Brad Hall Wanted to Turn Weekend Update into ‘The Daily Show’ Back in the 1980s

The early 1980s were a tough time for Saturday Night Live. After Lorne Michaels and the remaining members of the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players left at the end of Season Five, an all-new cast starred in a truncated Season Six before they were all fired — save for two breakout stars: Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo. 

With the departing cast members went new showrunner Jean Doumanian, who was replaced by Dick Ebersol for Seasons Seven through 10 (Michaels returned in Season 11). Ebersol was a controversial figure at SNL, as the show struggled to regain its cultural relevance during his reign and suffered from frequent cast turnover.

Smack-dab in the middle of Ebersol’s run came Brad Hall, who was a cast member for all of Seasons Eight and Nine. While he was in some sketches, he mostly helmed the Weekend Update desk for a season and a half before being replaced by various guest anchors. Hall departed the show at the end of Season Nine, though his girlfriend Julia Louis-Dreyfus remained for one more season before also leaving.

Since his time on SNL, Hall has continued acting — a notable role was playing himself on Curb Your Enthusiasm — but he’s mostly found success behind the camera, writing, directing, producing and creating various sitcoms. I recently caught up with Hall to talk about those challenging Ebersol-led SNL years, his desire to make Weekend Update more like The Daily Show and jamming on the piano and drums with Eddie Murphy and Stevie Wonder.

First things first: How did you end up on SNL?

Before Groundlings and UCB became the places where they got everybody, there was Second City in Chicago. I had a theater company with my friend Paul Barrosse in Chicago called The Practical Theatre Company, and we were kind of the hot new thing. We had a theater, and we shared Second City’s bar. 

Dick Ebersol and Bob Tischler were coming to see Second City with Tim Kazurinsky. They saw the Second City show, and Tim said, “These Practical Theatre guys are supposed to be good.” Bernie Sahlins, who, at the time, was running Second City said, “Yeah, definitely go there!” because he didn’t want to lose any more Second City people to Saturday Night Live. 

They came around and saw our later show. They liked it, and they hired all of us — me, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Gary Kroeger and Paul Barrosse. We had a problem, though, because it was an actual theater company, and a lot of people worked there, so we were tempted not to go because we had shit to do in Chicago. But Bernie said, “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity, you guys should go.”

So we went, but we continued the theater company. After a year, Paul came back to Chicago, and after two years, I came back too. 

With Second City and the Groundlings, Saturday Night Live would cherry-pick who they wanted and split up the groups. Did it make it easier that all of you got the offer to go?

It depends on how you look at it. There were great things about it — we all got to go together, and we were all best friends; Julia and I were already living together. What wasn’t great was that we came in as a unit, and so, other people were a little defensive. Friends of theirs had left the show to make room for us, so that was a little odd. 

We also came from a completely different world than that era of SNL, which was very straight. We had come from this little tiny theater company, and we had a rock ‘n’ roll band, we did a lot of physical comedy — none of this was ever going to get on the air at SNL. None of it was Saturday Night Live’s style.

None of us had ever done any TV either. Only I really had done a lot beyond Practical Theatre Company — I had been an actor in a lot of regional theaters. We were kids — I was 23, and Julia was Eddie Murphy’s age. We were really young. It was quite a shock to the system.

How did you end up being the Weekend Update anchor?

I’m not 100 percent sure how that happened. When they saw the show in Chicago, they thought maybe that I could do it. My conception of it, however, was completely different from theirs and Herb Sargent, who I loved. Herb was the main writer of news stories, but it had been the same thing for a long time, and it remained the same thing until Dennis Miller got there and kind of blew it up. 

I thought we could do it almost like The Daily Show, where we could cover real news, but from a Saturday Night Live perspective. It’s become more towards that over the years, but I wanted to do that then. I was even saying, “What if I go out and cover news live?” But they weren’t interested in that. Lorne Michaels might have done that, but during the Dick Ebersol era, no. They didn’t want us to break any new ground. Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo had become big stars, so their view of what they were going to do was, “Let’s service these guys who are very popular and keep the ship steady.”

Was Herb interested in changing it like you were, or was he on Ebersol’s side?

Not at all. He’d had a lot of conflict with Bill Murray when Bill wanted to change it years before. He liked to do it that way, and he wasn’t wrong — it was very successful with Chevy Chase doing picture jokes about contemporary stuff. But the early 1980s was a weird time because it was very transitional. He would put in a lot of Johnny Carson jokes and that, to me, felt very Vegas-y — it was middle-aged. 

You did a fair amount of jokes at Reagan’s expense, though.

Yeah, but I’m very very political, and to me, we weren’t doing anything cutting-edge. It’d be like, there was a picture of Reagan waving where it looked like his hand was stuck to his head, and the joke would be, “President Reagan had his hand stuck to his head this morning.” That’s not saying anything. 

Plus, I was stupid. I was like, “I’m not going to do any recurring characters. What’s this recurring character shit? That’s what they did when John Belushi was there.” We thought we were going to change Saturday Night Live, but no, you’re not going to change Saturday Night Live.

Are there any Weekend Update jokes that still stick with you?

The only news joke I remember doing was something about the Israelis looking for a new home for the Palestinians. I said, “And this is that home,” and the picture was some small house in the suburbs. 

The kind of thing I wanted to do though was like this one sketch I got to do with Jim Belushi. I was a reporter, and I said into the camera, “Statistics show that, in New York City, a man gets mugged every 13 seconds. This is that man.” Then I interviewed Jim Belushi who got mugged every 13 seconds during the interview. We did it out on the street. I wanted to do more of that, more film pieces like that. 

When you got on SNL, you were already with Julia, was there any difficulty juggling that on the show? Could you not tell people?

We’d been together a long time already, so that was no big deal. I don’t think that was common on the show; we may be the only married couple on the show. The only thing was, back in Chicago, Paul and I had been the artistic directors of the company, so I felt like I had to protect those guys, so I wrote a lot for Julia and Gary — for everybody, really. I wrote for Eddie; I wrote for everybody because I thought that’s how the show works. But that’s not how the show works — you write for yourself, you create your own stuff. I wasn’t from that culture, so I didn’t get that.

What was Eddie Murphy like to work with?

Eddie was frickin’ awesome. The most fun thing that ever happened to me on that show was when Stevie Wonder was musical guest and the host. I was just in awe of Stevie the whole time. He discovered early on that I’m a huge Beatles fan, and he’s a huge Beatles fan, so is Eddie Murphy. So we’d be singing Beatles songs and harmonizing — can you imagine how awesome that was?

One day, Eddie and I were waiting for a rehearsal. Eddie could play the drums a little bit, and I was sitting at the piano playing the piano on the stage. In comes Stevie Wonder with his brother Marlon. Stevie comes over to the piano and sits down next to me. I stop, and he says, “Don’t stop.” So I keep playing, and he starts playing another part on the piano with me so there’s four hands on the piano. I look over my shoulder at Eddie, and he has this look like, “Holy shit, we’re playing with Stevie Wonder!” 

We just improvised a tune with Stevie Wonder, and that was worth the whole thing.