The King of Comedy Writers
Jim Downey didn’t just set the house style of ‘Saturday Night Live’—he influenced all of modern American comedyThe King of Comedy Writers
Jim Downey didn’t just set the house style of ‘Saturday Night Live’—he influenced all of modern American comedy
There’s nothing more insufferable to Jim Downey than a writer talking about his own writing. Especially when that writer is him. So when NBC asked him to participate in a documentary about his legendary career at Saturday Night Live, he resisted. At least for a while.
“It’s sort of like a guy in the office who just tells his fellow workers repeatedly, firmly, ‘Don't ever throw me a surprise party,’” Downey says. “They scare the shit out of me. There’s nothing on earth I hate more than the surprise party. If I have a birthday, just say, ‘Happy birthday.’ Please, anything but a surprise party.”
Of course, everyone always ignores the plea. “The coworkers get together and say, ‘What are we going to do for Ed’s birthday? I know. Let’s have a surprise party.’ ‘No, but didn’t he say something …’ ‘Oh, he’ll love it. He’ll fucking love it.’”
Meticulously laying out this overdetailed, hypothetical scenario was Downey’s way of letting me know why he eventually relented. If a retrospective was inevitable, he figured he might as well join in. But putting it that simply wouldn’t be very interesting—or very funny.
“I have a fondness for the comedy of someone very painstakingly, laboriously explaining something that doesn’t even need any explanation to begin with, and also getting it wrong,” he says early in Downey Wrote That.
Director Brent Hodge’s film, now streaming on Peacock, isn’t a standard tribute. It’s a dissection of Downey’s uniquely explanatory style, which happened to shape the most influential television show of the late 20th century. He started working there at the beginning of the second season—the same week as office mate Bill Murray—and until his retirement in 2013, he was, as SNL creator Lorne Michaels puts it in the doc, “ground zero in the world of comedy.”
Since Watergate, no one on earth has been better at making fun of American absurdity. Downey’s hypernuanced sense of humor has been so dialed into our pop culture, politics, and history that many of his most memorable sketches barely felt like exaggerations. When Will Ferrell was playing George W. Bush during the 2000 election, Downey fed him “strategery,” a made-up word that actually sounded like something the future president might say. He wrote realistic commercial parodies like “Colon Blow,” a cereal that embraced the fiber-is-good-for-you craze a little too aggressively. Norm Macdonald’s perfectly deadpan tenure on the “Weekend Update” desk was a project championed by Downey, who coached the comedian on his delivery.
And if you grew up in the ’90s, Downey is likely responsible for some of your favorite moments from a low-usage, high-efficiency performer. When Adam Sandler needed a guy to put him in his place in Billy Madison, he called the man who’d done it in real life. The monologue that Downey wrote and delivers as the high school principal running Billy’s academic decathlon—a version of a speech he gave to Sandler and Chris Farley many times—is the funniest part of the movie.
“Mr. Madison, what you have just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard,” the principal says, launching into a long-winded comedic explanation. “At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”
A simple “wrong” would’ve done just fine. But then, that wouldn’t have been Downey.
When Downey got to SNL, it seemed like all of his new colleagues were from one of two cities: Chicago or Toronto. “Which I tend to think of as the same place,” he says. “That at the time was unusual because comedy tended to be very New York, and to some extent L.A. And most of the comedy coming out of L.A. was transplanted New Yorkers.”
The Midwest was different. “A place of flat accents,” Downey says. “It’s a more dry, ironic sense of humor. I think that has to do with the fact that we have an inferiority complex in my part of the country.”
Thanks to The Blues Brothers, most people who’ve heard of Downey’s hometown of Joliet, Illinois, associate it with Chicago. The place felt completely removed from the big city when Downey was young, though, despite it being only about 40 miles away. “I guess now it maybe is a suburb, but in those days it was more like Poughkeepsie to New York City,” he says. “Close enough [to Chicago], you can go there a couple times a year, but we tended not to.”
In 1968, during one of those rare trips, a newsstand magazine caught Downey’s eye: the Harvard Lampoon parody of Life. The cover photo was a dystopian Easter egg, painted like a globe and cracked in half. The headline: “The End of the World.”
