In this thread I talk about Saturday Night Live bringing back Da Superfans. That raises the following question:
Who (if anybody)owns the right to perform classic SNL or other sketch comedy characters? Who owns the Church Lady? Dana Carvey? Lorne Michaels? NBC? No one? Could Chris Kattan do the Church Lady on tonight’s show? Could an actor on a competing show, such as Mad TV, do the Cranky Old Man or Opera Man or something?
Also, does it make any difference if the original actor is dead? If Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi were both dead could Horatio Sans and Christ Kattan do the Blues Brothers or the Samurai Psychiatrists?
IIRC, this issue was raised when David Letterman went from NBC to CBS. He was not allowed to take “Larry ‘Bud’ Melman” with him, for NBC had deemed Larry their intellectual property. The actor Calvin DeForrest could appear, but not as Larry.
Who owns a particular character depends on the comedian’s contract. I’d guess that the writers of SNL are considered staff writers and thus their contributions are work for hire – SNL owns them, and since NBC owns SNL, they get the final say. But it’s also possible that, to keep the talent, NBC allows them the use of the character elsewhere.
Until someone decides to sue (or we can see the contracts), we can’t be sure.
It doesn’t matter if the actor is dead. The character are still under copyright, and whoever hold the copyright (the network or the actor’s heirs) has the final say.
A possibly related piece of anectodal evidence is that Clayton Moore, early television’s Lone Ranger, was sued by the production company (Warner Brothers?) who produced the television show over two decades after the series had been off the air for continuing to do public appearances as the character, The Long Ranger, with the outfit, guns and mask.
Apparently, there was no problem with him doing the appearances for a long time, but when the production company decided to do a feature film about the character, they sued claiming Moore was not a fair repersentation of the Lone Ranger.
The judge found for the production company, although they let Moore dress very similarly to the character in question for appearances but not exactly.
Not precisely an SNL sketch, but still vaguely related.
Not Dana Carvey. He wanted to use the character on his short-lived “Dana Carvey Show” on another network in 1996 after he left SNL. If memory serves he got sued and lost in court. I can’t remember whether it was Lorne Michaels or NBC that sued him.