A classic from one of the greats (who also, in regard to a current topic of onebee conversation, did not have many nice things to say about women in comedy). Haven't read that in a long time, thanks for linking to it.
Bee Boy — Mon, 3/10/08 10:07pm
[O'Donoghue] did not have many nice things to say about women in comedy
Indeed not. According to Alessandra Stanley, O'Donoghue scared Catherine O'Hara off SNL before she ever took the stage. (From what I've read, he was trying to restore some of the show's dangerous edge, which is still lacking to this day.) I don't know him well at all; perhaps he had nothing good to say about men in comedy either.
He came up in a Tiebreakers question recently, so the mention in Stanley's article caused me to look him up. I'd never heard of him (although my dad used to recount his impersonations of celebrities with steel spikes through their eyes) but I fell in love with him the instant I learned he'd written an unproduced screenplay entitled Planet of the Cheap Special Effects.
Then, a day later, this link came to me from a completely different direction and its brilliance was too much to ignore.
Brandon — Mon, 3/10/08 11:23pm
The O'Donoghue quote I always remember, from Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad's Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live (which I cannot recommend highly enough), is this:
"It does help when writing humor to have a big hunk of meat between the legs, I find. That may sound sexist, and I say it only the kindest way, but Mr. Ding Dong, I think, has a lot of comedy genes in there."
Now O'Donoghue loved to provoke, so it's hard to know how serious he was. And really, he seemed to regard a lot of his fellow writers with disdain, regardless of their gender.
Brandon — Mon, 3/10/08 9:09pm
A classic from one of the greats (who also, in regard to a current topic of onebee conversation, did not have many nice things to say about women in comedy). Haven't read that in a long time, thanks for linking to it.
Bee Boy — Mon, 3/10/08 10:07pm
Indeed not. According to Alessandra Stanley, O'Donoghue scared Catherine O'Hara off SNL before she ever took the stage. (From what I've read, he was trying to restore some of the show's dangerous edge, which is still lacking to this day.) I don't know him well at all; perhaps he had nothing good to say about men in comedy either.
He came up in a Tiebreakers question recently, so the mention in Stanley's article caused me to look him up. I'd never heard of him (although my dad used to recount his impersonations of celebrities with steel spikes through their eyes) but I fell in love with him the instant I learned he'd written an unproduced screenplay entitled Planet of the Cheap Special Effects.
Then, a day later, this link came to me from a completely different direction and its brilliance was too much to ignore.
Brandon — Mon, 3/10/08 11:23pm
The O'Donoghue quote I always remember, from Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad's Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live (which I cannot recommend highly enough), is this:
"It does help when writing humor to have a big hunk of meat between the legs, I find. That may sound sexist, and I say it only the kindest way, but Mr. Ding Dong, I think, has a lot of comedy genes in there."
Now O'Donoghue loved to provoke, so it's hard to know how serious he was. And really, he seemed to regard a lot of his fellow writers with disdain, regardless of their gender.