moment in time, but also an impressive display of Novello’s musical abilities.  

Still, at that time, stardom for Sarducci seemed hardly pre-ordained. 

Novello picked up a few behind the scenes writing gigs, including a staff position on the 1976 CBS TV comedy-variety series Van Dyke and Company. Like The Smothers Brothers Show, the writing team was strong, including, among others, Steve Martin, who was moments from breaking out as a star on his own. But the Dick Van Dyke-fronted series also didn’t even last a year. 

“It was a good show. Andy Kaufman was on there a lot,” says Novello. But as a writer who wasn’t doing anything on camera, he felt far removed from the production. “We worked in some bank building,” he explains. “We never even went to the studio.”

The game changer for Novello was his 1977 book, The Lazlo Letters, in which he once again adopted an alter ego, albeit this time existing only on the page. 

He created the character of Lazlo Toth, a defiantly ignorant right winger who was also a pathological letter writer. The entire volume consists of real correspondences written by this fictional character to political and public figures as well as corporate entities… and their improbable but actual replies. 

The Lazlo Letters was subversive, hilarious and a breakout bestseller. It was also, according to Novello, what inspired Lorne Michaels to offer him a job on the SNL writing team for the 1977-78 season. 

Arriving with the endorsements of his old Comedy Store cohorts Franken and Davis, Novello joined Brian Doyle Murray as the first new hires to the staff since Jim Downey joined in 1976. However, Novello was hired solely as a writer. There was no understanding or even discussion of him appearing as Sarducci or as a performer in any way.  

Still, Novello made meaningful creative contributions from the outset. Early in his tenure, he wrote the first “Olympia Cafe” sketch, famous for the instantly infectious rhythmic refrain of “cheeseburger cheeseburger.” And, as many of the writers were often cast in bit parts, so too was Novello throughout the season, as in the “Samurai Night Fever” sketch, starring John Belushi doing a mash-up of Toshiro Mifune and John Travolta, alongside host O.J. Simpson. 

Novello chortles, “There’s one sketch in there where he has a knife and it’s just like, what?! OJ with a knife?! But yeah, I was in ‘Samurai Night Fever’ as an extra sitting there between John and Danny [Aykroyd].”

Several weeks later, on an episode hosted by Michael Sarrazin, Novello suffered an unfortunate accident while appearing on camera in another sketch. “Yeah. That’s where I fell,” Novello recalls. “It was supposed to be ice skating, so they didn’t show our feet, but we were wearing roller skates and I fell and broke my hip in dress.” 

With the season drawing to a close, perhaps out of sympathy, Michaels gave Novello a spot to perform stand up as Father Guido Sarducci. So on May 13, 1978, the character made his SNL debut. “I’m on crutches. And it was at the very end of the season and it’s at the very end of the show. And then I was on crutches for like two or three months after that.”

Sarducci opens by explaining that the crutches were the result of a motorcycle accident. He says he was run over by a nun on a Vespa. Then he launches into a routine that is bold even by today’s standards. He talks about newly discovered evidence revealing the existence of Jesus’ younger stepbrother, Billy Christ. 

Then, Sarducci lays out how life is a job, for which God pays you at the end, deducting for every itemized sin from that total. It’s brilliant… and perhaps just a bit blasphemous. But Novello maintains that he received no notes to change anything and the show heard nothing from the Church or viewers. 

“Honestly, they had no complaints. Maybe it was the time period that people weren’t watching. But It was really surprising with the subject matter and Catholicism. Especially that piece about paying for your sins. You know, ‘Masturbation’s 35 cents.’ You know what I mean?”

It is also worth noting that, at the top of the show, he was billed as Father Guido Sarducci. Not Don Novello. This would continue to be the case for him going forward. On SNL and elsewhere. Novello insists that was his choice. “It’s what I wanted. I wanted it to be more real.” 

