Word: sketched
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...thin line, and Robert Smigel, the disheveled reigning king of TV comedy writers, knows both sides of it. As a writer on Saturday Night Live from 1985 to 1993, Smigel, 40, created groundbreaking sketch comedy, including Da Super Fans and the legendary Trekkies sketch in which an agitated William Shatner finally tells a convention of Star Trek fans to "Get a life." He was also the head writer during the schizophrenic first year of Late Night with Conan O'Brien and the infamously abbreviated run of The Dana Carvey Show, which debuted with a sketch of the President breast-feeding...
...prepares to shoot a scene in which the Anipals snort a pink cocaine-like substance, Smigel chuckles to himself. "I do feel like I'm devolving a bit as I get older. When I was 25, I was writing sophisticated sketches on SNL. Ever since I started Conan, I've been really silly." And lucky. After The Dana Carvey Show tanked in 1996, Smigel had enough money saved to write only when inspiration struck. He salvaged his Ambiguously Gay Duo cartoon (about a superhero combo that is really close) from Carvey and started making episodes for SNL. That...
...Live." Very underrated in his writing ability. You have to dig into the archives or pull out the best of tape of Chris Farley, and you see things that Adam wrote that were very inventive. He did a lot of funny stuff that played with the form of presentational sketch comedy that no one had done before. He dared the staff to like him. He was one of the first people who kind of stepped outside of conventional sketch comedy and commented on it in a way that deconstructed it in a silly way. At the time, the audience...
...them gimmicks, but I'm like a comedy trick shot artist. I do the real audio, and the thing I did on "Conan" with the lips, they're like funny visual gimmicks that kind of make it fun, it just keeps me interested. I was really getting fried on sketch comedy when Conan came along, and the idea of doing sketches that way was just such a pleasant diversion. That's like a vaudeville bit, that Bill Clinton thing that I do. But I like playing with silly visual tricks, and this is just one more where I'm combining...
...best. It's great. Ever since I left "Saturday Night Live" I've had this strange career where I bounce around between those two late-night shows. I'm the only person who gets to do that. And even when I was doing "Conan" I would occasionally have a sketch idea for "Saturday Night Live," and I had just built up enough credibility at that show that they were happy for me to submit stuff. And then when I left Conan I had a beautiful two-year period where I just had so much time with my wife...