"Saturday Night Live," the late-night NBC comedy-variety show now in its 50th season, generally prefers to mine its material from other people's dramas and the conflicts of everyday American life -- as it is presently doing with its weekly satires of the 2024 presidential race.
But over the years, "S.N.L." has generated more than enough curiosity, controversy and gossip about its behind-the-scenes operations to fill a small library of books.
For the comedy and showbiz nerds, there are scrupulous accounts of seemingly every day since Oct. 11, 1975, when Lorne Michaels, its creator and longtime executive producer, and the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players first hit the airwaves (a version of which is enacted in the new film "Saturday Night," which opens in theaters Oct. 11).
Other nonfiction books about "S.N.L." have focused on discrete eras in its history, or on standout performers and how they exemplified larger trends in popular culture. Members of the show's cast and creative team have also written memoirs pulling back the curtain on a workplace that can seem like a creative paradise -- or like a cutthroat crucible that occasionally produces good comedy, too.
Whether you've followed the show obsessively since the 1970s or only tune in these days when you recognize the musical guest, these books that offer a backstage look at "S.N.L." will keep you happily occupied as you wait for the clock to strike 11:30 on Saturday night.
Live From New YorkBy James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales
With a comprehensive cast of characters that seems to include anyone who has ever set foot in Studio 8H, "Live From New York" remains the gold standard of backstage reporting on "Saturday Night Live." The first hundred pages or so are fastidiously dedicated to the creation of "S.N.L." and its debut season, but then the book gets down to all the intramural fussing, feuding and mating of its ensuing decades.
An update published in 2014 added reporting on how "S.N.L." has handled recent presidential elections, while also giving time to bêtes noires -- like Sarah Palin, who told Miller and Shales, "If I ran into Tina Fey again today, I would say: 'You need to at least pay for my kids' braces or something from all the money that you made off of pretending that you're me!'"
Bunny BunnyBy Alan Zweibel
Zweibel, who was working at a deli counter (and moonlighting as a gag writer and standup comic) when he was hired for the first season of "S.N.L.," wrote this bittersweet memoir of his friendship with Gilda Radner, a founding cast member of the show who died of cancer in 1989 at the age of 42.
The book is presented as a series of conversations between Zweibel and Radner (interspersed with the author's rudimentary cartoon doodles), and its format can take a moment to fully lock into place. But once it does, "Bunny Bunny" -- a phrase that the perpetually anxious Radner would recite as a mantra -- is both an idiosyncratic firsthand account of "S.N.L."'s rollicking first five years and a tender story of how talented people take refuge in each other during oscillating periods of failure and success.
Saturday NightBy Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad
A fascinating time capsule first published in 1986, when the endurance of "S.N.L." was hardly assured, "Saturday Night" (unrelated to the film, despite its name) still has potency all these years later. Hill and Weingrad engaged in an exhaustive reporting project on "S.N.L."'s history up to that point and largely came back with the goods.
"Saturday Night" can be weirdly interested in minutiae; if you ever wanted a detailed accounting of cast member salaries, this is the book for you. But it also offers an engrossing chronicle of how Michaels's creative burnout led to a disastrous 1980-81 season (produced by Jean Doumanian) that nearly got "S.N.L." canceled, and how the ascent of a young comic and cast member named Eddie Murphy pretty much saved the show.
Gasping for AirtimeBy Jay Mohr
Mohr was a rising standup and comic actor when he had the misfortune to join the "Saturday Night Live" cast in 1993, at a time when the show was in disarray: Franchise performers like Dana Carvey and Chris Rock were gone, and newcomers like Sarah Silverman were struggling to find their groove.
Though his affection for the institution of "S.N.L." is abundant, Mohr pulls no punches in dishing on his co-stars and depicting the show's work environment as factionalized and Darwinian. He also admits to having stolen material from another comedian, Rick Shapiro, for an "S.N.L." sketch. It's first-rate bridge-burning and the fire is glorious to watch (from a distance).
Hello, Molly!By Molly Shannon
As a cast member at "S.N.L.," Shannon took part in a creative revival at the show that ran from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, contributing joyous characters like the discombobulated schoolgirl Mary Katherine Gallagher and the high-kicking Sally O'Malley. But her memoir, "Hello, Molly!," begins in a very dark place, with the childhood car accident that injured her and killed her mother, younger sister and cousin.
The stories of Shannon's picaresque childhood in Ohio -- raised by her father, who was driving during the crash -- are engrossing on their own, but when Shannon reaches "S.N.L.," those same tales illuminate perfectly how she drew upon a life that she refused to see as tragic in order to bring to life her best-known TV roles.
The Blues BrothersBy Daniel de Visé
No matter what its title may say, this engaging and deeply researched book is not really about the Blues Brothers, the sunglass-wearing musical duo that John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd created on "Saturday Night Live" and rode into the stratosphere. Rather, it's the story of the differing paths that the methodical, introspective Aykroyd and the slovenly, hedonistic Belushi took to "S.N.L." and to stardom, how those ascents impacted them -- fatally, in Belushi's case -- and how "S.N.L." itself transformed from a counterculture comedy show to a mainstream engine of mass entertainment.
De Visé recognizes the importance of music in Belushi and Aykroyd's offbeat partnership, and in the many projects they were part of, and the author's ear for writing about it gives his book its own irresistible hum.
Leslie F*cking JonesBy Leslie Jones
Every performer's path to "Saturday Night Live" is different, and still it is safe to say that no one arrived there in quite the same manner as Leslie Jones, who was 47 and had been working as a standup for years before she got Chris Rock to put in a good word for her with Lorne Michaels (at a time when the show finally realized it needed more Black women on its roster).
Told in the same unapologetically spicy voice as her live act -- "I may not be a fancy hammer, but I can hit the [expletive] out of a nail," Jones writes -- this memoir recounts the upbringing that took her from Tennessee to California, from high school and college basketball to a performing career, and from countless menial jobs to the "S.N.L." stage. Once there, Jones seems to have enjoyed the support of her co-stars and collaborators, and she gleefully recalls some of her favorite celebrity encounters, like the time Prince mistook her for Rock.
The Chris Farley ShowBy Tom Farley Jr. and Tanner Colby
If you begin this devastating biography of Chris Farley, the compulsively likable "S.N.L." funnyman who died of a drug overdose when he was 33, with any affection or sympathy for its subject, you will finish it having had your heart ripped out many, many times over.
As the book lays bare, Farley's addiction to drugs and alcohol and his need for onstage affirmation were deeply linked. A college friend, Jim Murphy, speaks to Farley's tragic idolization of John Belushi -- who also died at 33, from a drug overdose. "When Chris read 'Wired,'" Bob Woodward's notorious account of Belushi's appetite for drugs and alcohol, "he just took completely the wrong thing away from it," said Murphy.
And the "S.N.L." writer Nate Herman quotes a proverb he attributes to Second City's founding director Paul Sills, citing words that could apply as easily to any aspiring comedian as they did to Farley: "Out there doesn't matter. The stage is the only place you exist."
