Books: Flying and Crashing in Mig Alley Saturday Night

It was the 1978-79 season, and she was just somebody's girlfriend, trying too hard to party down.

Remember: Saturday Night Live had become the brightest, brashest success on television, the show to see, and be seen at. Chevy Chase had already made his mark there, and left for Hollywood. John Belushi had brought his brute comic force to Animal House, which pulled down some $150 million at the box office, and he and his buddy Dan Aykroyd were spending off-time starring in Steven Spielberg's home-front destruction derby 1941. Gilda Radner was the country's favorite comedy Kewpie, and Bill Murray, a shambling declension of goofiness, was hoving into view.

Attendance at a live Saturday Night Live broadcast, as well as the private bust-out that followed, was a mandatory lap on the fast track. Some cruised through; others crashed. No one was surprised when Aykroyd glanced down at the anonymous girlfriend passed out on the floor and coolly observed, "If you can't handle MiGs, don't fly in MiG alley."

The swagger and flippancy of that remark were qualities, shared and multiplied among a staff of intrepid writers, that made the show into a certifiable cultural phenomenon. S.N.L. was the first network program to cut off a slice of the energy, irreverence and scapegrace spirit of rock culture. It was also the first major forum for the comedy underground that had begun to form in the late '60s. This was humor influenced by Mad magazine and the National Lampoon, Ernie Kovacs and Monty Python, William S. Burroughs and Johnny B. Goode. Under the shrewd editorial tutelage of Producer Lorne Michaels, this over-the-top farce, gussied up a bit for home consumption, became the house style at Saturday Night Live. With a bow to Hunter Thompson, Aykroyd called it "Gonzo television."

Alas, the '80s have become bedtime for Gonzo, so the occasion seems prime for a chronicle of the show. Saturday Night, subtitled "a backstage history," does remarkably thorough research on incredibly haphazard troupes. Authors Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad sometimes let enthusiasm get in the way of level judgment--Baudelaire and Blake are cited among S.N.L's spiritual fathers--but their book works up a vivid frontline fever as it relates the conceptual brawls, bad trips on the twin drugs of cocaine and sudden fame, psychological entanglements, romantic skirmishes and perpetual pitched battles with the censors involved in getting the show launched. Michaels, his cast and his writers saw themselves as comedic fifth columnists at NBC. The network executives, of course, mostly thought the players were crazy--until they caught on big. Hill and Weingrad are deft at dealing with all the infighting, as well as describing what the creative action was like inside MiG alley. They also benefit from a cast of characters that comes predrawn in broad outlines, like so many figures in a crazy coloring book. But the shading added by the authors is careful and, in the case of players elbowed out of the spotlight, like Laraine Newman and Garrett Morris, compassionate. Some of S.N.L.'s creators turn out to be as vivid as the performers themselves. Writer Michael O'Donoghue decorated his office with a picture of Mass Murderer Richard Speck and a pinup of a nude amputee, and once pushed hard for a segment in which Announcer Don Pardo would be fired, on the air, for real.