In interviews and therapy sessions from New York to Hollywood, Lorne Michaels has been compared to the Godfather, Gatsby, the Wizard of Oz, Charles Foster Kane, Machiavelli and Darth Vader. Everyone in the comedy business has something to whisper about Lorne, who, like his friend Cher, is widely known by his first name. This is on account of the quiet yet career-breaking power he wields over the cast, writing team and vast production staff of the now fifty-year-old NBC sketches show Saturday Night Live (SNL). SNL occupies an outsize place in American life. Many of its characters – for instance, Dana Carvey’s Church Lady and her catchphrase ‘Now, isn’t that special?’ – have become what Susan Morrison calls ‘collective cultural property’. Chevy Chase’s bumbling Gerald Ford, Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin and Alec Baldwin’s Donald Trump have shaped public perceptions. (It was Fey, not Palin, who said she could ‘see Russia from her house’.) Michaels’s marathon career is chronicled with worshipful attention in Morrison’s rich biography. 

Michaels was born Lorne Lipowitz in Toronto. His maternal grandparents owned a cinema; he grew up venerating old Hollywood and was interested in comedy from his schooldays. His father, who had inherited a fur business, died when Michaels was fourteen, after the two had fallen out; Morrison suggests that Michaels’s aversion to conflict and his ‘watchful remoteness’ stem from that trauma. 

In the mid-1960s, Michaels enjoyed some success in Canada, first on the radio and later on TV, where he played the straight man in a duo with a lawyer named Hart Pomerantz. In 1967, they went to New York to meet Woody Allen, who was on the lookout for