If Lorne Michaels is the father of “Saturday Night Live,” then Rosie Shuster is its criminally under-acknowledged mother. Michaels may be prolific for his ability to wrangle talent and reassure network heads, but Shuster was vital in establishing the tone of this comedy institution that turns 50 this year.
“The show was one of the first to break through and represent what was actually going on,” Rosie Shuster told TheWrap during an extensive interview ahead of the “SNL” milestone.
When Shuster is written about, it’s often through the men in her life. The daughter of the Canadian comedy legend Frank Shuster, she is credited with introducing Michaels to the world of professional comedy. The two started writing together in high school and were married from 1967 to 1980. Their professional lives were just as intertwined as their personal as they both began their careers on “The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour,” contributed to Lily Tomlin’s early comedy specials and pitched NBC executive Dick Ebersol the show that would become “Saturday Night Live.”
During that first season, she became one of three women writers on staff alongside Anne Beatts and Marilyn Suzanne Miller, writing for the NBC series until its mass exodus in 1980. She later returned alongside Michaels in 1985 before leaving the series permanently in 1988.
What’s less covered about Shuster is the fact that her equally sharp and silly work helped pave the way for what would become the show’s comedic voice. The infamous bee costumes John Belushi so hated came in part from Shuster, as did Buck Henry’s “Uncle Roy,” perhaps one of the first times a TV show had discussed let alone joked about child abuse. Shuster didn’t merely pave the way for some TV show. She helped create and define a space that brought daring comedy to people’s living rooms, forcing America to laugh through uncomfortable truths and opening the door for countless women in the process.
“In the mid ’70s, what Anne and I would talk about a lot is that if you were a comedy subject and you said something witty, they thought your sharp tongue was somehow going to castrate them,” Schuster joked.
Now decades after helping found the comedy institution that has globally revolutionized comedy, Shuster is nervous that the future of “Saturday Night Live” may look bleak. “Kings don’t like to be mocked, you know,” she warned in the early days of Donald Trump’s second term.
Revolutionary beginnings
The counter culture was already in full force by 1975, the year “SNL” premiered. Nixon’s Watergate unfolded years earlier, an event that shattered Americans’ confidence in their government. Musical artists like Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin were using their art to lead political movements. Movies like “Bonnie and Clyde” and Andy Warhol’s explicit “Blue Movie” were pushing boundaries around sex and violence. And then there was television.
“It was stodgy, straight and square,” Shuster said. “The thinking was you’re going into people’s living rooms … You have to be very respectful and not rock the boat.”
There were some shows that attempted to reflect the times, like “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” and “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” but they were either quickly canceled or fell flat. Paul W. Keyes, the head writer for “Laugh-In,” had previously worked with Nixon on a failed gubernatorial campaign and brought him onto the show. “That wasn’t real,” Shuster said. “It had the semblance of it, but it didn’t have the guts and spirit of what was happening.”
When Shuster joined the original writers and cast of “SNL,” they knew two things. “We wanted to see what wasn’t there, and we wanted to make each other laugh,” she said. “The culture endures a vacuum when the time is right and conditions are right because you need someone willing to shepherd it through. Somehow we broke through.”
Baba Wawa to The Church Lady
During her time on the show, Shuster was responsible for such early staples as Gilda Radner’s Baba Wawa — her ridiculous Barbara Walters impression — and her Roseanne Roseannadanna character. But nearly all of the sketches Shuster is most proud of had an edge to them, from Dana Carvey’s overly pious and hypocritical Church Lady to “The Pink Box,” a commercial parody for a woman’s product that’s so personal, no one knows what it is.
“I designed the prop, which was a pink cube with a black inverted triangle — and that was before Brazilians,” Shuster said. “It’s such a rude prop, I loved it. I’ve still got it.” That sketch also marked the “only time” her father Frank Shuster gave a compliment about her comedy.
“I think it’s because he knew he could never have come up with it,” Shuster said. “I liked to show something that hadn’t been seen.”
Pushing gender boundaries was especially difficult in those early seasons. That was the case with the “Hard Hats” sketch. Featuring host Lily Tomlin, the still hauntingly relevant sketch features a group of women donning hard hats and sexually harassing a shorts-wearing Dan Aykroyd. Written by Shuster and Beatts, who often partnered together, the point of the sketch was to “spin the tables on what it was like to walk down the street and be a sex object.”
