Saturday Night Live stands the test of time, surviving changing tastes, politics, and media consumption for fifty years. That in itself is remarkable. Creator and producer Lorne Michaels couldn’t have predicted people watching the latest episodes (or condensed clips of them) on their phone in 1975 as he and producer Dick Ebersol frantically poached no-name comedians from radio shows. Before you ask, yes, Steve Martin was already famous, but no, he was never a cast member.

Michaels stocked his roster with underground comedians, many of whom had performed and written for years with each other at a modest media company called National Lampoon, which thrived in the form of radio, print, comedy albums, and touring off-Broadway shows. They weren’t ringers when they joined SNL, but as unknowns, these performers possessed a raw, strange energy that hadn’t been seen on TV before.

National Lampoon Made SNL What It Was

Director Jason Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan were met with a daunting challenge, recreating the drama and filling the cast for their docudrama Saturday Night. True to the spirit of the show it was inspired by, the fictional “Not Ready for Prime-Time Players” stars fairly unknown celebrities, while the likes Willem Dafoe, JK Simmons, Finn Wolfhard, and Matthew Rhys are sprinkled about the cast in supporting roles.

However, lost in the retelling of the October 1975 debut of the NBC comedy series, is an incalculable chunk of the essence that made SNL what it was. And, no, we don’t just mean drugs. If you were ever curious why so many SNL stars popped up in National Lampoon-branded films in the ’70s and ’80s (or what National Lampoon was), wonder no more. It wasn’t so much the training ground or feeder for SNL as it was the model.

Forgotten among the celebrated cast members of that first hectic season, buried deep in the end credits, are names like Michael O’Donoghue, who also made the commute over to NBC’s new show. Played by Tommy Dewey in the movie, he was a key writer in the early years who shaped the attitude and substance of the show’s skits, more or less recreating the magazine/radio show for TV.

These two comedy institutions were perennially linked in popular imagination, cross-pollinating and borrowing talent, but it was always one-sided, as the allure of television proved too strong. The SNL-National Lampoon relationship was ultimately less a case of Siamese twins than it was a parasitic twin and its unfortunate brother. It’s unfair to cast all the blame on Michaels for headhunting the best comedians, but National Lampoon deserved better than its grim fate as a marketing gimmick for direct-to-DVD comedies.

Lorne Michaels Gambles on a Long Shot

Michaels (played by Gabriel LaBelle) faced the crunch of organizing a live-TV show when launching the show. He also had to deal with the egos of his actors and actresses. On top of that, was the confusion of competing with a rival show named Saturday Night Live, airing in prime time on ABC.

Everyone involved had a chip on their shoulder, the show a mishmash of comedic skits, stand-up routines, puppets, and music at a time when TV was awash with meandering variety shows. The title of the cast, the “Not Ready for Prime-Time Players,” was a joke that aged immediately, a monument to the fickleness of audiences, parodying the corny Howard Cossell variety show of the same name on ABC which was canceled midway through its first season.

The original cast included Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), and John Belushi (Matt Wood). A few years prior to their TV breakout, comedy fans might have heard them and future cast members Bill Murray and Christoper Guest (who joined SNL in 1984 after starring with NL’s Tony Hendra in This Is Spinal Tap the same year) in the play National Lampoon Lemmings or in National Lampoon Radio Hour.

They were more Monty Python than Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, favoring surreal comedy and scathing satire to apolitical zaniness commonplace at the time in US shows. The time slot of 11:30 PM on a Saturday was so bad — the domain of Johnny Carson reruns — that no one at the network had any faith. Their measly paychecks, estimated to be $750 in 1975 dollars, reflected this. But, long story short, it caught on. The show is now entering its fifth consecutive decade on air.

National Lampoon’s Brain Drain, SNL’s Gain
Warner Bros. 

The rise in performers like Belushi and Chase would temporarily boost the National Lampoon brand. Founded by former Harvard students, most notably humorists Henry Beard and Doug Kenney, National Lampoon was an updated variation on the Harvard Lampoon paper. Hellbent on offending every group regardless of their sensibilities or viewpoint, the magazine was renowned for its sardonic style, one magazine cover featuring the staff’s threat to shoot a dog if enough people failed to purchase that particular edition. Bringing on the wry and demented O’Donoghue, NL built a rabid readership.

Writer/directors John Hughes and Harold Ramis proved their value without the SNL route, Hollywood fully exploiting the magazine’s ranks of underpaid and undervalued creatives. Kenney, who later produced Animal House and Caddyshack, died in 1980, and from there onward, the magazine pretty much went downhill, though the film series National Lampoon Family Vacation did yield some superficial, lingering relevance. The decline was simple, as former editor PJ O’Rourke chronicled in a post-mortem in The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. If NBC didn’t kill National Lampoon, someone else would have:

“If you see a pattern, it’s called money. What do you think the proper comparison would be between how much Hughes was paid for writing
National Lampoon’s Vacation
and how much I paid him for the short story “Vacation ’58,” upon which the movie was based? If you’re thinking chalk and cheese, you like to eat chalk better than John did.”

This unofficial partnership was lopsided in television’s favor, NBC unleashing SNL skit-to-film adaptations of its more popular characters like The Blues Brothers and Coneheads, stealing the spotlight.National Lampoon magazine was now an afterthought, and the magazine faded from public view in the eighties, eventually publishing its last edition in 1998 to absolutely zero fanfare.SNL recruited their way out of trouble. National Lampoon was never so fortunate. O’Rourke admitted it was, just like SNL, a stressful, dysfunctional environment, but with less pay. “National Lampoon was never a pleasant place to work … having a bunch of humorists in one place is like having a bunch of cats in a sack.” Not a big shock people jumped ship at the sight of any Hollywood producer.

The Ignoble Finale to the Greatest Comedy Brand in American History
Artisan Entertainment

The National Lampoon phenomenon was a fluke, started at the right time, with the right people, thanks to the right culture … and the right drugs. By the late 2000s, that mystique was thoroughly dead, and so were O’Donoghue, Radner, and Belushi, who all met untimely deaths.

Lampoon is alive now only in the theoretical sense, with no media platform nor creative leader still around, waiting to be sold to the next corporate entity to try and exploit boomer nostalgia. With the possible exception of Van Wilder, NL’s reputation was methodically destroyed rather than rehabbed, as a bevy of low-quality shlock was churned out in an attempt by rights holders to leverage whatever value the name had left. We don’t fault you comedy fans out there for not knowing about National Lampoon Presents: Jake’s Booty Call.

As detailed in the Showtime documentary National Lampoon: Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead, NL’s peak was relatively short-lived, culminating with the film Animal House in 1979, a film pieced together from bits of articles and semi-fictionalized essays from the magazine. The personal touch that made the magazine great is long absent. National Lampoon passed with a whimper. O’Rourke lamented how it wasn’t allowed a dignified ending.

Funnily enough, SNL has periodically faced similar calls to cancel it. Though mostly solid for 50 years (we won’t talk about Season 11), it has recently run into its own problems concerning declining numbers. Many viewers lost during the writers’ strike never came back, and the films also no longer gain any traction, with comedies relegated to second-class status. As much as we love hearing the inside dirt from Studio 8H and SNL lore, we can’t help but think that Saturday Night is missing a huge chunk of the backstory by omitting the prologue to the narrative. If any of the suits who own the National Lampoon IP had a clue, they might even pitch such an idea to Netflix or Apple. In the meantime, Reitman’s Saturday Night opens in theaters October 11th.