Amy Poehler and Julia Louis-Dreyfus put on their fandom hats on the Good Hang podcast this week, singing the praises of a comedian who paved the way for their Saturday Night Live success. Jane Curtin is an upcoming guest on Louis-Dreyfus’s Wiser Than Me podcast, and “it was a great opportunity to go back and look at her work, particularly her work on SNL back in the day,” she said, “and to understand the effect that had on my life.”
Along with Carol Burnett, Curtin represented “these cultural icons who’ve had proper influence,” Louis-Dreyfus said. “They get into your bloodstream without your knowing it. It’s not conscious. It’s not like you say, ‘Oh, there’s a woman on there,’ but you just see people filling this role and it just becomes part of your DNA, that that could exist in your life and your world.”
For performers like Poehler and Louis-Dreyfus, who endured the grueling work schedules of Saturday Night Live, it was astounding to learn that Curtin found a different way to succeed. She was not hired as a writer, so she “immediately made the decision that she was not gonna come to work on Monday and Tuesday. I swear to Christ.”
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“Whoa,” whispered Poehler. “That’s so baller.”
It’s hard to imagine any SNL cast member taking that decidedly sane approach today. “She’s like, ‘I’m not here to write. I’m here to perform. Let me know when you write for me,” Louis-Dreyfus revealed. “You’re paying me as an actor. I’ll be here for the table read on Wednesday.”
It helped that Curtin, a grown adult with a husband, was a great cold reader. Curtin would come in on Wednesdays to read the finished scripts, “she’d nail it and then she’d be in sketches,” Louis-Dreyfus said.
The bonus, outside of having more free time? “She was not doing that drug-filled, all-nighter life. She had the sense to realize that she was protecting herself.”
Curtin has openly spoken out against the original cast’s substance abuse, even though NBC censors allowed early SNL to get away with drug references. “There were drug dealers in the hallway,” including a lowlife named Merlin David, she says in Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. “I hated this guy so much. I just wanted him gone, but he had free rein.”
At one point, Curtin even stopped speaking to Lorne Michaels, angry that the producer wasn’t intervening with John Belushi’s out-of-control habits. “I confronted Lorne,” she remembers. “I said, ‘Are you going to do anything about this?’”
Even if Michaels felt helpless, Curtin could at least protect herself by refusing to be part of the druggy all-nighters.
“Jane always seemed like the reasonable cast member,” Poehler said.
Louis-Dreyfus agreed. “Because she was.”
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