Bill Murray Used His ‘Meatballs’ Motivational Speech to Inspire ‘SNL’s Worst Cast
There likely wasn’t a path to a win for Jean Doumanian when she took the reins from Lorne Michaels at Saturday Night Live in 1980. The show not only lost Michaels but all of the original Not Ready for Primetime Players, several of whom had gone on to be major movie stars. The new cast would inevitably be compared unfavorably to the first, but it didn’t help that Joe Piscopo was the closest thing Doumanian had found to a star. She’d also cast young Eddie Murphy, but inexplicably kept him relegated to the bench for the first part of the show’s sixth season.
“I could never describe to you in words how painful those first 10 months really were,” Piscopo said in oral history Live From New York. “You just knew that this was America’s favorite television show, and yet here we were, taking it right into the toilet.”
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For the first time, there were legitimate rumblings that NBC might cancel the show. So Doumanian called an audible, enlisting old pal Bill Murray to come back and save Saturday Night Live. As host, Murray helmed the best show of that season — and he began it by acknowledging how much it sucked.
The beleaguered cast shuffles into Murray’s dressing room, complaining that the critics have been raking them over the coals. Murray had read the bad notices, throwing real-life reviews back in the comics' faces: “Saturday Night Live Is Saturday Night Dead,” “From Yuks to Yecch,” and his favorite, “Vile From New York.”
Murray tries to cheer up the gang. “Even if your ratings went up higher than the old show, people would still say the old show was better, you know?” Then he acknowledged the truth: “And maybe it was.”
But the veteran SNL player had advice for the new guys. He told Charles Rocket to stop doing bad Bill Murray impressions. “And watch your mouth,” he warned one week after Rocket had dropped an F-bomb on live TV. “Clean it up.”
He instructed Denny Dillon to comb her hair and insinuated that Piscopo should change his name. As for Gail Matthius and Ann Risley? “You girls are terrific-looking. I still mix you up, I can’t tell you apart, but it’s great.”
At least Murray knew enough to single out Murphy. “You’re Black. That’s beautiful, man. You can do whatever you want.”
In the end, Murray concluded, “You guys need help. You need a lot of help.” And he delivered that help with a pep talk lifted straight out of his first move hit, Meatballs.
“The press, they can be terrible to you but it just doesn’t matter!” he said, jumping to his feet. “The ratings deal, it just doesn’t matter!” Even Murray potentially humiliating himself and destroying his comedy career — it just didn’t matter. The new gang gets caught up in Murray’s chant. “It just doesn’t matter!”
Unless you’re Jean Douminian, of course. She lost her job the following week.
Murray’s career emerged unscathed that night, but he still ended the 1981 episode with a heartfelt apology delivered straight to camera: “Danny, John, Gilda, Laraine, Garrett, Jane — I’m sorry for what I’ve done.”
