Lampoon Writers Ready for Primtetime

While it may seem to a typical by-stander that moving headquarters from a castle to a rock is kind of a downgrade, for writers from The Harvard Lampoon, this seems to have become part of a seasonal migration. Since the inception of “Saturday Night Live” in 1975, the Lampoon has sent a steady stream of graduates to write for the sketch comedy show broadcast live from Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Center, also known as 30 Rock.

There are currently five Lampoon graduates on SNL’s 33-member writing team, which includes all the cast members and producer Lorne Michaels.

James M. Downey ’74 is the patriarch of the Lampoon/SNL lineage. After serving as president of the Lampoon in 1973, Downey joined the writing team at SNL in its second season and has continued writing for the show on and off throughout the intervening years, holding the head writer position in the 1980s.

Downey says that at its inception, the live comedy show became a phenomenon because no one had ever done anything like it before. “Doing the show for the first five seasons was a kind of otherworldly experience,” he says. “The show was so hot, way more than it deserved to be. It’s sort of like being a rookie and going straight to the World Series and never going back.” And while he notes that recent seasons haven’t inspired the same ardor, he believes that SNL is now a more polished, sophisticated, and better-written production.

Downey recently garnered attention for the spot-on political sketches that he wrote for SNL, particularly the Sarah Palin skits he wrote for Tina Fey. “When I do political stuff, I just want it to be first and foremost funny and, second, not idiotic so someone who knows politics would say, ‘Yeah, it’s funny and it actually makes sense,’” he says.

Downey, who also wrote the well-received presidential debate sketches in 2000, says that acclaim for individual writers is a relatively new phenomenon. “Having the attention for writers is unusual, and it’s a nice thing,” he says.

Colin K. Jost ’04, who has been on the writing staff since 2005 and authored such recent sketches as “Don Draper’s Guide to Picking Up Women” with fellow alumnus Erik J. Kenward ’99, also made a foray into the political arena in writing the split-screen Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama ads. “It felt like our show was relevant,” he says of the attention that SNL received this past election season. “I don’t think we were impacting the election, but I felt like we were in the discussion.”

The creative process at the show is based on collaboration among the writers and actors. Jost compares it to living in dorms. “We all share rooms with cast members,” he says. “My roommate is Kenan Thompson. It’s kind of like a dorm set up almost, with everyone grouped together and you stay up all night and try to write something.”

This encourages actors to write, and occasionally writers to act. Downey has been in front of the camera, both on SNL and in feature films, including “Billy Madison” and “There Will Be Blood.” Though he doesn’t yearn to be in front of the camera, Downey does find it satisfying to be able to act out exactly what he envisioned as a writer. “As a writer the frustrating thing about it is that you can have in your head the words exactly as they need to be, and there’s that awkward gulf between that and what the performer does,” he says.

On the other hand, Simon H. Rich ’06-’07—a former president of the Lampoon who is in his second year of writing for SNL—says, “They only put me in front of the camera as a sight gag when they need an awkward-looking, childlike nerd when they need a cheap laugh.”

Jost and Kenward feel that the show’s performance aspect is one of the biggest differences between writing for the Lampoon and writing for SNL. Writers for the show help produce their own sketches, meaning that they have to think about costumes, sets, and props while discussing the piece with the host and actors. “There’s a huge difference between writing something and then seeing it visually,” Jost says. “It takes a while to train your mind for that, to anticipate it as you’re writing.”

Nevertheless, their college years have proven to be an invaluable source for developing and honing the writers’ comedic writing.

The Lampoon provided a forum in which Downey could sharpen his skills. “It’s a nice environment because it’s a bunch of smart-ass types who rub the edges off of most people,” he says.

Likewise, all the hours that Kenward spent hanging out in the Castle during his time at Harvard helped him to think critically about writing comedy. “Part of it is just making your friends laugh, but you’re hanging out with people thinking about comedy a lot so you sort of learn to make critical judgments about the quality of your comedy,” he says. Kenward believes that this ability to analyze comedy is what differentiates the professionals from people who are just funny.

Kenward, who has been working on SNL since 2001, also credits the humor magazine with opening up his eyes to the world of professional comedy writing. “Before I was on the Lampoon I didn’t even really know that being a comedy writer was a career path that was open to people,” he says. “I wanted to write for SNL after I got on the Lampoon and realized that that was something that I could do.”

In his time, Downey, who served as the president of the Lampoon in ’73, says that no one thought of the Lampoon as a possible pre-professional experience, though it has since become a West Point for comedy writing. “Nowadays it’s an honest-to-goodness pipeline,” he says, noting that such television comedy staples as “Late Night with David Letterman,” “The Simpsons,” and, formerly, “Seinfeld” have all been heavily staffed with former Lampoon writers. Downey says that he did not even consider comedic writing as a career option initially and would not have ended up at SNL “had I not managed my affairs as an undergraduate such that I had no other choice.”

“It’s fantastic to be able to write something on a Tuesday night at 5 a.m. that’s on netwrok television on Saturday night,” Jost says. “The whole time you’re rushing to make it better and rehearse it. You’re doing it in New York and you’re doing it on Saturday night. It never gets old.”