My parents had friends and attended and threw parties, but even so, there was something about adulthood that struck me as serious when I was a kid — adults spent their days getting their oil changed, filling out paperwork, going to funerals — and the sheer silliness of “S.N.L.” seemed charmingly, enticingly at odds with that. If you were lucky, perhaps you could build a life around silliness. As it turned out, I did and I didn’t: I’m not a comedian, but as a novelist, I did build a life around making stuff up, reconstituting what the culture offers.
Back in Minneapolis, the pandemic dragged on, and eventually my family was joined on our TV-watching couch by a rescue Chihuahua named Weenie. As we all watched episode after episode, it dawned on me that in addition to being a kid’s festive idea of adulthood, “S.N.L.” embodies several other elusive and aspirational ideas: an idea of New York for people who, like me, have never lived there; an idea of having hilarious friends or co-workers instead of annoying ones; an idea of being able to metabolize political instability into biting jokes instead of feeling helpless about it; an idea of glamorous after-parties that we want to want to attend when most of us don’t really want to stay up that late. (Though here I might just mean me. My kids are now teenagers and go to bed after I do. But my family has never watched “S.N.L.” live; we usually watch it on Sunday around 7 p.m.)
Many of us feel to varying degrees like outsiders — we’re not beautiful or famous or funny or coastal — and “S.N.L.” gives us access to beauty, fame, humor and New York. “S.N.L.” both mirrors and defines all these things; sometimes when I’m in New York, it feels New Yorky to me because I’m seeing imagery I’ve seen on the show, like the Prometheus statue outside Rockefeller Center, the 30 Rock marquee or the ostensible grit of the subway. A few years ago, a jaded magazine editor asked if it annoyed me that my publisher puts me up in hotels in Midtown, where it’s congested with tourists. At the risk of sounding like a Midwestern stereotype, it had never occurred to me that Midtown could be undesirable; I still can’t believe a publisher pays for me to stay at a nice hotel, and then I get to go for walks in Central Park.
As the months passed, the pandemic still didn’t go away, and I, like many people, experienced personal challenges in addition to the global ones. I decided that the novel I was trying to write was too depressing and set it aside. Desperate to cheer myself up, I started a novel set at a show a lot like “S.N.L.”
I did an enormous amount of research that was so delightful it didn’t feel like work, including reading the nearly 800-page oral history “Live From New York,” watching the documentary “Saturday Night” and listening to about a million comedian podcasts. By the time I finagled a ticket to watch a dress rehearsal of the show in March 2022, only two aspects of seeing it in person surprised me. The first was how often two or more cast members in the same sketch were on different stages (for instance, the cast member playing a mayor at a news conference and the cast members playing reporters).
