This. Book. Is. Amazing.I have two great loves in my life and they are constantly dueling for my time. Granted, I have an excess of free time due to laziness and not making plans with friends as often as I should, but still, EVERY MOMENT of it is a battle between my two major interests.They are comedy and books.For the first time, I was given an option that was TRULY BOTH. (That’s this book.) I made this book last me for a month plus because I so enjoyed not fighting that battle. (Picture me, tr...

Basically, the first cast all slept around, did drugs because they didn't know any better, and became famous overnight without expecting it. No one understands Lorne. Everyone loves Gilda, Chevy was a pompous jerk, and Jane was just a normal lady with a husband and cat. Later they adopted Bill Murray.The next cast all expected to get famous, and hardly any of them did. Lorne left the show, and so did the rest of America. Eddie Murphy gets discovered, Joe Piscopo becomes creepily possessive of hi...

Journalist James Andrew Miller and television critic Tom Shales compiled the definitive oral history of Saturday Night Live in 2002, a book that was nothing short of a master's program in comedy, writing and stagecraft, as well as the business of TV. Friends with interests in those areas, or who were simply fans of SNL, were lobbied hard by me to read it. Subsequently, and not surprisingly, my copy vanished.In 2014, in time for the 40th anniversary of the longest running variety series in televi...

3.5 stars. An interesting look behind the curtains of one of my favorite shows. It's a bit dated (2002), but just modern enough to include Will Ferrell at least. The format features scores of performers, writers, producers and Lorne Michaels himself all speaking directly on how they've put the show together, and all that has gone right and wrong over the years. It is both revealing and tiring, due to repetition and sheer length. I'd recommend it to people who enjoy the show, but that's about it....

Wow, this took me FOREVER to read. It was in my bathroom, so I only read it sporadically, but STILL. I go to the bathroom EVERY DAY.I think it could have been shorter if it had been edited better. This was only the second "oral history"-stylee book I've read (the other was Gonzo) and it wasn't put together nearly as well. The interstitial writing was so pandering and complimentary that it made me want to barf. And the interviews themselves were very repetitive (newsflash: Lorne Michaels doesn't

Well, I feel like I know more about Lorne Michaels--and how people feel about him--than I'd ever want to know. Why did the authors think he needed his own section?This book was interesting, but the worshipful quality of it was annoying as hell. It's just a TV show. It's not changing the lives of anyone except its stars. But in this book, it's portrayed as one of the most significant things to happen in the U.S. Whoever criticizes the show is wrong, and wrong to do it, and any star who criticizes...

This is an oral history of the iconic comedy show that interviews performers, hosts, writers and producers from the show's first year in 1975 through this book's publication in 2002. Like many of my generation, I grew up badgering my parents to stay up late enough to be able to watch such characters as Roseanne Rosannadanna and The Blues Brothers, then abandoned the show when creator Lorne Michaels and the original cast left 5 years later. Though I didn't start watching it again regularly until

This is a verbal history of Saturday Night Live made of a tapestry of insiders talking. The only major figure from SNL history they couldn't get to talk was Eddie Murphy, but everyone else is here. Ten thoughts on the book:1) Writing about music may be like dancing about architecture but talking about comedy is, for me, really, really interesting. Even if you're only getting one more studied pose from comedians and writers, stuff like this and Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee are almost more fun...

I love this kind of "oral history" approach. Everything told through interviews with the people that lived it. And you're left to weave together the truth and the fiction. SNL is an institution, despite the derision it gets from each new generation of viewers. Taking 90 minutes of television out of the hands of a broadcast media elite in the mid-70s and handing it to what was essentially a bunch of kids to do whatever they want in real time on live television was a huge deal. We take for granted...

When I was a teenager, there was a channel that began replaying SNL from the first episode in 1975, and my dad would record it and we would watch it every night. I watched all of the material from the 1970s while also watching the current shows in the late 80s, and it was fascinating to watch how much had changed, and what had stayed the same. Because Lorne Michaels wasn't at the show from 1980-85, he never allows that era to be reshown, so that will always be a hole in my viewing knowledge of t...

Do you have what it takes?The first time I learned about this book was in looking to find out more about the long and storied history of Saturday Night Live after the 40th Anniversary episode. And a history of the show as told by those who lived it? That's exactly the sort of book I was looking for.My experience with SNL is remarkably limited. I mostly watched the re-runs in high school when they were on cable and really only with the cast I was most familiar with (late 90s and early 2000s). I d...

This was an engrossing and sometimes infuriating read. SNL is an undeniable force in pop culture, launching career after career and influencing the cultural memes, but I still had a hard time dealing with the self-important tone of the authors and the people they interviewed. The overall impression was that they'd been participating in a cult that still held them and the rest of us in thrall. And Lorne Michaels = Jim Jones. The book was fun for the bits of insider-y gossip it offered--everybody

So I feel a little guilty for giving this only three stars because I certainly appreciate the amount of work that went into it, but I've got to stick to my guns on this one. To an SNL nerd like me, the oral history method is a perfect match. Competing memories, disagreements and insights make the reading really dynamic and quick, so even though it clocks in at however many pages it's pretty much a breeze. Here's the thing: Shales nails down the early stuff comprehensively, so even if you don't h...

"Horatio was wiping tears of laughter out of his eyes with a waffle." --Paula Pell, describing the "Debbie Downer" sketch she wrote in which nearly every actor broke character and laughed during the performance"I always said I would love to have done SCTV. There were smarter producers and smarter people involved." --Tim Kazurinsky"I like it when people leave because that's what makes Saturday Night Live work. If you had the same cast that you had from the '70s, this show wouldn't be around." --J...

