Conversations about those who have shaped and personified Saturday Night Live’s brands of comedy tend to turn to the show’s cast and/or Lorne Michaels. This is not particularly surprising, and it suggests that SNL’s apparent position as a showcase for young, Michaels-dominated comic performers resonates with audiences, the press, critics, and others who engage with the show. However, I would like to focus on Michael O’Donoghue, the former National Lampoon writer installed as SNL’s (then titled NBC’s Saturday Night) first head writer in 1975 and consider his written and onscreen contributions in the context of the show’s dual contradictory positions (at least in its early years) as cutting-edge trailblazer and mainstream tastemaker.1 Namely, O’Donoghue’s tenure as head writer and occasional cast member represents a key moment in mainstreaming certain forms of cruel, sick, or dark televisual comedy.

To the proposed question, “Why is Saturday Night Live still important?” I add a corollary question: why should we look at O’Donoghue today? For one, a further look at O’Donoghue, the show’s writers, and the authorship of SNL’s humor might question Lorne Michaels’ imposed authorial persona. More to the point of this piece, though, examining O’Donoghue’s humor might help us more clearly understand SNL’s contributions toward mainstream American comedic forms and practices as well as how the show both works within and stretches their boundaries. In this context, we might better understand not only potential lines of influence between O’Donoghue and contemporary comedy, but also the extent to which his humor calls attention to the functions of comedy more generally. Thus, SNL’s contemporary relevance does not necessarily need to be located within its current episodes; paradoxically, various points in the show’s early history might carry more currency for analyzing today’s comedic genres, formats, and practices. Sick jokes, cringe comedy, and conceptual anti-humor abound, and even if they cannot all be traced directly to O’Donoghue, one can consider his work a comedic progenitor to more recent shows such as South Park, The Sarah Silverman Program, Eastbound and Down,2 and Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, among many others.

Hosted by Georgia senator and future NAACP chair Julian Bond, the April 9, 1977 episode of SNL offered a series of skits more politically satirical in nature than usual, including a commercial for “Right On Afro Lustre” and a Black Perspective talk show in which Bond explains to host Garrett Morris that “light-skinned blacks are smarter than dark-skinned blacks.” In this episode’s installment of “Mr. Mike’s Least-Loved Bedtime Tales,” O’Donoghue (as the titular Mr. Mike) visits the cottage of Uncle Remus, played by Morris, and tells him his version of the tale of Brer Rabbit:

In my story, [Brer Fox and Brer Bear] respect his wishes and skin him alive. I mean, it’s all very amusing to talk about being skinned alive in some children’s book, but can you imagine it actually going down? Toward the end, when they were cutting the ears away from the side of the skull, he was screaming: “Throw me in the briar patch! Throw me in the molten glass furnace; anything but this!

Mr. Mike explains that in his story, which concludes with Brer Fox and Brer Bear eating Brer Rabbit and selling his feet for lucky charms, “There’s no moral…just random acts of meaningless violence.” Even in this episode, the sketch stands out not for its overt racial humor but for its vivid description of carnage. This least-loved bedtime tale transgresses good taste on a number of levels, and it is unsurprising that it aired during a time when Michaels was attempting to limit O’Donoghue’s on-air presence.3 The sketch also gestures toward a difference in the politics of O’Donoghue’s SNL material and some other contemporaneous “dark” or “subversive” comedies such as M*A*S*H or All in the Family. While the latter two shows’ satire engaged broad political targets such as war and race relations, respectively, O’Donoghue’s antipathetic hostility—both within the story’s content and through his cold performance style—betrays a darkness of a different sort. If other forms of satire engage with certain political issues, O’Donoghue’s comedic attacks seemed to be aimed at broader principles of compassion and propriety.

But while O’Donoghue’s work is noteworthy for its confrontational nature, he is not the first name that generally comes to mind when discussing early SNL and avant-garde humor; that distinction goes to Andy Kaufman, though he only appeared periodically on the show as a special guest. Kaufman’s anti-humor performance pieces are of a different and less malevolent nature than O’Donoghue’s work, but they are similar in that they both question fundamental principles of writing and performance on which humor is supposedly built. As former SNL writer Bob Tischler notes, O’Donoghue “was most interested in shocking the audience. I don’t mind shocking the audience, but you have to make them laugh too, and entertain them. He was really just into the shock value, or doing something that was weird and boring.”4 Indeed, Kaufman and O’Donoghue both utilized SNL as a platform to investigate and undermine comic performance as well as the exchange between comedian and audience. O’Donoghue’s work reminds us that this exchange does not need to be a mutually mirthful one.