A teen Downey bought a copy and took it home. The issue’s mix of irreverence and attention to detail was like nothing he’d ever seen. So when he began attending Harvard, he naturally made a beeline for the Lampoon castle, which was once named one of the world’s most phallic buildings. As president of the organization, he mockingly invited right-wing movie star John Wayne to campus for a friendly debate.
“We’ve heard you’re supposed to be some kind of legend,” Downey wrote in a letter dated December 5, 1973. “Everybody talks about your he-man prowess, your pistol-packing, rifle-toting, frontier-taming, cattle-demeaning talents, your unsurpassed greatness in the guts department. But we at the Harvard Lampoon tend to doubt it. You’ve made a lot of movies in your time, sure, but there are fifty of us and we’re young whereas you’re an old man.”
The Duke may have been cantankerous, but apparently he had a sense of humor: Wayne accepted the challenge and his visit to Cambridge—the itinerary for which included a parade on an armored vehicle and a roast—made national news. It was the kind of cleverly anarchic stunt that summed up the Lampoon’s influence on comedy.
“It’s a place where originality was the prime directive,” Downey says. “And I’ve discovered that more and more about the Lampoon over the years. It was doing something that no one’s done before. Not being hacky.”
Yet even after his Lampoon experience, Downey didn’t believe that a comedy career was possible. He graduated Harvard with a degree in Russian studies, before Lampoon alums had fully taken over TV writers’ rooms. But he had developed a reputation among his peers. One day, Downey got a phone call from The National Lampoon’s Michael O’Donoghue. ‘“Hey, Downey,’ he said, ‘I hear you’re funny and we’re doing this show.’ … I said, ‘Hey, yeah, I’ve got nothing else to do.’”
Then came a big surprise: Downey landed a year-long fellowship in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. When he returned to the United States, SNL was off and running. “I go, ‘Oh, well, everyone’s talking about this great new comedy show that people are interrupting their Saturday nights to watch,’” Downey says. It was only then that he realized it was the one O’Donoghue had told him about.
After moving to New York, Downey crashed at National Lampoon cofounder Douglas Kenney’s apartment. At the time, Kenney, Harold Ramis, and Chris Miller were holed up there writing Animal House. “I would come out of the door of the guest bedroom and Kenney would be like, ‘Hey, pee pants, what do you think of this?’” Downey remembers. “And they would use me as a sounding board. I’m not saying I contributed anything to that. Except that they sort of threw stuff at me and I gave them my reaction.”
Downey remained jobless until Kenney ran into Michaels at a party. “Hey, there’s a guy sleeping in my guest bedroom,” Kenney supposedly told him. “It would be great if he was able to afford his own place.”
Not long after that, Michaels read some of Downey’s work and hired him. Around Thanksgiving 1976, about a year after traveling through Siberia, he joined the staff of the hottest show on TV.
Something Downey learned fast about Saturday Night Live is that there is no easing in. He says Michaels’s philosophy was this: “drop them into the deep end and they’ll figure it out.”
It didn’t take long for Downey to pick up maybe the most important SNL skill: how to work well with other writers. “You hang out, you throw out an idea and you go, ‘How about this?’” he says. “And then they get a sense over time of the way your mind works, the kind of things that you’re good at, what makes you laugh.”
Early on, the writing duo of Al Franken and Tom Davis encouraged his ideas. “The reason I loved writing with other people was because it was instant confidence,” Downey says. “If you’re sitting there with Al and Tom and you pitch, and you throw something out, if they laugh instantly, you don’t have to sell it. I mean, I can write three different lines, and one can be gold, one can be brass, and one can be a steaming turd, and I might like all of them equally. So to some extent, you depend on your fellow writers to push you.”
Downey shared an office with Murray and they became close friends, but the cast member he really connected with at first was Dan Aykroyd. “Who’s himself a great writer,” Downey says. “And just constantly an engine of characters and ideas. And he would just do these crazy attitudes, which you could then figure out a way to use.”
