George Carlin Refused to Do Sketches in the First-Ever ‘Saturday Night Live’

One of the original concepts for Saturday Night Live was to have a series of rotating hosts that included iconic stand-up comedians George Carlin, Lily Tomlin and Richard Pryor. What happened to that plan? “Perhaps I poisoned the well a little,” Carlin wrote in his book Last Words. “I certainly was full of cocaine. (Though I was far from the only one.)”

What else did Carlin do to sour NBC on having the comic as a semi-regular? 

Honestly, Carlin doesn’t recall all of the details. Journalist Bob Woodward said someone had to break down Carlin’s hotel room door because he was so coked up. Did it actually happen? “I don’t remember,” he confessed. “It may be true. Maybe I went missing the day before or after the show, crashed after being up all week.”

One thing Carlin does remember is refusing to participate in any comedy sketches — a problem for a producer trying to put on a sketch comedy show. Carlin told Lorne Michaels, “I’ll just fuck it up. Instead of hanging around throughout the show in sketches, give me a series of monologues of a few minutes each.” And that’s exactly how the first episode of Saturday Night played out.

“I had found out that long since in the late ‘60s when I got hot that I really wasn’t a born actor,” Carlin explained to the Television Academy Foundation about his refusal to do the sketches. “There was no satisfaction in it. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but ‘actor’ is part of a collaboration. I think I never really felt comfortable in collaborative efforts. I never liked being part of the group.”

Even though he was in his comfort zone, Carlin could never rewatch that Saturday Night premiere without wincing. “There’s one place where I can see myself grinding my jaw from the cocaine,” he said. “I can see my discomfort from the cocaine and from being out of place.”

The comedian eventually stared down his fear of sketch comedy when he returned to host in the 1980s. Michaels was gone, and Dick Ebersol was at the helm. “I said I want to be in the sketches,” Carlin remembered. “And I was good in them. I was really good in them. I felt like an actor, you know — even though it’s sketch acting, I felt I was acting.”

But that was the end of Carlin’s relationship with Saturday Night Live, a breakup that stung. “I never got called back, even when I got super hot later,” he explained. “I never got called back by Lorne Michaels.” 

When SNL held televised parties for its 15th, 20th and 25th anniversaries, its inaugural host didn’t get an invitation. “The most natural thing in the world for public relations purposes would be to have the original host to host one of those,” Carlin said. “Or just to stand up in the audience in his dopey tuxedo.”

Why the snub from Michaels? “I don't know,” Carlin said. “Must have had something to do with that cocaine week. I must have left a very, very sour taste in his mouth. That’s the odd part to me — I can see not hosting but I can’t see not being somehow acknowledged in the anniversaries. It’s just weird to me.”

It is weird. But with the 50th-anniversary show coming up in a few months, Michaels has another chance to make it right, even if it has to be posthumously.