The paradoxical problems of conceptualizing cruel humor and anti-comedy are perfectly exemplified in a quotation attributed to O’Donoghue: “Making people laugh is the lowest form of comedy.” On these terms, O’Donoghue’s work exists as a sort of meta-humor that calls attention to, questions, and ultimately violates the very fabric of comedy. Peter Brunette traces the surrealist image of the ruptured or gouged eye through George Bataille and Luis Buñuel up to the Three Stooges, suggesting that it represents an assault on “all that the eye can represent—the reason, the mind, vision, the father, and meaning itself” and an according attack on the narrative of the comedic short film.5 While I do not want to veer into overly abstract territory, O’Donoghue’s impressions of celebrities jamming needles into their eyes represents a similar attack as it performs violence against the hacky comedic trope of the Vegas-style impression. This affront can be considered contextually as well, since O’Donoghue’s calculated cruelty exists within and ironically clashes with the hoary format of the network television variety show. This at once labels his work as comedy and pushes against our understanding of what comedy should entail. Indeed, some of Kaufman and O’Donoghue’s work might not even be considered comedy if it did not appear on SNL, a problematic that highlights the extent to which format informs reception.

Click here to view the embedded video.

While National Lampoon and SNL represent the most popular conduits for O’Donoghue’s comedy, it appears in a less distilled form in his never-aired television special Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video. A spoof of the exploitation/travelogue classic Mondo Cane, Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video not only gives insight to the aesthetic traditions (e.g. Mondo, exploitation, and trash)6 that informed O’Donoghue’s comedy, it highlights the trust that NBC placed in him at the time. Full of conceptual oddities such as swimming cats, a peek at Dan Aykroyd’s webbed toes, and performances by Klaus Nomi, Root Boy Slim, and Sid Vicious. NBC commissioned it as a one-off SNL replacement, though they eventually refused to air the special.7 O’Donoghue spends much of Mondo Video addressing the audience and preparing them for the scandalous nature of the footage—a maneuver that aligns O’Donoghue with the shock tactics of exploitation cinema while lessening the impact of the actual footage, thus reducing the transgressive nature of the piece as a whole. This is not to say that Mondo Video has no subversive qualities; on its own terms, it is far more experimental than O’Donoghue’s SNL material. However, it does not carry the same disruptive potential as his SNL work, because it does not exist within the context of the very form that it attempts to undermine.

While I have focused on O’Donoghue in this piece, I am not interested in suggesting that he (or any other individual) should be considered the primary auteur of Saturday Night Live’s early comedy. To do so would simply replace the legend of Lorne Michaels-as-auteur with a different myth, and it would elide the contributions of the other writers, cast, and crew. Nor am I interested in claiming that he was solely responsible for the introduction of dark or cruel humor into American comedy; to be sure, these have been around as long as comedy itself. Still, I do believe that analyses of his work in the comedic, political, and industrial contexts of SNL can help inform our discussions of “mainstream,” “dark,” “popular,” “cruel,” or “subversive” forms of comedy, whether we look to problematize these terms or see them as distinct and material qualifiers. Ultimately, O’Donoghue’s contributions to American comedy, televisual and otherwise, are nicely encapsulated in an exchange between Mr. Mike and Laraine Newman from a season-three “Mr. Mike’s Least Loved Bedtime Tales” sketch—one which was also shown during Bill Murray’s 1994 on-air eulogy for O’Donoghue:

Mr. Mike: Sometimes you have to be cruel, Laraine.
Laraine: In order to be kind, Mr. Mike?
Mr. Mike: No, in order to be even crueler.

Image Credits:

1. Michael O’Donoghue as Mr. Mike

Please feel free to comment.