Downey and Marilyn Miller collaborated with Aykroyd on “Two Wild & Crazy Guys.” Downey also worked with him on a character named Irwin Mainway, a sleazy pitchman who sold dangerous toys. “It was a standard format where Jane Curtin was a very stern, unforgiving interviewer busting him,” he says. “And he would have these preposterous rationalizations.” In one of those sketches, Mainway shills unsafe Halloween costumes, including one that Downey suggested: “Invisible Pedestrian.”
Downey says that moments like that “that would get huge laughs” gave him the confidence to start working on solo material. In 1980, he came up with an intricate Civil War sketch for host Bob Newhart where he plays a Union Army officer who promises to write a letter to a wounded soldier’s mother after his death—but keeps putting it off, despite Murray’s character nagging him to do it. “Newhart fucking loved the piece,” Downey says. “And it was a huge hit at read-through. And then we did it on the show.”
In front of the studio audience, it bombed. The way Downey saw it, opening with a teenager dying was a tough thing to dig out of. And yet, Downey points out, none of the actors broke character. To him, that kind of unwavering commitment made SNL what it was. “When something on our show works, it’s a positive feedback loop for the performers,” he says. “And when it doesn’t work, it’s a negative feedback loop and they start to lose confidence in it. It’s tough to be out there for five, six minutes. And that’s one of the reasons I have boundless admiration for performers on our show. One of the things they have to be willing to do is soldier through a piece that isn’t really working and trying their best not to sell the piece out. Just stick to it. Just believe, ‘OK, I want to do it so the people at home will appreciate it.’”
The Newhart sketch was also a reminder that a national TV show couldn’t operate exactly like the Lampoon, where originality was put on a pedestal. “I wish I could say that pure originality was the most important thing to an audience,” Downey says. “But it’s not even in the top 50. If you grill them, they would go, ‘Yeah, I guess it was nice that I’ve never seen anything like that before.’ But they wouldn’t offer it up as a positive. And so I remembered that over the years.”
A big part of what made SNL work—and last—was that it found a formula and stuck to it. There was room for creativity inside those lines—but the lines had to be there. Downey understood that better than anyone else.
“I remember having an argument with someone who was a critic of the show one time, and she was saying like, ‘What’s this, another talk show? Jesus, how groundbreaking,’” he says. “I’m going, ‘No, idiot, it’s a form. It’s not an idea. It’s not a premise. It’s a way of arranging people, hopefully in a funny way, to talk about something.’ It’s like saying, ‘Oh no, you’re having dinner on a table? Really, you’re going to do the table thing? I suppose you’ll have chairs and plates.’ Well, yeah, because it’s really more about the food.”
By the late ’70s, Downey had become, in Lorne Michaels’s words, “the voice of the show.” But after Michaels and what was left of the original cast bolted after the 1979-80 season, the show as it was originally conceived ended. Downey followed them through the exit and into the open door of another cutting-edge NBC show. In 1982, he became the head writer at Late Night With David Letterman. He’s the guy who invented the Top Ten List.
With four new episodes a week to fill in a 12:30 a.m. time slot, the writers sent their willing and eager boss off in strange directions. “Things that are so goofy, so silly that even if most of them hate it, some people will go, ‘Oh my God, I love this and I’ve never seen this before,’” Downey says. “And so we would do things that, even if they played to silence, Dave could play against them. Dave didn’t object. Dave could do something like fan himself with one of his blue 5-by-7 cards and play the silence. You can’t really get away with that on Saturday Night Live because we do 22 shows a year. You can’t be quite as indifferent to lack of audience response.”
The call of sketch comedy, though, was hard to resist. After a detour at Michaels’s short-lived The New Show, Downey returned to Saturday Night Live in 1984. When Michaels came back the next year, Downey was named the first head writer in the history of the show. With the arrival of new cast members like Dana Carvey, Kevin Nealon, Jan Hooks, Jon Lovitz, and Phil Hartman in the mid-’80s, SNL started to hit its stride again.
