The Boston Globe - January 25, 2004
What's So Funny?
Three New England comedians are adding a streak of regional humor to Saturday Night Live, including characters straight from the streets of Boston.
By Janice Page, 1/25/2004


(Click on image for larger version.)
Saturday Night Live cast members (from left) Rachel Dratch, Amy Poehler, and Seth Meyers inside Studio 8H at Rockefeller Center. Inset, a scene from the show. (Photo / Brian Doben)

Jane Curtin. Adam Sandler. Kevin Nealon. Sarah Silverman. Anthony Michael Hall. There are a few other names -- the infamous Charles Rocket, the forgotten Nancy Walls -- but, really, the number of New England-bred Not Ready for Prime Time Players sprinkled throughout the more-than-28-year run of NBC's Saturday Night Live is embarrassingly small for a show headquartered just minutes south of Greenwich, Connecticut. And let's face it: Aside from Cambridge-born Curtin and New Hampshire-reared Sandler (born in Brooklyn, if we're being honest), ours isn't exactly the A-list of SNL alums, either.

So when three New Englanders show up simultaneously in the main cast of this durable show, and when all three appear talented enough to breathe the air in hallowed spaces previously occupied by the likes of John Belushi and Gilda Radner, you have to wonder if somewhere an axis has begun shifting. Saturday Night Live, once predominantly the acting province of New Yorkers, Midwesterners, Californians, and Canadians, has suddenly been overrun by performers who bleed Fenway red and appreciate the creative syntax of "So don't I." Is it any wonder that Curt Schilling will be wearing a Red Sox uniform come spring?

On the backs of Lexington's Rachel Dratch, Burlington's Amy Poehler, and Bedford, New Hampshire, cutup Seth Meyers, the current season of Saturday Night Live constitutes the first in which a trio of New England natives has enjoyed repertory-player status at the same time. They join a writing team that traditionally sports no shortage of Yankee connections and Harvard degrees (think Conan O'Brien) and a legendary Westfield, Massachusetts, announcer by the name of Don Pardo. All of which means that the show's New England influences may finally be as obvious in front of the camera as they have always been behind it.

Or are they?

Some would argue that growing up in New England confers a certain comic sensibility, and the number of Bostonians on the stand-up circuit and in coveted late-night talk-show-hosting positions seems to bear that out. But in the ensemble sketch comedy that defines SNL, does a regional sense of humor mean anything? Do most viewers even recognize that teenagers Denise and Sully, whose "retahded" escapades are regularly played out by Dratch and Jimmy Fallon, are characters drawn without embellishment from the streets of Greater Boston? Do they appreciate the nuances of suffering-Sox-fan commentaries that Meyers brings to the "Weekend Update" newscast? In short, do the New Englanders on SNL write and perform from a perspective that's measurably different from that of their fellow cast members, or are they just three up-and-coming comics making a living in the Big Apple?

That's what we went to Manhattan to ask.

IT'S FRIDAY AFTERNOON, AND THE laborers inside studio 8H at Rockefeller Center are moving faster than knockoff handbags on a Times Square sidewalk. Sets are being hammered into place and facades scrubbed and painted, if they're even that far along just 33 hours before the show goes live. Cables slither and cameramen crawl over every available inch of floor space.

Stage right of the opening-monologue location known as home base, the SNL cast is rehearsing. The guest host for the week, 11-time veteran Alec Baldwin, tells director Beth McCarthy Miller that he has an idea for the scene they're fine-tuning, in which a corporate presentation is unraveling because the presenters (paunchy Baldwin and petite blond Poehler) slept together the previous evening.

"Stay engaged," Baldwin instructs his patient leading lady. They run the lines again, playing off each other directly this time. To those watching carefully, the sketch does seem marginally better. But was the high-level massage worth the precious rehearsal time it gobbled?

For the next hour, the five-minute scene will undergo dozens of tweaks and on-the-spot rewrites while camera specifics are blocked. Cue cards notwithstanding, one wonders how actors keep the more minute changes straight, let alone psych themselves for Saturday rehearsals that will again throw everything up for grabs until seconds before air time. And in the end, after all that work, the scene elicits no more than a polite chuckle from the studio audience when it's broadcast live at 12:30 a.m.

That's the present and persistent reality of Saturday Night Live, a show that's had so many qualitative ups and downs it's growing numb to the headline "Saturday Night Dead," despite consistently beating its late-night competition. With the recent exodus of stars Will Ferrell, Ana Gasteyer, Chris Kattan, and Tracy Morgan, Fallon and his "Weekend Update" co-anchor Tina Fey are probably the highest-profile faces in the current 14-member group. Wise-cracking Poehler, who along with boy-next-door Meyers came aboard as a featured player in the ominous September of 2001, remembers thinking when she arrived: "Oh, great. I'm joining this show right when everyone is going to start saying it sucks again."

And folks have.

