Lorne Michaels’ 1969 Comedy Album Is Bargain-Basement Mel Brooks
While Lorne Michaels is an occasional bit player on Saturday Night Live, offering $3,000 for a Beatles reunion or singing operatic encouragement to Steve Martin, not many think of Michaels as an out-and-out comedian. But back in the 1960s, he was part of Hart and Lorne, a two-man comedy team that took Canada by storm.
Well, they performed in Canada.
Don't Miss
Along with his boisterous comic counterpart, Hart Pomerantz, Michaels struggled to find his way into the comedy business. As a comedy writing team, the duo sold jokes to Woody Allen and Joan Rivers, creating a resume that landed them writing jobs on The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show and Laugh-In. They didn’t last more than a single season on either show, but the credits got them their own Canadian program, The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour. Michaels even anchored a proto version of Weekend Update.
Right around that same time, the duo released The Comedy of Hart and Lorne, a comedy album on the CBC Radio Canada label. Good luck finding a copy on eBay — I’ve tried — but you can listen to the entire thing here.
What you’ll find is a series of two-man sketches that are very much in the vein of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s “2000-Year-Old Man” bits. Brooks and Reiner had a consistent template across their hilarious comedy recordings: Reiner played the straight-man interviewer, asking questions to Brooks as a series of outrageous characters, from the ancient survivor to a newborn baby to a coffee-shop beatnik. The inventive bits are still referenced as inspirations for multiple generations of comics — and they clearly inspired Hart and Lorne.
Pomerantz in particular copped to that influence. “We became a Mel Brooks/Carl Reiner sort of comedy team,” he said in a documentary about Terrific Hour. And The Comedy of Hart and Lorne might as well be a Reiner/Brooks album, just less funny and original. Michaels takes the Reiner part, soberly interviewing his more gregarious partner so he can deliver the punchlines. Pomerantz gets the Brooks role, playing a variety of big characters evident in the unimaginative naming of comedy tracks like “Airline Pilot,” “Bank Robber” and “Canadian Indian.”
A bit in which Pomerantz plays a beleaguered Canadian Beaver has some okay jokes. The national mascot feels disrespected about being stuck on the country’s nickel, spending half his life in parking meters and pay toilets. “We want the dime,” Canadian Beaver demands. In a foreshadowing of Michaels’ future comedy career, the Beaver threatens to move to the States. “You’re never appreciated in your own country,” he says.
Canadian Beaver made the leap from The Comedy of Hart and Lorne album to Terrific Hour — in fact, the documentary names the goofy rodent as the duo’s breakout character, with Pomerantz gnawing his teeth (and the scenery) in an oversized fur coat. The fact that you’ve never heard of Canadian Beaver proves the breakout never reached epidemic proportions.
There’s not much on The Comedy of Hart and Lorne to predict Saturday Night Live — except for a Lorne Michaels performance that indicates he’d be better off as a producer.