While there is a rich history of comedians appearing in the guise of an alter ego from Harry Einstein’s Parkyakarkus to his son Bob Einstein’s Super Dave Osborne, it was hardly the norm. Especially not on SNL. But one could easily assert that it was Novello’s warm, gentle, grounded portrayal of the character that gave him permission to get away with as much as he did. 

In fact, in his book Saturday Night Live: Equal Opportunity Offender, legendary NBC censor Bill Clotworthy detailed how troublesome religion historically was as a topic for programming, citing Father Sarducci as a notable exception. “I’ve always suspected that the Catholic Church was secretly delighted to be so humanized, he wrote.”  

Season three of SNL concluded the following week and Novello hobbled off on his crutches. But over the summer, events transpired that would precipitate Sarducci’s swift return to the show. In a big way. Pope Paul VI had reigned as the head of the Catholic Church from June 21, 1963 until his death on August 6, 1978. Pope John Paul I was then elected on August 26. But his pontificate was historically brief, lasting only 33 days, as he died on September 28. 

SNL season four commenced on October 7 and Pope John Paul II was elected on October 16. Five days later, Father Guido Sarducci made his debut as a correspondent on “Weekend Update” to report on the situation. Slyly, the production team had set up all of the clocks behind the “Update” desk to show the time in Warsaw. A clever nod to the new Polish Pope. The stage was, quite literally, set.  

Father Sarducci’s segment was a subversive secularization of the campaigning at the conclave. His report consisted of holding up American style political pins bearing slogans in Latin. Among those he claimed had thrown their zucchettos in the ring included a pair of cardinals who were running as a tag team, offering to serve as Pope on alternating days as well as the 106-year-old Cardinal Dario Fungi, who was running as a short-term compromise in the event of a deadlock, buying the conclave a little extra time to decide on someone else before his inevitable natural expiration.  

That episode was hosted by trailblazing rock icon Frank Zappa. When asked what memories of that show leapt to mind, the first thing Novello recalls is, “a lot of people thought I was Zappa.” Apparently, as the character was still new to many, the resemblance between the two Italian-American men with mustaches was strong enough to create confusion.  

Zappa’s stint as host and musical guest lives in SNL infamy due to his stilted acting in sketches, allegedly precluding from Zappa ever being invited back. Novello offered his reflections in hindsight. 

“I felt bad about that Frank Zappa show, because I was a fan of Zappa’s. He wasn’t used to reading cards. I saw on some show he talked about it. When I was on The Smothers Brothers show, no one showed me anything. It was only when I got on Saturday Night Live did I learn how to use cards. And Bill Murray told me,” Novello explains. 

“You don’t speak your lines when you’re reading from the cards. You read the card when you’re not talking. Then you turn to look at the other person when you talk. I had no idea. But Zappa made fun of it out of desperation. Like he was Dean Martin obviously reading the card. But the other people didn’t know he was gonna do that.”

Three episodes later, on a stronger show hosted by Carrie Fisher with musical guest The Blues Brothers, Novello returned to “Update” as Sarducci, this time pitching Americans to invest in the Vatican bank and offering various premiums, including his book “A Guide To The Confessional,” which he says will help those who want to game the system, promising, “You can screw around your whole life and still get to heaven.”  

Quickly gaining popularity, Sarducci returned two episodes later, and again only two episodes after that. It’s already his fourth appearance of the season and arguably one of his all time best. Sporting a black sombrero, Sarducci spins the yarn of having traveled to Mexico with the Pope’s entourage and having returned with a rare artifact: the bill from the Last Brunch. 

Novello recalls, “My idea was the bill for the Last Supper. You know, that was the idea. And the censor [Clotworthy] says, ‘You can’t do that. You can’t say the Last Supper.’ And we settled on the Last Brunch, which was much funnier.”

By the end of season four, Sarducci had appeared on seven of twenty episodes and was clearly a breakout star. So much so that when Lorne Michaels set out to produce Gilda Radner’s one woman Broadway show, Sarducci was invited to perform at multiple points in between her scenes. 