1. A couple of distinctions: when I discuss “mainstream” comedy in this piece, I refer to popular American comedic forms, genres, and texts that at some level inform or are informed by Saturday Night Live. I am also aware of and sensitive to the problematic nature of the term “mainstream” in studying any form of media, though a thorough investigation of the term is beyond this piece. Still,SNL has long held (albeit intermittently) a vaguely defined and even potentially imaginary centrality in American comedy, and its longevity, flaunted “liveness” (through aesthetics as well as modes of production and exhibition) and fiscal and creative clout keep the show firmly entrenched in the cultural cachet of “mainstream,” as fuzzy as that term may be.
2. For further discussion of this show, see Nick Marx’s recent Flow column, Nowhere to Go but Up: Redeeming HBO’s Eastbound & Down. http://flowtv.org/?p=2331
3. Perrin, Dennis. Mr. Mike: The Life and Work of Michael O’Donoghue (New York: Avon Books, 1998), 327.
4. Shales, Tom, and James Andrew Miller, eds. Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2002), 225
5. Brunette, Peter. “The Three Stooges and the (Anti-)Narrative of Violence: De(con)structive Comedy,” Comedy/Cinema/Theory, ed. Andrew S. Horton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 180.
6. It should thus be unsurprising that around the time of his death, O’Donoghue was apparently planning on collaborating with Quentin Tarantino, another public figure who represents an intersection between mainstream popularity, trash aesthetics, and dark humor.
7. New Line Cinema eventually released Mondo Video in theaters.

Since its debut last year, my obsession with the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim series Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! has grown accordingly with my dwindling interest in the rest of Adult Swim’s comedy lineup. I can at least partially attribute this to the sheer absurdity of the show, which makes other Adult Swim series–bizarre as they are–look tame by comparison. Indeed, Awesome Show pushes the linchpins of Adult Swim’s comedy–surrealism, gross-out humor, a low-budget look–to their respective extremes, all while eschewing the Cartoon Network’s nominal format: animation. While the cheap aesthetics of many of Adult Swim’s cartoons betray a self-conscious and extreme form of their creators’ and audience’s oft-perceived status as late-teens and early twenties slacker/stoner males, Tim and Eric’s hyper-condensed version of the Adult Swim M.O. elicits a different and more complex response from me than Adult Swim’s other fare.

Created by comedians and college friends Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, can loosely–precariously, really–be considered a sketch comedy show. Many of the skits on Awesome Show, whose third season premiered just a couple of weeks ago, represent warped broadcasts from Channel 5, a fake local or public access television network. As the New York Times puts it, these pieces feel like “outtakes from a public-access channel that’s broadcast only in hell.”1 Concomitant with this theme, the series imitates public access’ cheap feel, complete with obvious green screens, flubbed lines, video aesthetics, and even talent gleaned from actual public access stations. Of course, recombination of formats and genres is nothing new. However, what I find particularly interesting about Awesome Show are the ways in which it imitates not only the visual style and format of public access television, but also the multiple “failures” associated with cheap television and video production.

In particular, there are two types of failures that form the bulk of Awesome Show’s comedy: (1) amateurish performance and (2) technological blunders and screw-ups. Rather than attempting to create an unspoiled diegetic world, the series draws much of its comedy from the cracks in the system and those moments in which the apparatus exposes itself. In its portrayals and simulations of “bad” performance in front of and behind the camera, the series attempts to elicit the sort of abject horror/charmed fascination that is often associated with spectatorship of some of the more bizarre and inept material found on public access. What keeps the series difficult to pin down, however, is its position on the fence between intentional, simulated ineptitude and portrayal of authentically and accidentally incompetent performance.

The series’ recurring cast includes public access personalities such as impressionist James Quall and church puppeteer David Liebe Hart, as well as an elderly man named Richard Dunn, who Heidecker and Wareheim claim to have found in the Adult Swim parking lot when they decided to include him in the show.2 The use of amateur performers who may not be “in on the joke” opens the show up to criticisms of exploitation, but I submit that the use of folks like Quall and Hart is more complicated.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I do not want to ignore the possibility that these performers are used for their sheer awfulness; in fact, that is the very point. However, the show regularly features more “prestigious” actors and comedians such as Jeff Goldblum, John C. Reilly, and Mr. Show’s Bob Odenkirk (who also produced Heidecker and Wareheim’s earlier Adult Swim animated series Tom Goes to the Mayor) as well as musicians such as The Shins and Aimee Mann. This wide range of performers all participating in Tim and Eric’s absurdity creates something of a democratizing televisual oddity in which public access performers and Oscar-nominees all perform at the same sublimely bizarre level.

