Feldman's Faves: September 1, 2025

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

I hope everyone is enjoying the last long weekend of the summer (sob).

At the same time, if you are a sports fan it is great time to be alive – US Open, College and NFL football, and the Pennant Races heating up. So, so good…

Oh and I guess Travis Kelce is getting married…..

Finally, good luck to all of you with kids going back to school tomorrow (or later this week). It is an adjustment for everyone in your house. Just remember to breathe…..

This week’s theme is brilliant comedic minds and SNL.

Lauren Michaels in his early years asked people to imagine a world with no string – yo-yos crashing to the ground, kites flying into space, only off leash dog parks, etc…..

LORNE - THE MAN WHO INVENTED SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE By: Susan Morrison – Before Drake, Lorne Michaels was by far, the most famous and successful person to come out of my high school ( a few years before I went to that high school). Michaels as a Toronto boy whose creative talent and ambition led him to create one of the most enduring and successful shows in the history of television, which just celebrated 50 years on the air – a truly remarkable achievement. His life story is one of tragedy (losing his dad at an early age) and triumph (Captain Obvious….). Like all great artists, which is Michaels truly is, he is a complex and difficult character who demands perfection, has a brilliant eye for talent and most importantly for reading the mood of the day. He is fearless and hilarious and is an absolutely unique talent. Much of his life story is well known, but a lot of it gets revealed in great detail and in ways I did not know about until now. As one reviewer notes, “Any book about Lorne Michaels is inevitably a book about Saturday Night Live, the comedy program he created and (excepting one disastrous hiatus) has led for 50 seasons. Few TV programs are better documented than SNL—especially its brash and druggy early years—and Morrison, articles editor at the New Yorker, covers the relevant highlights. But she also offers an engrossing story about Michaels’ rise, celebrity, and philosophy of comedy. Raised in Toronto, he married into Canada’s comedy scene—his first wife was the daughter of a top Canadian gag duo. Eager to escape the country’s provincial scene, he headed for America but chafed at working for squares like Phyllis Diller; a fortuitous connection with a rising Lily Tomlin earned him a reputation as a judge of comic talent and an eager iconoclast. Each of the book’s seven sections opens on one day in the manic life of a 2018 episode of the show, which reveals Michaels as being hands-on with every element of the show, from lighting to soothing cast members’ egos. But it also reveals him as a sphinxlike figure, an inveterate name-dropper who never fires anybody directly and makes guest-host choices, like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, that sometimes infuriate his left-leaning cast. (Michaels notes that as a national show, SNL needs to take a pox-on-all-their-houses posture.) Morrison soft-pedals some elements of Michaels’ history—whether he might have intervened more when John Belushi and Chris Farley were spiraling, the show’s weak record on diversity, his failed marriages—but the book isn’t hagiography, chronicling his tussles with network execs and various film flops. Morrison does a fine job of revealing a leader who keeps his cards close to the vest, which is both a temperament and a survival tactic. A top-shelf showbiz biography.” One point made in this book is that everyone thinks that their high school era was the best years of SNL. I am one of those people and Eddie Murphy, Mike Myers, Phil Hartmann and others of that era are my proof….Who do rank as the greatest SNL cast members of all time? Here’s a good review from the NYT – https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/12/books/review/lorne-susan-morrison.html

CONAN O’BRIEN NEEDS A FRIEND – Greg Daniels – As many of you know, I am a HUGE fan of Conan. He is so creative, crazy and fun. Everything he does makes me laugh. I am obviously not alone in my thinking given that he was recently awarded the Mark Twain Award for humour (with a great special on Netflix that airs the show). He was also a writer on SNL and the guy Lorne Michaels picked out of obscurity in the early 1990’s to host the Late Show. On this episode he speaks Greg Daniels. Daniels and Conan have been friends and comedy partners forever, including as roommates in LA and as young writers at SNL. But Daniels is way more than just another Conan sidekick and his credits include The Office (American version – he also played Mose), Parks and Recs, King of the Hill, Upload and now, the new Office spin-off, The Paper, which looks really funny too. These two are really funny together and in many ways represent a huge part of comedy history over the last 30 years. Here’s an excerpt from the PODCAST itself, “Writer, showrunner, and producer Greg Daniels feels outraged about being Conan O’Brien’s friend. Greg sits down with Conan to discuss their unique strategies for saving money living together in their first LA apartment, traveling to Vancouver to hunt down the stars of the Canadian series Beachcombers, and expanding on the world of The Office with the upcoming spin-off series The Paper.” https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/conan-obrien-needs-a-friend/id1438054347?i=1000721716459

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.

And remember to stay safe, stay healthy and to docket daily.

Jon