By then, TV advertising had become a monster that ruthlessly targeted everyone, including children. In other words, it was the perfect time to make fake commercials. In 1988, Downey wrote and appeared in “First CityWide Change Bank,” which did one thing and one thing only: make correct change. “If you come to us with a $20 bill, we can give you two 10s,” Downey’s character says. “We can give you four 5s. We can give you a 10 and two 5s. We will work with you.” It’s the quintessential Downeyan joke: someone explaining something that doesn’t need to be explained.
In the late ’80s, more than ever, Downey began to apply his sense of humor to politics. It was a big change from SNL’s early days, when “there were pieces that you could call explicitly political only maybe three or four times a season,” he says. Elected officials were on TV all the time now. There was a lot to work with. “Lorne loved doing political openings,” Downey says. “We must’ve done a dozen just with Dana as George H.W. Bush. Part of it was that there was a very simple set, the Oval Office desk. They were fairly easy to write, and Dana was always great. Sometimes the ideas were a little thin, but they were simple to do. And it came to be expected.”
The increase in political comedy started to make more sense to Downey in early 1991 after he wrote a sketch starring Hartman as then–U.S. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. In the faux Gulf War press briefing, Cheney repeatedly deflects reporters’ questions about when the attack on Iraq would begin. “I just saw it as a silly piece,” Downey says. But then national newspapers ran stories about it. “I remember Lorne saying that was the first time we’d ever made the front page of The New York Times,” he says. Sure enough, cable news soon started airing SNL highlights.
“We developed kind of a symbiotic relationship with it,” Downey says. “They would mine our stuff. So every Monday, MSNBC or CNN or even Fox would use clips of the political pieces we were doing. It did help us. It gave them, of course, free, fair-use stuff. It sort of attracted, I suppose, a segment of our audience which wanted to see political satire. We certainly did a lot more of it than we ever had. It just kept growing and growing as a feature of the show. And then by the 2000s, it began to be almost a requirement.”
There was also, however, always plenty of room at SNL for, well, less intellectual comedy: Downey’s the one who came up with Chris Farley’s “Chippendales Audition.” The writer had a knack for knowing how to tailor material to the cast’s talents. When Robert Smigel was writing a “Schmitts Gay” beer ad for Carvey and Nealon, Downey suggested replacing them with Farley and Sandler. “You know they’re the best people for it conceptually,” he told Smigel. Like usual, Downey was right.
Back in the early ’90s, it was Sandler who brought Norm Macdonald to Downey’s attention. “He came to my office one time and said, ‘You’ve got to see this guy,’” he recalls. “‘He’s the only guy out there doing stand-up who scared the shit out of me.’”
Macdonald left his writing gig on Roseanne for SNL in 1993 and took over for Nealon on “Weekend Update” the next fall. Thus began one of Downey’s favorite working relationships.
The key to Macdonald’s fake news anchor was his precisely calibrated delivery. “If you watched it with the sound off,” Downey says, “you couldn’t be 100 percent certain it was a comedy show.” In Downey’s eyes, Macdonald couldn’t have cared less about being a people pleaser. The comedian’s incessant jokes about O.J. Simpson, who was the biggest story in the country at the time, royally pissed off NBC West Coast president Don Ohlmeyer—a friend of the alleged murderer. But Macdonald didn’t stop.
“Norm was a guy who if he thought something was funny, he was absolutely happy to do it,” Downey says. “In fact, determined to do it, whether or not it had any prospect of getting huge audience laughs. Every time someone asks me about the Norm ‘Update,’ they bring up something that I consider a canard. They talk about how Norm would just stare into the camera. But I always say, ‘No, he’s giving audiences a moment to get the joke.’ And it was to show that we were confident that this was funny. … I know that’s the kind of thing that drove Don Ohlmeyer insane.”
Macdonald’s “Update” was, it turned out, the highlight of a disastrous 1994-95 season that ended with most of the cast and writers getting fired. The network did keep Macdonald on—but not Downey. “They acknowledged that Norm’s ‘Update’ worked,” he says. “That summer, Norm was calling me. Norm would say, ‘Hey, hey, hey, Jim, you’ve got to do ‘Update.’ And I go, ‘Norm, I was fired. You have to take that up with Don Ohlmeyer.’”