Gilda Live on Broadway ran during SNL’s summer hiatus at the Winter Garden Theater and would later be faithfully adapted and forever preserved in the Mike Nichols directed film, Gilda Live.  

When reflecting back on that show, Novello speaks with particular warmth. “I was really happy to be part of it. That was a lot of fun. And working with Gilda was just great, you know? She was unbelievable. No one like her.”

Following Radner’s first two sketches, Sarducci took the stage pushing the oft-referenced 106 year old Cardinal Fungi in a wheelchair. “You know, that was a real guy that played Fungi in that chair! People didn’t know if it was a doll or not. He was a really nice guy. He would just meditate and mostly he wouldn’t move,” chuckled Novello.

Just as the stage show curated many of Radner’s most beloved SNL characters, it also was a prime showcase for Sarducci. Novello is quick to agree. “I think I did some of my best pieces in that.” One outstanding example was his “Five Minute University” routine, based on the notion that Sarducci had to open a school that would offer students in five minutes everything they would remember five years after graduating from a four year college.  

Novello adds, “They wanted us to do an album together, but then we did two separately. She did an album, and I did an album.” Both produced by Lorne Michaels, the Gilda Live soundtrack and Father Guido Sarducci Live at St. Douglas Convent went on to be nominated for the Best Comedy Recording Grammy Award in 1980, competing alongside Richard Pryor, Monty Python and the ultimate winner, Rodney Dangerfield. 

Later that year, Novello’s label, Warner Bros. Records, released his holiday single “I Won’t Be Twisting This Christmas” with his version of the Richard Harris classic “MacArthur Park” sung in Italian on the flipside.

With SNL stars Aykroyd and Belushi now gone, Sarducci returned for season five a fan favorite, ready to take on an expanded role. Of course he continued on “Weekend Update” and his report on the season premiere on October 13, 1979 remains one of his most memorable. 

Following the first visit by Pope John Paul II to the United States only days earlier, Sarducci’s comment on all the media sensationalism was his “Find The Popes In The Pizza” contest. A close up of a slice of pizza appeared on screen while viewers searched for hidden images of all 264 popes. Only one was clearly visible. Sarducci cautioned, “Some are easy to find, some are hard.” And “Most of the popes have red faces.” 

Novello recalls how the elements of that segment came to be. “I found that visual of the pizza outside some travel office when I was working on Van Dyke and Company. So I had that. And then my parents were on some cruise ship and some Italian guy was singing ‘On The Sunny Side of the Street’ on one of those cruise albums you could buy. So that’s where I got that song. Yeah, that was one of my favorite pieces.”

As the season pressed on, Sarducci was utilized in increasingly innovative ways.

On January 26, 1980, the show broke format with a cold open that took the form of  a “Weekend Update Special Report” about Paul McCartney having been arrested in Tokyo for possession. 

It is explained that they have sent a correspondent to Japan with a suitcase full of marijuana, hoping that he’d be arrested and jailed with the former Beatle. But the plan went awry when McCartney was released just before their reporter was taken into custody. Cut to a captive Sarducci reading from a prepared statement, naturally concluding with “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night.”

While Novello was not really in Tokyo, this joke would have a momentous payoff on the penultimate episode of the season. 

On May 17, 1980, the show once again opened with a “Weekend Update Special Report.” Jane Curtin announced it was Paul McCartney’s 122nd day without marijuana and she then threw to Sarducci, via satellite, positioned outside McCartney’s office in London. With his hair in cornrows, a la Bo Derek in the movie 10, Sarducci stood vigil in front of the building for the duration of the broadcast, which kept cutting back to him as he waited for the rock icon to emerge, occasionally throwing coins and rocks at the window.

According to Novello, he and SNL director Jim Signorelli really traveled to England. It was really 4:30am London time. And that was really McCartney’s office in the West End. But because the show wasn’t known for stunts like that, once they got into position, Novello said they began to worry. 

