The Inside Story of the Most Famous Joke from the First-Ever ‘Weekend Update’
A lot has changed about Saturday Night Live over the last 50 years, but the faux newscast “Weekend Update” has always remained more or less the same. Like it was on the very first show, it’s still a parody of the news with an anchor telling topical jokes based on what’s going on in the world that week. Sometimes there have been two anchors instead of just one, but the formula has otherwise gone unchanged.
One man who worked on that very first “Weekend Update” was Alan Zweibel, who has since written for a number of other legendary TV shows and movies (It’s Garry Shandling’s Show and Dragnet chief among them) and is the author of Laugh Lines: My Life Helping Funny People Be Funnier. While he’s had a storied career, I recently asked Zweibel to narrow in on the fall of 1975 and share what it was like to write the very first “Weekend Update” with Chevy Chase.
‘SNL’s Original Legendary Writer
My career started with writing jokes for Catskill comedians — they paid me $7 a joke — and learning how to write jokes is what got me the job on SNL. When I got there, I was a natural for “Weekend Update” given my joke-writing history. I had not heard of Second City and I had never written sketches, but “Weekend Update” was easy for me because it was just jokes toward the audience.
Don't Miss
I didn’t work with Chevy at first, I worked with Herb Sargent. I was 25, around the median age of everyone else there, but Herb was 54 and already a big-time TV writer. He had produced That Was the Week That Was, and he had written for The Tonight Show with Steve Allen. He had produced some shows that Lorne Michaels was a writer on too, so he had a history with Lorne.
When SNL was being formed, Herb became a writer on the show. I think he even asked to be a writer on the show because it would be in New York, and he knew it would be young and adventurous — and that’s the way he was, even though he was so much older than all of us.
Herb was such a good joke writer, so I gravitated toward him. Back in those days, there was no internet, so, to write “Weekend Update,” Herb would come in with maybe five or six newspapers from a newspaper stand, and he and I would go through them looking for joke material.
The Name Weekend Update
Herb shaped “Weekend Update.” I wasn’t in that room a lot, so I’m sure Chevy had input too, as he was a wonderful writer back then. One thing I was in the room for was — I was at my desk in the bullpen, and as Lorne was passing me, he said to Chevy, “Let’s call it ‘Weekend Update.’”
There were some last-minute changes, though. I have a script of the first episode where, in the “Weekend Update” portion of the script, Chevy had a name like “Ron Omega,” and he went to correspondent “Rick Bulova.” Somewhere in between this script and the show, it was decided to let Chevy use his real name.
The Iconic Stamp Joke
In the very first “Weekend Update,” I wrote a joke that went, “The Post Office announced today that it’s going to issue a stamp commemorating prostitution in the United States. It’s a 10-cent stamp, but if you want to lick it, it’s a quarter.”
When I wrote that joke, it was 1975. The next year was the bicentennial, and the Post Office was coming out with a whole series of commemorative stamps to celebrate the bicentennial with famous wars, famous people and other things to celebrate our country. I was working at a delicatessen at the time, and I thought, “What would be a funny commemorative stamp?” I ultimately came around to prostitution. That part was easy, but the punchline took me like a week.
I tried other stuff like, “If you want to lick it, you have to take it out to dinner first,” but once I landed on “If you want to lick it, it’s a quarter,” I knew that was the joke.
When I auditioned for Lorne, I typed up 1,100 of my best jokes and put them into a binder. I knew that stamp joke was a really good joke, so I put it as the first joke on the first page. When I met with Lorne at a hotel in the city, he opened up the book and read the first joke in front of me. Then he started nodding and closed the book. He liked it!
I’m sure he read the rest of the binder later to approve of me getting hired by NBC, but that’s how that joke got me hired on this brand new show that was going to be called Saturday Night Live.
I still have that binder. In fact, for Jason Reitman’s movie Saturday Night, he asked me to send him a photo of what the binder looked like and what the first page looked like. In that movie, there’s a guy playing me with that joke and the guy playing Chevy tells it.
Nowadays, I do lectures all over the country. I’m often booked at a university with kids who are 18 or 19. I’ll tell that joke and it still gets a good laugh, but there are kids who will come up to me afterwards and ask, “Why would you lick a stamp? All you have to do is peel it.”