As I have noted, performance is not the only way that Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! plays with the notion of “bad” TV. The series is filled with manufactured bloopers, choppy editing, and analog equipment failures. At its most extreme, the show uses media malfunction to create an inscrutable choppiness in which performative markers of comedy–dialogue, physical humor, etc.–become obscured by formal breakdown. The second-season skit “Steve Brule’s Last Resort Fighting” simulates an apparent instructional video taught by the title character, a local news “expert” played by Reilly who lacks not only expertise, but basic intelligence and social skills as well. Compounding the awkwardness of Reilly’s performance, the skit mimics the bad tracking, grainy image, and abrupt skips of a bootlegged videotape. The relentless barrage of skips and flubs achieves its own off-kilter comedic cadence, and the rupture becomes integral to the joke rather than simply aiding it. The piece moves beyond the metatextual and, in a sense, becomes anti-textual through its violence against a coherent and unadorned comedy sketch.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The overwhelming irony of the series, of course, is that the titular “Great Job” is nowhere to be found–at least not if one looks for any traditional marker of quality. However, this is also what makes the series one of the most interesting on television, and one of the more unconventional comedy shows in recent memory. Like the films of Ed Wood and the music of The Shaggs, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! finds art by plumbing the depths of ineptitude. But while we can legitimately enjoy the former two works while understanding that their putative failures are likely unintentional, with Tim and Eric we cannot be so sure.

Even more than Wood and The Shaggs, however, Awesome Show reminds me of transgressive filmmaker Nick Zedd and actor/writer Reverend Jen Miller’s consciously amateurish and chroma-key-reliant public access television series The Adventures of Electra Elf and Fluffer. With this comparison, I don’t mean to suggest that Tim and Eric’s comedy is quite as shocking or political as some of the more aberrant material found in the transgressive/No Wave cinema(s). However, Heidecker has noted that the duo’s bizarre experiments started as a “fuck-you” to their rigid and joyless film school.3 This line of practice betrays a similar–albeit less rhetorically acerbic–impulse as Zedd’s proclamation in the “Cinema of Transgression Manifesto” that “all film schools be blown up and all boring films never be made again.”4

Click here to view the embedded video.

In a missive on the series, Jeffrey Sconce deftly notes that much of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!’s material constitutes a series of fractured quotations of comedy tropes, in which “no joke is simply a joke anymore, but is instead a position-statement on comedy itself.”5 Indeed, Heidecker and Wareheim’s brand of humor represents a vital deconstruction of current comedic forms that seeks to effect a response of deep unease and reflection on exactly what constitutes comedy, and their most direct satires of mass media feel like cracked-lens simulacra of polished and joyless mainstream comedic and televisual conventions.

This is perhaps most apparent online, where Heidecker and Wareheim have expanded their warped vision into a talk show, Tim and Eric Nite Live, and ironic viral “oddvertisements” for/against Shrek 3 and Absolut Vodka.6 Consistent with Tim and Eric’s unsettling comedy, the ads deflate the pleasures that corporations tie to these products (conspicuous consumption and a high-society lifestyle, respectively). Through these online ventures, two planned spin-off series–one staring Reilly as Dr. Steve Brule and the other starring anti-comedian Neil Hamburger7–and, of course, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, Heidecker and Wareheim continue to explore the paradox that comedy can be at its funniest when it is less conventionally enjoyable.

Image Credits:

1. Eric Wareheim and Tim Heidecker
2. David Liebe Hart
3. Front Page “Awesome Show” Logo

Please feel free to comment.

1. Itzkoff, Dave. “The Bizarre Brains of Nightmare TV.” New York Times 27 July 2008.
2. Heidecker, Tim, and Eric Wareheim. “Tim & Eric.” Interview with Josh Modell. A.V. Club 13 Nov. 2007
3. ibid.
4. Zedd, Nick. “Cinema of Transgression Manifesto.” nickzedd.com
5. Sconce, Jeffrey. “Be-Be-Beaver Boys!” In Media Res: A MediaCommons Project. 22 Jan. 2008
6. Interestingly, while the Shrek ads were meant to be satirical and were not commissioned by Dreamworks, Tim and Eric’s vodka ads with Zack Galifianakis were commissioned by Absolut.
7. Itzkoff, op. cit.