You might have thought that every aspect of Saturday Night Live had been plumbed for laughs and profundity during the bacchanal of 50th anniversary celebrations last February.
But no: the new documentary Downey Wrote That, which drops on Peacock today, proves the well isn’t quite dry yet.
That it’s saying something new about a writer—not a cast member, not a host, not a musical guest, but a writer—might sound like a barrel-scraping exercise, or maybe a 10-to-1 a.m. Kyle Mooney sketch that got cut from at dress rehearsal.
Even the subject himself seems to think so. Early in the film, he says, “There’s nothing the public hates more than looking at or listening to a writer talk.”
But the next hour defies that analysis. Because Jim Downey—no matter how obscure his name and face may be to most of the show’s fans, past or present—is a legend at SNL, every bit as much as Murray, Radner, Ferrell, or McKinnon.
If you’re going to make a documentary about the person who writes the jokes instead of the one who delivers them, this is one of the few truly worthy subjects.
Downey spent roughly 32 years on and off the show, working with various casts, starting with the iconic mid-’70s crew and continuing through stints with the Hartmans, Sandlers, Macdonalds, and Rudolphs.
He was so respected that cast members felt lucky just to say his lines: “I am a bar fly.” “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.” “Remember when you were with the Beatles?” “Lord and Lady Doucebag.”
Downey wrote so many classic sketches that the film could easily have worked as a highlight reel.
That certainly would have been simpler than trying to explain what made his comedy so distinctive—or to show how he worked. (There are plenty of shots of him jotting notes on scripts or yellow legal pads, and sometimes erasing them later.)
Yet the explaining part has real merit—remarkably so, since there’s usually nothing more nonsensical than trying to explain a joke.
But something clicks when John Mulaney describes Downey’s knack for “someone laboriously explaining something that doesn’t need explanation,” illustrated by that commercial parody for “First CityWide Change Bank,” where a clerk details all the ways the bank can change a twenty.
“We can give you two tens. We can give you a ten and two fives…” (On that rare occasion, the clerk was played by a young Jim Downey himself.)
How important was Downey to the show? Maya Rudolph says, “His language lives here, and without that language so much of the place would not have been established.”
Or, in the opinion that most matters, Lorne Michaels: “More than anyone, at least for the first 20 years, he became the voice of the show.”
That’s no small thing, even if Downey’s name is unfamiliar to 90 percent—or more—of the people who have watched SNL over the past 50 years.
Who is he? Jim Downey is the prototype of the TV comedy writer of the Boomer generation: the Harvard Lampoon guy who went on to create some of television’s most enduring late-night comedy.
Another of those guys, Conan O’Brien, does much of the interviewing in the film. He and fellow host-legend David Letterman elevate Downey to the pinnacle—a one-of-a-kind comedy writer who took TV places it hadn’t gone before.
Downey did that not only for SNL but also for David Letterman, serving as head writer for Letterman’s Late Night in the 1980s.
That was a relatively brief detour from Lorne Michaels’ orbit, but long enough to produce wildly original work—like the extended “world’s largest vase” saga, which included a black-tie unveiling, a changing of the guard, a radio tower on top of the vase, and even a book of “Children’s Letters to the World’s Biggest Vase.”
Downey returned to SNL when Michaels came back from his five-year interregnum and stayed for a long stretch—until another brief departure that ended with Michaels re-hiring him specifically to handle political satire.
That led to another golden era, from Ross Perot (Dana Carvey) twanging ideas to Larry King, to debate sketches so memorable they became cultural touchstones.
“Governor Palin?” Cut to Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, flute in hand. “Oh, are we not doin’ the talent portion?”
The most famous of them all was Gore v. Bush in 2000, which ended with their signature lines: “lock box” and “strategery.” The latter literally entered the national lexicon.
But perhaps the most fertile and funny period of Downey’s career came through his partnership with Norm Macdonald on Weekend Update.
Michaels assigned him to write exclusively for that segment, and it became one of the most consistently hilarious eras in Update history.
Coinciding with the O.J. Simpson trial, the jokes that came from that desk remain among the show’s most daringly potent:
“It was revealed this week that defense attorney Johnny Cochrane once abused his first wife. In his defense, Cochrane said, ‘Hey, at least I didn’t kill her—like some people I know.’”
The O.J. jokes infuriated Simpson’s close friend Don Ohlmeyer, who ran NBC Entertainment. Macdonald was fired. Little-known fact: so was Downey.
As writers of jokes go, this was a singular and storied career.
Everybody remembers it was Will Ferrell who said “strategery” on Saturday Night Live. But sometimes the composer deserves as much fame as the vocalist.
Downey Wrote That is now streaming on Peacock.
They should hire him to come back to teach the current writers how to write a decent sketch.