Lew Morton’s first job out of college was about as high-pressure as it gets: writing for Saturday Night Live during one of the most turbulent periods in the show’s history.
On this week’s episode of LateNighter’s Inside Late Night podcast, Morton—who went on to write for NewsRadio, Futurama, Silicon Valley, VEEP, and Beavis & Butt-Head—looks back at his 1993–1995 tenure at SNL, when a wave of veteran writers had just exited and a new, largely inexperienced staff was thrown into the deep end.
“I was 22… I had no idea what was going on,” Morton tells Mark Malkoff. “I was just trying to keep my head above water.”
Morton was hired straight out of the Harvard Lampoon, submitting six sketches—two of them commercial parodies, which he believes helped him stand out. One of those pieces made it to air almost immediately, and he landed two sketches in his very first episode.
That season, he says, felt less like a unified creative effort and more like survival. “It didn’t feel like a ‘we need to improve the show’ environment,” Morton recalls. “It was more like, ‘I need to get my sketch on.’”
Still, he found an early ally in cast member Rob Schneider, with whom he frequently collaborated. One of Morton’s proudest pieces from that period—a subway busker who insists he doesn’t want money while singing increasingly desperate lyrics—remains, in his view, “probably the best sketch I ever wrote.”
The conversation is packed with behind-the-scenes stories from a notoriously challenging era. Morton remembers writing sketches for non-actors like Charles Barkley and Nancy Kerrigan, dealing with live animals that refused to cooperate, and watching sketches collapse in real time when the cultural mood shifted midweek.
Morton also offers a vivid look at the writers’ room culture under then-head writer Jim Downey, whom he describes as a singular comedic mind. “If you got five minutes of his time, he would write the funniest joke in your sketch,” Morton says, recalling how Downey would build sketches line-by-line, repeatedly acting them out from the beginning.
He also spent time contributing jokes to “Weekend Update” during Norm Macdonald’s early run—until Macdonald publicly claimed to write the segment himself. “We were like… we could sleep,” Morton jokes of the writers who quietly stopped helping.
Beyond the chaos, Morton remembers the experience as an invaluable education. “You learn a lot,” he says. “It’s kind of the best first job you can have.”
After leaving SNL following the show’s 1995 season reset, Morton quickly found his footing in scripted television, eventually becoming part of some of comedy’s most influential writers’ rooms.
But for all the ups and downs, his memories of SNL remain vivid—especially the surreal ones.
“Between sketches, they’re dragging donkeys across the floor,” he recalls. “That’s show business. Some weeks, you gotta drag a donkey.”
Click the embed above to listen to Lew Morton’s’s full conversation with Mark Malkoff now, or find Inside Late Night on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