SNL did bring Downey back to work with Macdonald on “Weekend Update.” But that didn’t last: NBC pushed Downey and Macdonald out midway through the 1997-98 season. Macdonald still got the last laugh, though. In what amounted to an SNL exit interview on Late Night, he recounted his final conversation with Ohlmeyer: “He goes, ‘Oh yeah, I’m firing you from the show.’ And I said, ‘Oh that’s not good. Why is that now?’ And he goes, ‘You’re not funny.’ And I said, ‘Holy lord, that’s even worse news.’”
Like Downey’s departure from Saturday Night Live in the early ’80s, the one in the ’90s was temporary. He came back again in 2000. By that point, making the decades-old sketch comedy show feel fresh wasn’t easy. “I’d be the first to acknowledge that in the early years of the show, it was like living in a primeval kind of paradise where there was just fresh, juicy fruit on every tree dropping into your lap,” Downey says. “And then the second wave had a tougher time, because, Oh, didn’t they try something like that? We want to stay away from that.”
Even making parody ads was more challenging than it was in the ’70s, when everything tended to be more earnest. “Commercials these days, I’d say 80 percent of them are, in some way, supposed to be sly, or funny, or ironic, or silly,” Downey says. “And it makes it hard because they’re doing our job for us. So what do we get to do?”
Still, the increased degree of difficulty never sucked the joy out of working at SNL. Downey figured things out, like he always had, with the help of hungry young cast members. He points to a pre-taped, fake infomercial he wrote in 2002 starring Chris Parnell, who plays a CEO methodically explaining to clients that his investment firm has been scamming them. It was the kind of bit that sent Downey back in time. “I’ve been there at the show so long that I tend to think of cast members as powerfully reminding me of previous cast members,” he says. “It’s a sports thing, where a certain NBA player reminds you of an earlier generation. Chris Parnell is very much in the Phil Hartman school.”
The sketch is also a who’s who of SNL up-and-comers: Maya Rudolph, Will Forte, Fred Armisen, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon, Amy Poehler. “I’d just like to say that even though I think you’re an evil person, and even though I came here intending to kill you,” Poehler says at one point, “I’ve been really impressed with your honesty.”
“I just loved seeing all the cast be so good in it,” Downey says. “And as a group, we don’t do enough big cast pieces when in the early years of the show, when we had a seven-person cast, eight-person cast, it was a lot easier.”
It’s that kind of collaborative magic that Downey, who retired from Saturday Night Live in 2013, cherishes. “My pride is bound up with having played for some great teams,” Downey says.
What he’s leaving out is that those teams wouldn’t have been as great without him. His ability to help several generations of writers and performers elevate their work was as important to SNL as his sense of humor. There’s a reason that the list of notable colleagues who gush about him in Downey Wrote That spans five decades.
Now 73, Downey is still making his protégés and old friends laugh. Two years ago, he went on Conan O’Brien’s podcast and unleashed a perfectly deadpan bit about Jeffrey Epstein that became one of the internet’s most used memes. Paul Thomas Anderson, whom Downey met on the set of Late Night when the director was 10 years old, just put him in a film for the second time: In One Battle After Another, he plays a white supremacist who has two of the movie’s best lines. And not long after that shoot, Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin asked him to be a kindly, bubble-blowing man named Douglas in their new HBO show The Chair Company.
Back in 2012, Downey actually worked on Robinson’s first pre-filmed piece at Saturday Night Live, “The Undecided Voters.” “My last year at SNL was Tim Robinson’s first and only year,” Downey says. Then they lost touch. “There’s so many people at this point that I’ve worked with over 50 years who are off doing great things,” he adds. “If I did absolutely nothing else, I wouldn’t be able to stay on top of it.”
But a few years ago, Downey’s son urged him to watch I Think You Should Leave. Downey was astounded. “It was like, ‘Oh my God,’” he says. “It was thrilling.” It was radically different from SNL, the kind of show that he couldn’t have ever imagined existing.
“One of the things that has given me great satisfaction is seeing people that I’ve worked with who are going beyond what we have done,” Downey says. “I know I’ve said this before, but I always like saying it. To me, comedy is sort of like science where you want to keep moving forward. And occasionally, it does.”
