Michael O'Donoghue - Saturday Night Live

On the pioneering, late-night sketch comedy program Saturday Night Live, on which creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels assigned him the position of head writer, O'Donoghue appeared in the first show's opening sketch, as an English-language teacher instructing John Belushi in such phrases as "I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverines," and "We are out of badgers. Would you accept a wolverine in its place?" He later appeared in the persona of a Vegas-style "impressionist" who would pay great praise to showbiz mainstays such as talk show host Mike Douglas and singers Tony Orlando and Dawn—and then speculate how they'd react if steel needles were plunged into their eyes. The shrieking fits that followed are believed by biographer Dennis Perrin to be inspired by O'Donoghue's real-life agonies from chronic migraine headaches.

O'Donoghue, in his refusal to write for Jim Henson's Muppet characters which appeared in the early years of SNL, quipped, "I won't write for felt."

Later, O'Donoghue cultivated the persona of the grim "Mr. Mike", a coldly decadent figure who favored viewers with comically dark "Least-Loved Bedtime Stories" such as "The Little Engine that Died." His other SNL sketches range from a black-and-white Citizen Kane parody to a Star Trek spoof that was a tour-de-force for Belushi.

O'Donoghue shared SNL Emmy Awards for outstanding writing in 1976 and 1977. He left the series in the fall of 1978, after three years.

In 1979, he produced a television special for NBC, featuring most of the SNL cast, called Mr. Mike's Mondo Video. Because of its raunchy content, the network rejected the program, which was then released as a theatrical film.

O'Donoghue returned to SNL in 1981 when new executive producer Dick Ebersol needed an old hand to help revive the faltering series. O'Donoghue's volatile personality and mood swings made this difficult: His first day on the show he screamed at all the cast members, telling Mary Gross she was as talented as a pair of old shoes, and forcing everyone to write on the walls with magic markers. This horrified Catherine O'Hara so much that she quit before ever appearing on air. The only one he liked was Eddie Murphy, reportedly because Murphy wasn't afraid of him. According to the book Live From New York O'Donoghue tried to shake things up on that first day by saying "this is what the show lacks" and spray-painting the word "DANGER" on the wall of his office.

Arguably the most memorable sketch O'Donoghue created during this short-lived tenure was a spoof of the old Superman "Bizarro" world (where up is down, etc.) set in the Ronald Reagan administration.

According to a question in the SNL edition of Trivial Pursuit, O'Donoghue was fired after writing the never-aired sketch "The Last Days in Silverman's Bunker" (which compared NBC network president Fred Silverman's problems at the network to Adolf Hitler's last days in charge of the Third Reich). It was planned that John Belushi would return to play Silverman, and a great deal of work had been done on creating sets for the sketch (which would have run for about twenty minutes), including the construction of a large Nazi eagle clutching an NBC corporate logo instead of a swastika. Another unaired O'Donoghue sketch from around the same period, "The Good Excuse", also involved Nazi jokes. In the sketch, a captured German officer berated by his captors for Nazi war crimes explains that he had a good excuse, which he whispers into their ears, inaudible to the viewers. His captors are quickly persuaded that the unheard "good excuse" was, in fact, a good excuse for the crimes of the Third Reich.

O'Donoghue was further connected to SNL by virtue of his marriage to the show's musical director, Cheryl Hardwick, in the late 1980s. The union was fodder for a "Weekend Update" joke in which Dennis Miller noted that the couple was registered at Black and Decker.

O'Donoghue was one of several original writers rehired by Lorne Michaels upon his return to produce the show in 1985. O'Donoghue's intention was to write and direct short films for the show; however, none were completed and he wrote little else, apart from a monologue seemingly designed to humiliate Chevy Chase when he hosted the second show of the season. (The monologue began, "Right after I stopped doing cocaine, I turned into a giant garden slug, and, for the life of me, I don't know why.") The monologue never aired (though, according to Dennis Perrin's biography Mr. Mike, Chase loved the monologue and lobbied Michaels to perform it), and O'Donoghue was fired a month later after telling The New York Times that SNL had become "an embarrassment. It's like watching old men die." His final contribution to the show was a song, "Boulevard of Broken Balls," co-written with Hardwick and performed by Christopher Walken on the October 24, 1992 episode. (A version of the song sung by O'Donoghue appears on the album Give Me Your Hump! The Unspeakable Terry Southern Record, produced by Hal Willner and released in 2001.)