“It was live. But when we got there, where his offices were, it looked like New York. And we thought nobody would believe we’re in London. So they started dressing it. What saved it was that the sun came up. It started getting light at the end.”

Sarducci used various strategies to coax McCartney outside, including singing a medley of Beatles songs. Eventually Paul and his wife Linda emerged in their bathrobes for his first-ever appearance on SNL. Novello recalls that McCartney had been reluctant, but “Linda was pushing him to do it.” 

The running joke of their interview was that Sarducci tried to make every question about marijuana and Paul playfully deflected each one. But Novello saved the best for his last question. 

“I say, ‘Paul, I gotta ask you something. I know you’re not gonna like it.’ And you think I’m gonna ask him, ‘Will the Beatles get back together,’ right? And he looks at her like, ‘You see?’ And then I say, ‘If you could be any animal, what would you be?’ When I asked him that, he smiled and she’s like, ‘See, I told you.’ It was a big hit.”  

The following week was the season five finale and the last SNL with the original team. Lorne Michaels, the cast, and the writers all left (Michaels would return five seasons later). But since Novello had created Sarducci prior to being hired on the show, he was free to do him anywhere and everywhere he wanted. And throughout the 1980s, there seemed to be no shortage of media opportunities for Father Guido Sarducci.

On April 3, 1981, Sarducci hosted the ABC weekly comedy-variety series Fridays. Although critically derided as a cheap SNL rip-off, the show was not without its redeeming qualities, which Novello still remembers with pride. 

“That was a really good show. When I hosted that, I did it with Dawn [Tony Orlando’s two  female back up singers]. Any sketches I was in, they would just be there, you know? It was pretty funny. And then there was this sketch called ‘Fistful of Darwin’ that was written by Larry David and this other writer. It was really a good sketch. And they wrote it. I didn’t. I think I had very little to do with it. It was about the evolution of God. You know, that man evolved and also God evolved. And I had this chart. It was like a God that used utensils and then a God that stood up upright. And then there was another sketch that Larry David wrote called [‘In the eyes of the Woodsman’]. But it was like surreal. It was really funny.”

Novello has come to believe that his old SNL boss wasn’t thrilled that he’d taken that gig. “I think Lorne resented it that I hosted Fridays. I think that’s why George Carlin never hosted the show again [under Michaels]. And I couldn’t understand why. And I think it was because he did Fridays. I mean, you’d think if he’d be mad at anybody, it would be Bernie Brillstein, you know? That he was executive producer of Fridays. You’d think that would be something to resent. He was Lorne’s manager.”

Weeks later, on May 1, 1981, news broke that, while working in Italy, Novello got into some trouble with the authorities. In fact, one could say the highest authority. 

Novello explains, “I was doing an article for an Italian-American magazine called Attenzione. You know, comedy. The idea was I’d go to a number of places in Rome. Coliseum, Villa Borghese, and then the Vatican. And there was a guy named Paul Solomon, who was a very good photographer, and they brought him over too. And so, we’re there in St. Peter’s Square, and I’m screwing around, standing in front of the Swiss Guard thinking nothing of it. And Paul says, ‘Let’s go see if we can get into the Vatican, you know, behind the gates, to the offices of L’Osservatore Romano.’ And I said, ’They’re never gonna let us in.’ And he said, ‘Well, let’s just try.’ So we go in the car to the gate there and they didn’t ask us anything. They waved us in, we drove in and parked and they arrested us. We were set up. They saw we were screwing around. And they kept us for about six hours and then turned us over to the Italian police.”

As reported by UPI, “Vatican police ‘collared’ Father Guido Sarducci of NBC TV’s Saturday Night Live for impersonating a priest and entering the Vatican without authorization.” The coverage indicated that the Swiss Guard initially mistook him for an actual priest. Novello believes they had no idea who he was. 

