Unflappable: How The Real Rosie Shuster Helped Shape Saturday Night Live

Countless people made Saturday Night Live the comedy institution it is today. But the late-night sketch show may not have made it a year—let alone 50—without Rosie Shuster.

Moviegoers are getting a glimpse of Shuster’s work—and impact—on the sketch series in Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, with Rachel Sennott stepping into her vintage shoes.

For the film, which dramatizes the 90 minutes leading up to SNL’s debut episode on October 11, 1975, Sennott found inspiration not just in Shuster’s comedy but in her unflappable, quick-witted personality.

“It felt like she was calm, like the eye of the storm, and anything that anyone threw at her she could take it and pivot or figure it out,” Sennott told Paper. “She was ahead of her time and so smart. All the women of SNL in that period were the beginning of so many generations of women in comedy.”

Shuster was one of three women on the writing staff when the series debuted in 1975. During her tenure, she helped bring classic characters like the Killer Bees and Roseanne Roseannadanna to life, sometimes over the objections of what was undoubtedly a boys’ club. Her working and romantic partnership with SNL creator Lorne Michaels influenced the show long after she left to write other seminal comedies like The Larry Sanders Show. No wonder she gets the star treatment in Saturday Night.

Shuster may be associated with an iconic American TV show, but she came from Canadian comedy royalty. Her father was Frank Shuster, a comic who frequented radio and television with his partner Johnny Wayne. The men were regular guests on The Ed Sullivan Show, beating out the puppet mouse Topo Gigio for most appearances. Rosie remembered listening to the pair craft jokes in her family’s den through the vent in her childhood bedroom, drawing inspiration from their rapport and raucous laughter.

“It was all there for me to slide into,” Shuster told the Toronto Star in 1988. “It was absolutely reflexive to me; it became the most natural thing to do.”

Her father gained another young disciple when teenage Lorne Michaels entered Rosie’s orbit. She has long claimed the future SNL creator followed her home from school one day, sparking a romance that would span both of their early comedy careers and the launch of NBC’s now-legendary sketch show. Frank Shuster served as a mentor to his future son-in-law; Lorne and Rosie married in 1967.

The couple cut their comedic chops at the Canadian Broadcasting Company before moving to Los Angeles. Michaels landed a job at Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, where Shuster apparently penned a few uncredited monologues. They both contributed material to Lily Tomlin’s early comedy specials. And when Shuster wasn’t especially proud of her work on a TV show, she blamed it on her pseudonym, Sue Denim.

Sue Denim, not Rosie Shuster, was also the one alongside Michaels when he met with NBC executive Dick Ebersol in 1975 about developing a new live comedy show. (“Rosie loved having these various names,” Ebersol recalled in Live from New York, noting that the couple also neglected to mention their marriage for most of the meeting.) With the network’s greenlight, Shuster and Michaels began assembling a cast and writers’ room, pulling from the staff of National Lampoon and mutual professional acquaintances. Their romantic relationship had already begun disintegrating, but their working partnership was far from over.

“We were together and apart, together and apart,” Shuster recalled in We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy. “We were not particularly together when the show started, but he still wanted me to do it and we had to discuss how that was going to go, because it was a show that, on one level, was what we had been talking about all our lives. I felt like it was my birthright, like I have to show up and do it.”

Shuster churned out beloved recurring characters, often collaborating with writer Anne Beatts. There was Baba Wawa, a send-up of Barbara Walters; Lisa and Todd, the teen nerd power couple; and “Weekend Update” regular Roseanne Roseannadanna, all of whom provided ample fuel for the show’s rising star Gilda Radner. Shuster penned less savory people, too, like Buck Henry’s pervy Uncle Roy. (Sketches featuring the creepy babysitter did not make the migration to the internet.)

“To me, comedy writing was all about flirting with taboos and seeing how far you could push it,” Shuster said in Live from New York. “Not just gratuitously, though; it had to be funny.”

Shuster also worked on the Killer Bees, one of the show’s earliest recurring bits. Cast members would pop up in goofy black-and-yellow bumblebee costumes at every opportunity—much to the annoyance of cast member John Belushi.

“You cannot put an actor in a bee costume and say, well, that funny dress will make up for weak writing,” he told the Oakland Tribune in 1976.

Belushi represented a giant stumbling block for Shuster and Beatts. Though the star was not the only one contributing to the chauvinistic atmosphere in Studio 8H at the time, he was perhaps the biggest offender. Belushi was known to tank sketches written by women by reading them quietly at rehearsals or refusing to play his part. One role he turned down was a “beefcake” that host Lily Tomlin catcalls in the 1975 “Hard Hats

Shuster enjoyed better relationships with some of the other men on set, including writer Jim Downey, who obscured her contributions to get Belushi onboard with their sketches, and cast member Dan Aykroyd, whom she dated for several years. She also collaborated with Dana Carvey on his breakout “Church Lady” sketches in the mid-’80s, drawing inspiration from judgmental WASPs she knew back home in Toronto. 

By that point, Shuster was already in and out of the writers’ room. She joined the mass exodus of cast and crew—including Michaels—in 1980, only to return with him in 1985 and then leave for good in 1988.

Shuster continued working with Beatts outside the halls of NBC on Radner’s Broadway show Gilda Live and the teen sitcom Square Pegs, starring Sarah Jessica Parker. In 1988, she landed a job on a Superman TV special; it was a fitting gig for the cousin of the comic’s creator, Joe Shuster (not to mention a longtime friend of Hollywood’s origial Lois Lane, Margot Kidder). 

Shuster also wrote for Carol Burnett and The Larry Sanders Show, for which she received her eighth Emmy nomination. All of her other nods, including two wins, were for Saturday Night Live.

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  1. Richard Howell says:

    I remember watching ‘Wayne and Shuster’ in the 50’s.