Steve Martin and Lorne Michaels approached the early 1970s, that tumultuous time of Vietnam and Watergate, from completely different directions. “For Michaels, it was a call to arms, banishing big dumb comedy,” according to Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. “For Martin, it was a chance to poke at the pieties of the counterculture.”
That’s why Michaels resisted booking Martin as an SNL host at first, considering the comedian’s so-stupid-it’s-smart stand-up to be mostly stupid. Before long, however, Michaels came around. “I was completely off about Steve,” he remembered. “You forget that there have to be jokes. His work, I began to see, had a joyousness. And we were deadly serious.”
Saturday Night Live came at just the right time for Martin. After leaving a writing job with the Smothers Brothers, he’d been on the road doing stand-up for about 10 years. That’s a lot of lonely nights spent in hotel rooms, wondering if anyone could see through the silliness to what he was trying to say. Appearing on SNL “was like a great escape from my solipsism,” Martin explained, like “being dropped off at a playground.”
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Martin hadn’t collaborated with like comedy minds in years. “My appearances on SNL, whether I was dancing with Gilda Radner, clowning with Danny, pitching show ideas with Lorne and the writers, or simply admiring Bill Murray, were community comic efforts,” he writes in his memoir, Born Standing Up. “Watching the gleam in your partner’s eyes, acting on impulses that had been nurtured over thousands of shows, working with edgy comic actors — some so edgy they died from it — was thrilling.”
Martin became so interwoven with the show that many viewers remember him as one of the original cast. As host, he wasn’t the stodgy actor that the show had to figure out how to use — he was One of Us. And he worked with guys like Aykroyd to meld his silly sensibilities with SNL’s anarchaic takes. “Danny had this idea about two Czech guys that I didn’t quite understand,” Martin remembers in Lorne. “And I had this thing, ‘Wild and crazy guy!’ that I was doing in my show.”
The two comics put the concepts in a blender, affected fake accents, found some bell-bottom pants in wardrobe, and created something new: Foreign guys on the prowl for love. It didn’t take at first — the live audience gave a lukewarm response to Yortuk and Georg Festrunk despite Martin remembering that the sketch “was killing us with laughter.”
But it struck a chord with the viewers at home. The second time the Czech brothers appeared, the live audience was waiting for them, howling with laughter as they searched for foxes with their big American breasts. “Somehow,” Martin said, “it got in their brains.”
After years of going it alone, Martin now had community. “We were all united in one, single goal,” he said. “Which was, using the comedian’s parlance, to kill.”
Content shared from www.cracked.com.