People come up to cast members all the time, whether at delis or at weddings, to express their un-sugarcoated opinions of how today's Saturday Night Live compares with the good old days. All TV shows breed familiarity, but this one in particular feels owned by the folks who remember its groundbreaking 1975 debut and have stuck with it through every lifesaving transfusion of talent.

"The legacy can be crushing," Poehler says with characteristic frankness. "I mean, who's better than Gilda Radner?" That's why Poehler tends not to watch syndicated reruns or stare back at the many classic photographs adorning the halls leading to studio 8H; it's too much pressure to envision topping Roseanne Roseannadanna, even for a night.

ALL THREE OF THE CURRENT NEW England players came to SNL by way of Chicago, where they performed in improv troupes long known as Midwestern magnets for executive producer Lorne Michaels's scouts. Each of the players is the elder of two children and draws a picture of devoted, good-humored, slightly crazed parents with solid middle-class values. In New England, as in Chicago, says the giggly/serious Meyers, "the idea is the tallest tree in the forest gets cut down."

So rather than being class clowns, Meyers, Dratch, and Poehler were the kids at the back of the class muttering witty asides. "I think all of us have a sharper humor that comes from commenting on what's happening rather than being the actual happening," Meyers theorizes as he fidgets energetically with the zipper on his fleece pullover. "It's that sort of wry New England sense of pointing out anyone who's trying to make a big deal of himself."

It's a viewpoint that certainly finds its way into their writing, which anyone familiar with the SNL system knows is the key to both getting noticed and sticking around on the show. The three hang out together and tend to think the same things are funny.

"I think it honestly has a lot to do with teasing," says Poehler, 32. "For example, when Seth's family is here, we all make fun of Seth. I feel like in Boston you kind of earned your place by everyone teasing you and you finding a way to hold your own at the Thanksgiving table."

Meyers, 30, backs her up, adding: "New Englanders are really good at teasing you and letting you know that it's coming from a place of affection." Minutes later, Poehler jokes that Meyers ends each of his sketches with the words "Live free or die."

Anyone who's ever been to a pub in Ireland knows that Mayflower descendants can't claim to have invented this particular brand of comedy; still, we'll happily take credit if it produces funnier TV. And one way you can tell a New England sketch from its very close Midwestern cousins, even without references to Anthony's Pier 4, is by measuring the amount of sarcasm and opinion coming out of the characters' mouths.

"Even people who aren't educated have an opinion in Boston," comments 37-year-old Dratch in a voice much smaller than that of the brassy women and gruff bald men she generally plays on SNL. She says it smiling, because the uneducated don't bother her nearly as much as educated folks with no sense of humor.

Now in her fifth NBC late-night season, pint-sized Dratch remedied the near-fatal career mistake of majoring in drama at Dartmouth College ("Not a lot of funny people up there," she says dryly) by moving on after graduation to Chicago's Second City, where she eventually teamed up with Fey in a successful two-woman show. At SNL, she's fortunate to have shared the stage with Ferrell in sketches inspired by a Dartmouth professor's salacious use of the word "luv-uh." She also does a nerdy boy named Sheldon and a killer Calista Flockhart impression that makes full use of her scrunchable face, which didn't get much of a workout playing a secretary in the movie Down With Love. Her brother, Daniel, is a writer for TV's quirky Monk. Former Burlington Mall-rat Poehler nurtured her comedy skills in the My Mother's Fleabag troupe at Boston College, then moved to Chicago to hone her talents at Improv-Olympic and Second City before coming to New York with the Upright Citizens Brigade, which she still performs in most Sundays in the Chelsea section of Manhattan.

Poehler's most memorable turns on SNL have thus far been a one-legged dating-show contestant, a trailer-trashy wife, and sendups of vacant celebs such as Kelly Ripa and Sharon Osbourne. She's married to TV actor Will Arnett (Arrested Development), which no doubt weekly disappoints the young males who gather to shake her hand after the show. ("I'm not worthy," she laughs as she greets them. "You're awesome!" they gush back.)

Meyers, the latest to graduate from featured-performer status to repertory player, is still finding his footing on creative turf, where he's seen in Irish bar sketches with Fallon and is occasionally asked to put his clean-cut good looks to obvious use doing imitations of Hugh Grant and Tobey Maguire. He's a graduate of Northwestern and an alum of ImprovOlympic and the touring Boom Chicago. Younger brother Josh is in the cast of Mad TV, and they hail from the same oddly fertile southern New Hampshire comedy region that nurtured Silverman and Sandler.

Though none of the three current SNL New Englanders has broken out, a la Sandler or Curtin, there's hope that in this again comically promising election year, each will find his or her groove. In the meantime, they're in Meyers's dressing room/office down the hall from studio 8H, lounging on a small couch and a battered leather recliner that just about fills this no-frills closet of a space.

Late-night performers get neither sitcom amenities nor sitcom salaries. They put in ridiculously long hours (if only 20 weeks a year) and can expect few pats on the back from Michaels, who, in the best-selling book Live From New York (subtitled "An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live"), admits to the authors that he presides over a workplace prone to "an enormous amount of pettiness." It's competitive, high-stress, completely insane, and there's no other job like it in television, the performers say frequently. And they mean that as a compliment.