“They took my cape and turned it over to the Italian police and they questioned us. They kept us as long as they could without keeping us overnight. So they said, ‘You have two weeks to leave Italy.’ And I said, ‘Well, we were gonna go to Sicily and visit some relatives.’ And then they said, ‘Okay, three weeks.’” When it was all over, Novello said, “They dropped the charges.”

Back in New York, SNL was recovering from a challenging year. After Jean Doumanian took over and was quickly replaced by Dick Ebersol as Lorne Michaels’ successor during the sixth season, the show was starting to get some traction again in season seven. As Eddie Murphy’s star began to rise, Bill Murray came back to host the Christmas show. And he brought his old friend Father Guido Sarducci along to discuss his psychic predictions, including one that the Earth would be invaded by a race of aliens disguised as Chiclets.  

Sarducci would appear on SNL twice more during the Ebersol years. Both times in season nine, and both times as host. Although Novello is quick to clarify, “They say I hosted twice, but (the second time) there were like five people hosting.” 

Yes, on May 12, 1984, the SNL season finale was co-hosted by five of that season’s earlier hosts: Billy Crystal, NYC Mayor Ed Koch, newscaster Edwin Newman, Hill Street Blues star Betty Thomas, and Father Guido Sarducci. 

But on that jam-packed finale, Novello contributed a pre-taped segment that was a masterclass in improvisation. 

He stood with a microphone on a New York City street and interviewed drivers as they stopped for a red light. “Steve Allen used to always do the Man on the Street. But this was the Man in the Street. I thought it was clever because if you’re just talking to someone, it’s like, how do you get ’em to move on? But because the light would change, they would have to take off and then new cars would come up,” Novello explains.

Having Sarducci visit SNL during that period gave it a sense of continuity. And Novello recalls it feeling familiar to him as well. “It was pretty much run the same. (Longtime original SNL director) Davey Wilson was still there. And Ebersol was nice to me.” 

But Novello’s full time return for what has retroactively been branded “The Weird Year” would be another story.   

Lorne Michaels coming back to SNL for season eleven in 1985 should have felt like a homecoming. Especially considering that he brought back stalwarts Al Franken, Tom Davis and Jim Downey to serve as his key lieutenants, with Novello back on staff. But the season was infamously miserable and Novello was among those in misery. 

“They asked me to come back and everybody’s like, ‘We’re gonna have a lot of fun.’ And then I went back and they were like some old time producers. They didn’t really try to work much with the staff or anything. They ran it like when I worked on Van Dyke and Company. We never went to the studio and we didn’t have much to say. And it had a good writing staff, but it was really a hard cast to write for. It just didn’t work together. But individually, Randy Quaid was great. He always gets put down, but boy, he was good. And [Jon] Lovitz was on it and good. It was a real disappointment. I really hated that year,” says Novello.

Nevertheless, Sarducci made several memorable appearances on the show that season. 

On November 23, 1985, new “Weekend Update” anchor Dennis Miller welcomed back Sarducci, who entered boldly attired and with a big announcement: He had left both the church and his job at L’Osservatore Romano to start his own religion,“The People’s Catholic Church.” Renaming himself Pope Maurice, he insisted that he just be called “Maurice,” declaring that in his church, everybody’s pope. It was an ironically egalitarian editorial, considering Novello felt the year was plagued by frustrating layers of hierarchy.  

When season eleven ended with the show teetering on the brink of cancellation, Michaels made sweeping changes. And Novello did not return. 

Sarducci appeared on SNL only three more times. Once in 1989, once in 1993 and lastly on October 7, 1995 on an episode hosted by Chevy Chase, occurring just days before the 20th anniversary of SNL’s first broadcast. 

Fittingly, it was on that nostalgic night that Sarducci filed his final report on “Weekend Update.” Novello recalls, “I did a piece about the Pope losing his wallet in the park. Which I thought was a pretty funny idea. We opened up on all these nuns with flashlights and then we find the wallet (full of) euros and francs and marks. It’s all bulgy, you know, with different currencies.”

