Bob Odenkirk recalls Chris Farley getting "mind-fucked" by Lorne Michaels

If you’re one of those people railing against America’s gerontocracy and think Lorne Michaels should step aside and let fresh young blood run Saturday Night Live, well, Bob Odenkirk once counted among your ranks. The former SNL writer admitted that during his time at the show in the late ’80s, he felt having a 40-plus-year-old boss was a comedic liability. “I thought, Fuck this guy for being in charge. Shouldn’t SNL be for each generation?” Odenkirk says in a new profile for The New Yorker. However, with time and hindsight, the now-62-year-old actor admits, “I was a dick.”

Fair play, it seems, because it sounds like Michaels could be a dick a lot of the time, too. The New Yorker references in a moment in the oral history Live From New York where Michaels once told Odenkirk “I’ll break your fucking legs” for whispering in a staff meeting. Odenkirk himself recalls Chris Farley coming to him in tears, saying every time he did well Michaels critiqued him, and every time messed up Michaels told him he did well. “Chris was mind-fucked,” Odenkirk shares. “Lorne clearly felt that if you kept people off balance they’d try harder.”

As for the rest of the show, “You’d think that you’d say, ‘We’re gonna pick the best sketches, and then we’re gonna shine ’em up as best we can,'” Odenkirk said, but actually “the focus is on just getting it to happen and not on the quality level.” 

Michaels himself acknowledges that putting together a show’s lineup requires finding “enough colors to make a rainbow”—that is, not just the funniest sketches, but also the sketches that please the guest host, and sketches that play to middle America, and etc. And he also freely acknowledges that he can be hard on his young staff. As he so lovingly puts it: “The only thing that justifies that level of abuse is the exhilaration of it working.”