The six-day workweek at SNL begins on Monday, when ideas are pitched to the host. Inspiration and creativity may be random things by nature, but here they must happen on Tuesdays, the designated writing day, which very often lasts all night. Come Wednesday afternoon, some 30 proposed sketches will be read, with roughly a dozen making the cut that sends them into Thursday and Friday rehearsals. On Saturday, there's a dress run that weeds again, so that by air time only eight or nine sketches remain. To survive as a writer-performer on SNL, you have to be an optimist at the beginning of the cycle and a pessimist by week's end, reconciled to falling flat and empty-handed on occasion, then turning around and climbing the mountain all over again.

"It's the kind of show that you almost have to audition for every week," Poehler says, "even though you've got the job."

Most folks would hate that idea, but she and her compatriots describe it as a huge rush, which is why they're always keeping one eye out for material that could work itself into a sketch. They're doing it even now, in Meyers's office, while Poehler and Dratch are being asked about a high school job they had in common. At different times, both worked at the old-timey Chadwick's Ice Cream in Lexington, waiting on tables and occasionally bursting into birthday serenades.

Dratch: "I think we were both attracted to the drama of the situation: The 1920s styrofoam barbershop hat! The ruffled blouse and required tights!" In a flash, she retrieves the singsongy announcement that accompanied orders of the now-defunct shop's biggest dessert. "Ten scoops of ice cream! Miles and miles of whipped cream! Cherries and nuts! Ladies and gentlemen, Chadwick's own Belly Buster!"

Poehler: "And that announcement had to be made by a manager. Then the Belly Buster was carried out on a stretcher -- a job often given to the exhausted Filipino dishwasher who had such contempt for us high school kids anyway."

Dratch: "Later, someone would always be, like, `Go clean up the bathroom; someone puked up the Belly Buster.' "

Meyers: "And then was there another song? `Attention! Attention! Ladies and gentlemen, there will be a bathroom cleanup!' "

Poehler: "Hah! See how it works? That's good."

Meyers: "That's how it happens."

OK, so maybe you had to be there. The bit was funny while they were riffing it, which is presumably the case with a lot of what ends up on Saturday Night Live these days -- the common complaint being that the sketches are one-joke, overlong, and not terribly sophisticated. When it works, organic slice-of-life humor is the Second City hallmark that separates these players from The Groundlings alumni who come to SNL from Los Angeles with a strong stable of characters to be deposited into sketches. Dratch, Poehler, and Meyers say their New England roots served them well in Chicago, where working-class humor is as appreciated, if not quite as feisty, as back home.

"Me, Rachel, and Seth have a healthy blue-collar attitude about our comedy," Poehler says. "I think we work pretty hard, and I think we appreciate it. But what's really cool about this show is you get trusted with a lot of responsibility very early, and it's, like, `You're live. Go!' You have to cowboy up to that moment, and that kind of stuff makes you feel invincible."

Studio 8H is outfitted with rows of yellow seats and blue seats courtesy of George Steinbrenner's Yankee Stadium. From any one of them on a Saturday night, the show looks miniature and all-business and is mostly impossible to see except on monitors as it shifts frantically from set to set. Way before the "cold open," as the first sketch is aptly labeled, the place is abuzz with staging activities, live music, and the inevitable manic warm-up comic. Lorne Michaels briefly passes by in a gray suit, then disappears for the rest of the night.

Now everything the cast members do is for keeps. If a line is dropped, it can't be rescued with the same timing. If a case of the giggles hits, the performer can seek composure or just let it happen, maybe to even bigger laughs. And if the f-word should be uttered, as befell Bangor, Maine, native Charles Rocket during a spoof in 1981, well, that could be your only legacy.

It's this moment that Dratch, Poehler, and Meyers all say they enjoy most, partly for the challenges it brings and partly for the chance to present viewers with genuine snapshots and accents that never go the horribly misguided way of Laura Linney in Mystic River. It doesn't bother them that fans have been known to praise "those New Jersey characters" Sully and Denise; they figure that as long as the sketches pull laughs, their hometowns are ahead.

"It's a New York show, and I think for a long time the show has observed funny specific things about what it is to be a New Yorker," notes Meyers. "But there are so many funny fantastic things about New Englanders, and to get that sensibility into the show has been wonderful."

On this particular mid-November Saturday night, there are no overt New Englandisms in the script, but there are moments -- as when two characters try to out-zing each other for bragging rights -- that definitely reflect regional roots. And that makes one wonder if the cast realizes just how cool it is to get paid to stealthily poke fun at everything and everyone you grew up around. Does Rachel Dratch, for example, pause to process that this sort of thing doesn't happen every day to a girl from Lexington?

"Oh, I know," Dratch says convincingly. "Sometimes it's a girl from Burlington."

Janice Page, a former arts and entertainment editor for the Los Angeles Times, is a freelance writer living in Brookline.