“Nobody wanted to be in it,” Shuster recalled. “[John] Belushi didn’t want to do it. Danny finally was coerced by Lorne to do it. He was a good sport.”
Shuster ran into a similar problem with “Mommy Beer,” a sketch that put a nipple on a beer bottle in a gag that likened grown men to babies. “These guys got so queasy when they had to drink their mommy beer. It freaked them out,” she said.
“Anne and I took a lot of shit. Marilyn worked on her own. She didn’t have quite the animosity with Belushi,” Shuster said. “We were really on the front line … we learned to have pretty thick skin.”
It’s no secret that Shuster, Beatts and Miller had a more difficult time than their male colleagues. By now, it’s well known that Belushi would often refuse to perform sketches from the show’s female writers. But during the ’70s, these pioneering women had to deal with their internalized misogyny in addition to the dismissiveness of their peers.
“We were conditioned to be young ladies,”” Shuster said. “Some social grace is great. I’m not saying be a rude asshole, but we had internal stuff to get over as well as external. And then a woman’s point of view, our experience wasn’t always as funny to guys as it was to women.”
Those early experiences are what make the women who came after her so impressive to Shuster. She pointed to Molly Shannon’s Mary Katherine Gallagher as one of the first characters that paved the way for women-led comedy that wasn’t afraid to “scare the boys.”
“Gilda always made things work, and Laraine [Newman] and Jane [Curtin] were brilliant in their ways, too, very much so. But people like Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, they just have a lot of confidence,” Shuster said. “They were more empowered women somehow.”
Kingly woes and an uncertain future
That’s far from the only way the show has changed since Shuster’s time. Season 50 has 17 cast members — a far cry from the nine original Not Ready for Primetime Players. “It’s just a different animal in many, many ways,” Shuster said.
There’s also the position of the show itself. When it first aired, “Saturday Night Live” stood as a defiant embrace of the modern times on a medium that was stuck in the past. During the show’s first episode, NBC executives pitched a fit when host George Carlin planned to perform his stand-up in a t-shirt, a garment that was dubbed far too casual in the TV era of Johnny Carson (Carlin later agreed to wear a jacket over his shirt). For comparison’s sake, it only took months after Marcello Hernandez’s viral “Domingo” sketch for NBC to team with Funko on a licensed figurine of the breakout character.
“You’ll see some of the performers in the sketches do the actual commercials, not the commercial parodies,” Shuster said. “Suddenly, they’re participating in what we used to joke about. It changes things … How can you be part of the revolution and then you’re doing the commercial?”
Shuster is sympathetic and realizes that this is a broader cultural shift rather than one confined to the hallways of Studio 8H. “It’s an expensive, hard world,” she said. “It used to be called selling out. Now get over yourself. If you get a big payday, grab it; good for you. But for an old timer like me, I’m still trying to completely catch up with it, and I can’t entirely.”
The evolution of “Saturday Night Live” into the comedy establishment is especially notable as the show has repeatedly butted heads with perhaps its most powerful rival: President Donald Trump.
“I was really pissed [Trump] was asked to host the second time. As you know, many people were pissed that Jimmy Fallon ruffled his hair and humanized him,” Shuster said.
Shuster is far from alone in her anger. The Daily Beast recently reported on the internal revolt that took place when Trump hosted the show in November of 2015.
“We’re coming into a time when God knows what that face of comedy is going to be. I just don’t know how much freedom of expression there’s going to be,” Shuster warned. “You don’t want to write grim futures. You just have to stay alert, stay present, find other ways to keep your spirits aloft no matter what.”
There’s another more direct reason why the future of “Saturday Night Live” may seem uncertain. The question of who will replace Lorne Michaels has hovered over this network staple for over a decade now. Like most people connected to the show, Shuster doesn’t know what will happen.
“I don’t think he knows. He’ll make up his mind at the last minute,” she said. “But they need somebody who can fight the powers that be and make unpopular decisions that will have good, lasting effects.”
Shuster also emphasized that whoever is selected to run “SNL” needs to have “a spine of steel and brass clangers.”
“Maybe Tina Fey. Her ovaries I’d put up against any dude,” Shuster said. “The only other thing is that Tina always says she’s a good girl. So it depends on who she’s the good girl to. There are going to be forces that will try to suppress it.”
