Actor and original Saturday Night Live cast member Garrett Morris gave an interview to The Hollywood Reporter published on Oct. 27, and the 84-year-old dished on life, addiction, racism, SNL and Dave Chappelle.
Garrett was starring on Broadway in Porgy and Bess in 1975 when he joined the cast of the brand new variety show, Saturday Night Live. He had moved to NYC after graduating college in New Orleans in 1958. The actor was part of the SNL cast, including Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, Jane Curtin, and Laraine Newman.
He described his audition and noted that he was a playwright hired to write on the show, but the writers didn’t like him. One even stole a sketch idea from him and never gave Garrett credit. He was about to confront the writer when Lorne Michaels asked him to audition for SNL.
“It was Gilda and me. Lorne assigned us a scene: I was a cab driver bringing in a visitor to the city. Gilda was the visitor, and I was the cab driver, and I cheated the shit out of her in the sketch. And they laughed. Now, I had done some improv, but it was different from The Groundlings. In the ‘hood, we dealt with subjects like teen pregnancy, drug abuse, what white cops were doing to Black people. My improv went from what I call ‘Hate whitey’ to ‘Kill whitey.’ Gilda’s range was just immense. I was counterpunching in this whole thing, but it got me over. After that, Lorne said, ‘You’re hired.’”
The comedian said that nothing was being written for him once on SNL, and he would go months without a sketch. After he would complain, then he’d get a sketch.
“Thank God for Alan Zweibel,” he said. “He wrote for me. And Chevy Chase wrote for me.
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The Julliard School of Music graduate also revealed that National Lampoon co-founder Michael O’Donoghue and SNL writer was racist. He recalled an incident in 1975 when he realized his optimistic assumption of O’Donoghue was incorrect.
“I was a little disappointed in Michael O’Donoghue. Because he was associated with National Lampoon, I made some progressive assumptions I shouldn’t have made,” he said.
“He was a racist motherf***er,” Garrett continued. “I suggested I could play in this skit, a doctor. He had the nerve to tell me, ‘Garrett, people would be thrown by a Black doctor.’ Mind you, this is 1975. I was raised in New Orleans, where not only did I see loads of Black medical doctors but loads of Black Ph.D.s. I was thoroughly disappointed that a man who was associated with the Lampoon should be this way. So once or twice, he and I did some stuff together, but I always knew what he really was.”
Garrett also discussed the controversy surrounding comedian Dave Chappelle and his set about the LBGTQ community.
“I got from that: Relax, everybody, this is comedy. Everybody can be the butt of a joke. And why should it be that if we joke about you, it’s sacrilege? You sit in the audience and laugh at jokes about everybody else. If we make a joke about trans [people] or gays, suddenly it’s sacrilege. And that’s what I got from that. I don’t see what’s wrong with that, with all due respect.”
The SNL alum also called Chappelle a genius. “I think Dave is a genius, to be honest. He’s a comic genius.
The actor also said he did a lot of cocaine back in the day. Garrett said he regretted some of his behavior while working on SNL and credited Michaels for not firing him as executives had wanted but instead allowed him to audition for other roles first. Garrett said he got clean in 2005 with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.
He also credited Michaels for creating a show as bold as SNL during the 70s. “Let’s face it, with racism as it was at that time. You wouldn’t have thought a show like that would do what it did.”