560 pages of new interviews with the living cast members, past and present, from Saturday Night Live (no old material from the dead), as well as Lorne Michaels and writers. It’s a fairly interesting bit of reading, going from the show’s origins in ‘75 to the 2002 season, and getting views from everyone except Eddie Murphy, who will not talk about the show ever for some reason. There’s a lot of gossip, anecdotes about the crazy all-night sessions, backstage sex, backstabbing, and so forth. And pl...

A good guilty pleasure read, but seriously uneven. Five stars for the section on the 70s (drugs! sex! drama! blues bars! all night parties! crazy people!), four for the early 80s (hot mess! intrigue!), and three for the rest of the book (basically, there were guest stars; Janine Garafalo hated the show and everyone hated her; everyone has daddy issues with Lorne Michaels). This waning excitement is probably a combination of the show itself getting into more of a routine over the years and the fa...

this is the gossipiest book i have ever read. and that's saying a lot, because I read tina brown's biography of Princess Diana.The beginning is a lot about creating SNL and the not ready for primetime players, which I loved. I have a real thing for Gilda Radner.The second half, after Lorne Michaels comes back to the show, is just so so gossipy. So gossipy. Not a lot of substance, unless you count backstabbing as substance. Worth it for the first half, but you can probably quit when you get to th...

I liked this book better than a lot of the other books I read about SNL, because it was presented as an oral history. People painted in a negative light in previous books (Chevy Chase & Jean Doumanian, for example) got to tell their sides of the story (Chase is uncharacteristically humble and expresses regret for some of his past actions, while Doumanian is given more than enough rope to hang herself). Plus, since this is a fairly recent book, it talks about more recent backstage drama, such as

this was read solely in the bathroom over several months. dull, repetitive stuff. it was extremely self-congratulatory and basically i wanted it to be a different book. with all these hilarious people being interviewed, you'd think it might be interesting to hear about their tastes in comedy, their writing processes, their favorite moments, but no, this is mostly just about who was taking what or screwing who (literally and figuratively) and who was an asshole and stories about lorne michaels ac...

I've been a huge fan of SNL since I was a kid. This book is written in an interesting interview style. Rather than one long interview, it pulls pieces of interviews from MANY people and puts them together in nice little chapters based on subject and time period. Great read if you're a fan of SNL and love to hear all the details behind the scenes.

It’s hard to rate an oral history because so much depends on the interview subjects’ material, but I really enjoyed this one. I only wish more could have been heard from. Few cast members and more could have been written about some of the most famous bits on the show. Over all it was excellent, though.

A must read for fans of the show, even if you've already read the previous edition (which I had). Full review to come.

This review was originally posted on Rebel Mommy Book Blog

So, yes: I primarily read this for my husband, Bill Hader, even though I knew he wouldn't show up until the last hundred pages of this 750+ page behemoth. But the whole book is pretty damn riveting. I would never identify as a huge SNL fan; however, it's been part of the comedy background of my life for my entire life. My parents introduced me to Landshark and Toonces, and everything after that seeped into my brain just...as a culturally conscious American, I guess. SNL has been fairly good and

To start off, the format of this book was perfect. It was just the right amount of light but informative storytelling/oral history that I was enthralled.Some parts of it definitely showed the book’s age, and there were other parts that I wasn’t super into (particularly the last chapter on Lorne Michaels). I appreciated the way the rest of the book had intertwined the veneration for people involved in the show with the rest of the history, so that last bit felt a little dragged out and out of pla...

I have always been impressed with the performers on Saturday Night Live. I could never even imagine performing a live show every week for several months a year, year after year. To then try to always make that show funny, culturally relevant, cool, socially progressive, and a launching pad for some of the best comedic talents of all time is a tall order.Sometimes the show was a huge success, sometimes a miserable failure, and most of the time somewhere middling in between. The running joke about...

Saturday Night Live has never been something I stay up for, or really care about at all. The only times I remember sitting down at 11:30pm and watching SNL were on the weekends my brothers and I stayed at my Dad's. It was this special bonding time between a Dad and the kids he doesn't see often. We'd stay up late, cracked out on buttery popcorn and chocolate goodies bought from Costco, and laugh even at the unfunniest of sketches, happy to be up past bedtime and happy to be with each other.In ad...

This is really great dish, especially if you watched this show for any extended period of time in your life. I've fallen away from watching it the past few years, but watched it for decades. So the dish is great. I guess I had this idealized (and erroneous) conception of how the show works. I figured that it was all about camaraderie and friendship and a shared sense of the mission---simply to make people laugh. Okay, and maybe to make them think too. Sometimes. But not too much. But NOOOOO!!! A...

Ugh. For a 600-page book of interviews with some of the funniest, charming, egotistical, and most dysfunctional people around, LFNY is appallingly bereft of insight or pleasure.Shales and Miller are waaaay too close to their subjects, and as such treat their heroes/friends like they were delicate flowers. There are, to my mind, only 2 interesting anecdotes beyond the navelgazing. The first involves poor Garret Morris, who apparently freebased so often in his office that the maids were afraid to

on the Sports Guy's "Table" scale, this book was a definite C. [in short, anything/anyone you encounter either A) brings something to the table, B) brings nothing to the table, or C) takes things OFF the table. metaphorically speaking. my scale goes to D), takes things off the table & then smashes the table to splinters, rendering it useless. but i digress.] while it did provide me with *some* new information, some few juicy tidbits, they were overwhelmed during the course of the book by a parad...