Amazingly, even though it has been 30 years since his last appearance, Father Guido Sarducci still holds the SNL record for the most-utilized fictional character in the show’s history—racking up 42 unique segments occurring in 25 episodes, edging out both Dana Carvey’s Church Lady (at 24 episodes) and Will Forte’s MacGruber (at 29 segments).

Beyond SNL, Sarducci was ubiquitous in late night, filling the guest seat on all the major talk shows for many years, including at least ten appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson between 1983 and 1990.

Novello says of Johnny Carson, “He was just great to work with. I mean, just the best. When you did that show, he just wanted you to do good. I never felt any other host was like that. He was just all there for you, you know? What a wonderful guy.” 

Carson’s appreciation for Sarducci was especially unique given that the legendary Tonight Show host didn’t usually have performers on in the guise of a character. Novello acknowledged the rarity of that occurrence, offering the caveat, “In the beginning it was hard for me to get on there. But he felt that he had to make people know that he didn’t think I was a real priest. He was afraid that the audience would really think he thought I was a real priest.”

Sarducci was also a frequent guest on Late Night with David Letterman. But his appearance on August 27, 1985 was particularly noteworthy. For a couple of reasons. 

That night, James Brown was also a guest. Being the hardest working man in show business, Brown was enlisted to also serve as the announcer at the top of the show, billboarding Novello’s character simply as “Father Sarducci!” 

“That was so bizarre,” Novello recalls. “They said to me, right before the show, ‘James Brown is gonna do the opening intros, but he doesn’t wanna announce you.’ And I’m like, ‘What?’ ‘No, he doesn’t wanna announce you. He has some reason.’ But then he did! He didn’t wanna say, ‘Guido.’ That’s what I found out later. I saw him right before I’m gonna perform. He says, ‘I’m really sorry. I have a friend named Guido in Florida, and I think if I say Guido, he may think I’m making fun of him.’ That’s what he said. It’s so weird. And I’m thinking, ‘I can’t believe it. I’m talking to James Brown!’ You know? ‘Good God!’”

The other possibly significant aspect from that same episode is that while promoting his direct-to-video special Father Guido Sarducci Goes To College, Sarducci mentioned that his tape was the tenth most rented video in the Vatican. He then launched into a funny list of the top ten videos in the Vatican. (The others being two Bing Crosby films, three collections of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, a pair of Jane Fonda workout tapes and a couple of less family-friendly titles.) 

Novello says, “I always thought I kind of had something to do with that whole Top 10 list. They weren’t doing that before I did that. No one’s ever mentioned that, but I thought that’s where they got the idea. I don’t know.” 

As it turns out, Letterman’s now iconic Top Ten list made its on-air debut just three weeks later, on September 18, 1985.

All through the ‘80s, Sarducci remained a pop culture fixture, He appeared in music videos with everyone from Jefferson Starship to Rodney Dangerfield. He guested on sitcoms like Square Pegs and It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, courtesy of original SNL writers Anne Beatts and Alan Zweibel, respectively. He released another Warner Brothers album in 1986 titled Breakfast in Heaven. And then there was his Cinemax comedy special Father Guido Sarducci’s Vatican Inquirer: The Pope’s Tour in 1987, guest starring Tony Bennett.

Sarducci’s visibility continued through the ‘90s, but then slowly began to taper off. Following a  brief benediction on the National Mall in Washington D.C at Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s  “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” on October 30, 2010, Sarducci didn’t appear on television again until his shot with Colbert a few weeks ago. 

When asked if this might be the beginning of a comeback, Novello humbly replies, “Well, you know, I’m open to ideas if somebody calls me.”

Considering that there’s a brand new American pope and that you can fit even more popes in a Chicago-style deep dish pizza, perhaps we will be seeing more of Father Guido Sarducci soon. May it be so and may he live longer than Cardinal Fungi.  

Arrivederci America.  

Get stories like this in your inbox: Sign up for LateNighter’s free daily newsletter.