For the past 40 years, Lorne Michaels has been a veritable King of Komedy, helping American TV to grow up with the more than legendary first four seasons of Saturday Night Live back in the seventies and then returning to helm the show from the mid-eighties to the present. But in all that time, I’ve never read of Lorne actually getting off a funny himself. Yeah, he owns it, but he can’t do it!
But now I know that Lorne, at least on one highly fraught occasion, connected not merely for the circuit but a hands-down grand slam. Aging wise-ass David Spade tells the story in his new memoir David Spade is almost interesting, which is in fact almost worth buying. It seems that back in the day Dave happened to be standing next to Lorne off-stage when temperamental songstress Sinead O’Connor concluded her act by tearing up a picture of the Pope. Dave was speechless but Lorne was more than ready.
“Irish,” he said, with a shrug.
Afterwords
Dave also has a good story about his best bud ever, the tragically fat Chris Farley. Chris was dating a classy Ivy League chick who not surprisingly decided that Chris had more problems, and more belly, than she wanted to deal with. Chris, not surprisingly, was defiant in defeat: “Let her go,” he said. “She’ll never get a guy half as funny, half as rich, or half as famous as I am.”
“Dude,” said Dave, “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but the guy she’s seeing now is Steve Martin.”
