Alan Zweibel Knows You Want to Talk SNL—And He’s Good With That

He’s won five Emmy Awards, and the prestigious Thurber Prize for comic fiction, but Alan Zweibel knows where every description of his career begins.

“It always starts with: an original Saturday Night Live writer,” Zweibel said. “Those first five years are held in such reverence.”

Zweibel was there from that very first night in 1975, though all the antic and frantic moments from those first five years that are now legendary, so much so that many of them are memorialized in the new film Saturday Night. Like many veterans of that groundbreaking broadcast, Zweibel found himself admiring the movie despite the lax-to-non-existent effort to tell it like it literally was.

“Lorne didn’t find me in a bar when he went for a walk that first night,” Zweibel said, citing one scene from the film in which actor Josh Brener plays Zweibel. “But I think Jason Reitman captured what was going on, the chaos of the whole thing. I thought he did a terrific job.”

Of course, the 50^th anniversary season of SNL has brought many of those who took part in the birthing back to heightened relevance. Zweibel is among the best-remembered and most-admired members of the original writing staff.

He had been working as a deli counter man in his native New York, writing jokes on the side. “I was writing for stand-up comics in the Catskills, seven bucks a joke.” He got a meeting with the then-unknown Lorne Michaels. “I typed up 1100 of my best jokes.”

The first joke on the 1100-strong list is told on “Weekend Update” in the movie—it’s the one about the stamp commemorating prostitution in America. “A 10-cent stamp; but a quarter if you want to lick it.”

Zweibel, 25 years old, was aware that this new TV show was a real long shot, and before he signed on, he was offered much more money for a job in LA, writing jokes for Paul Lynde as the center square on Hollywood Squares.

He wavered. “The SNL thing was 11:30 on a Saturday night. The only people who were going to watch were angry people who weren’t getting laid.”

But Zweibel went with the vision Michaels pitched. “Sketch on TV then was Carol Burnett and Flip Wilson,” Zweibel said. “Bob Mackie gowns, bright lights, no depth on the sets. Lorne described his show as the off-Broadway version of variety.”

So there Alan Zweibel was, on the premiere episode, off camera, waiting to hear Chevy Chase tell his stamp joke. “I’m shitting bricks, of course,” Zweibel said. But “when it got a huge laugh, boy was I struttin’ around.”

That moment told Zweibel something about this new show. “It was kind of a signature. Wow. This show is gonna take some chances.”

It was the start of an unimaginably golden experience. “I went from slicing lox in a delicatessen to an Emmy Award in nine months.”

As it turned out, having the deli on his resume didn’t hurt. A fellow writer, Tom Schiller, had invented the now-celebrated Samurai character for John Belushi to play, in a sketch called “Samurai Hotel.” Michaels wanted to repeat the character when Buck Henry, sidekick in the sketch, returned as host.

Zweibel said: “Lorne came up to me and said, ‘You worked in a deli, right? You think you can write Samurai Deli?’ I went, ‘Oh you bet, boss.’ I walk away and I think: now what am I going to do? What does that even mean?”

The sketch killed. Zweibel wrote all the subsequent iterations, 15 in all, which included “Samurai Tailor,” “Samurai Stockbroker” (especially memorable because Belushi accidentally slashed Henry’s head with his katana sword), “Samurai Optometrist,” and “Samurai Night Fever.”

All the writers looked to write recurring characters, and Zweibel scored big with a character he created with his great friend Gilda Radner: Roseanne Rosannadanna. But he fell short other times. He tried a parody of the cop show Starsky and Hutch, only with a guy named Jean-Paul Sartsky (played by Dan Aykroyd) mixing existential philosophy with his street smarts.

Another one-show effort was called “A*M*I*S*H,” (zinging the M*A*S*H typography) which was, Zweibel said: “About an Amish “Mod Squad.” The initials stood for “Able Men in Search of Harmony. They would read a newspaper because they couldn’t use the police radio. If they read about a bank robbery, they would get up and start walking to the bank. But when they get to the bank it’s like two days later, things would be all cleared up and they’d say: Our work is done here.”

The first sketch he recalled getting on the air was a commercial parody about a room deodorizer for the socially conscious. They didn’t want a spray that used fluorocarbons so they applied the deodorizer with huge roll-ons. “They rolled it on the ceiling and walls. Two people had to roll it.”

Another commercial parody was “Try-Hard 1-11,” a take on the famous DieHard battery ads that showed their car batteries could start an engine in deeply frigid conditions. “I had batteries that started old people’s pacemakers in the cold.”

Zweibel was later tasked with putting together “Weekend Update”. Like everything else in the show, it was subject to constant and instant change in the break between dress rehearsal and the live broadcast. Zweibel was so committed to jokes being up to date he sequestered himself in an NBC office to watch the late local news at 11 p.m. “If something struck me funny, I’d write a joke, and it would be on Update a half-hour later.”

When the show put on its infamous Mardi Gras special in New Orleans, Zweibel was even more up-to-the-second. “I’m under the ‘Weekend Update’ desk, writing jokes and handing them up. Think about the pressure!”

Because of his physical size he became useful in other ways.

“Whenever they needed a large person to have electric shock therapy, or be a dead body, or play the Tin Man going through a metal detector, they’d shove me out there. Here I was the Tin Man, and I’m nervous—I used to get nervous being on air. And Lorne sees me, and he says, ‘You OK?’ And I say, ‘I feel like I’m gonna faint’ And he says, ‘You can’t.’ And I say, “Why not?’ And he says, ‘Because we’re on live TV.’ And I say, ‘You’re right. OK, if I’m going to faint, I’ll do it after.’ ’’

That was, and is, the essence of Saturday Night Live as Zweibel experienced it, and describes it. The show happens, whatever wild or improbable things go on off camera, the show goes on. Live from New York.

“Lorne will just look at an intern and tell them to go to makeup and wardrobe and have them make you look like Lincoln. And then Lincoln is walking around. It’s like a Bergman movie.”