If you’re talking about the sketch comedy performer who holds the entire 90-minute show together, then there’s no doubt Hartman was the best, with Aykroyd and maybe Guest getting an honorable mention.
But if you’re talking about the one performer who you stayed up to watch, and felt like turning the show off after they finished their big sketch, then Belushi (John, not Jim,) Radner, Murphy, Carvey and even Mike Meyers are farther up the list.
Dana Carvey did the Church Lady.
Mike Meyers is underrated.
Toss up between Hartman, Farley, and Jon Lovitz.
Best wishes,
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M- Hartman, F- Radner.
Phil Hartman
Mike Myers - Myers has been in some dreadful stuff lately, doing his Scottish accent thing over and over, and I think people have forgotten how hilarious and versatile he was.
Eddie Murphy
John Belushi
Gilda Radner
Dana Carvey - Like Mike Myers times 10 in terms of his career going down the tubes. Of course he got really sick.
I guess my picks aren’t very original.
I think he has a hard time because he has a reputation of being hard to work with.
Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler. Maybe I’m showing my age, but just their presence in a skit made me laugh and, for the most part, I hate really old, boring, one-note SNL.
I liked Joe Piscopo. His Sinatra was great, as was his Ted Koppell impersonation. When Dick Ebersol took the reigns of SNL after that disastrous first season post-Not Ready For Prime Time cast, he and Eddie Murphy were the two lone holdovers. I’m not calling him the greatest ever, but he did have his hand in making the show good enough to not be canceled outright.
Another Eddie Murphy vote.
I wish he would go back and host the show- with decent sketches maybe it would remind him that he doesn’t need latex or animation to be funny and there’s 25+ years of characters to catch up on. No idea if he’s been offered and refused or if he’s never been offered; anyone know?
I think Dana Carvey is underrated—perhaps partly because he didn’t have much success after SNL, and partly because he didn’t have a persona of his own (the way, say, Chris Farley did) but vanished into his characters, but he was wonderful on the show. SNL was a great outlet for his particular talents, and he had more really funny characters and bits than maybe anyone else: The Church Lady, Garth, Franz (or was it Hans), George Bush, John McLaughlin, H. Ross Perot, the Grumpy Old Man…
I’m not ready to call him the greatest, but he’s easily in the top ten.
Carvey is up there. Hartman of course. I think Ferrell isn’t getting his due. His sketches may not have been as memorable but he owned his characters and dominated the screen whenever he was on there.
my vote goes to farley though. talk about stage presence. granted it was knocking down stuff, but damnit if he didn’t make the funniest slapstick since the stooges.
-I AM EL NINO. ALL OTHER TROPICAL STORMS MUST BOW BEFORE… EL NINO.
nobody else in the history of comedy could have delivered that line and made it funny, much less balls out funny.
As far as best hosts, it’s thisclose between him, Steve Martin and Christopher Walken. Tom Hanks is waaaayyy up there.
But if we’re talking purely about cast members, and purely for the work they did on the show (nothing subsequent), it’s between Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd. I love the actors who can play the “straight man” with just as much humor and deft ability as the guys who play the zany, crazy, funny man. Run around like a monkey, use funny voices, talk about rolling doobies in a van by the river… sure, that’s funny. But Elwood Blues was seriously funny… and he did it with minimal lines and as the “straight man.”
They had the lingering stink of the Charles Rocket era they had to work against, but I thought that was the best that SNL has ever been. The best part was they had performers, Piscopo especially, who had more than a handful of characters they could do. The last decade of SNL has all been about having the same performers do they same characters over and over and over and over…
That era actually had the courage to kill characters off, to force the writers (a lazy, shiftless bunch - if they wanted to work for a living, they would have never become writers in the first place) to create new stuff. If Eddie Murphy had been on during the last decade, there would be a Buckwheat sketch every single week. Instead, they killed him off and had a brilliant piece about saturation news coverage.
Maybe some of the performers of the last decade are capable of doing a wide range of characters, but they never get a chance. They do their couple of characters, doing essentially the same sketch every week.
Agreed, especially about Aykroyd. I remember him doing dozens of different characters for single bits, like when he played a disc jockey manning both an AM and FM station, switching voices and personalities.
John Belushi, although Eddie Murphy was pretty damn good.
My vote goes to Belushi, though it’s tough to argue with a lot of the names mentioned here.
A couple who I think deserve to be in the conversation that I don’t think have come up yet are Darrell Hammond and Chevy Chase.
Hammond, like Carvey, often disappeared into his characters so he’s easily overlooked. But he’s a master impressionist with great comic chops, and incidentally the longest-running cast member in the show’s history. His Bill Clinton alone should earn him a mention here.
Chase gets a lot of scorn for bolting after the first season, but I think he’s a big part of the reason the show became as successful as it did so quickly. He was better at physical comedy than he gets credit for (remember his pratfalls at the start of each episode?), his befuddled Gerald Ford was a classic, and he originated Weekend Update!
Aykroyd of course could also be “the wild and crazy” guy, but even then he was usually sharing the scene, something Belushi never seemed able to do. Aykroyd was the only person who could really shine in a scene with Belushi, and he did that by working the edges and not trying to compete. Several people named in this thread owned every sketch they were in. That may increase your chances of becoming the breakout star, but it’s not necessarily the greatest thing for an ensemble show.
+1. I was just thinking that the best presidential impersonation was probably Hammond’s Clinton, for his understated glibness and sleaziness.
But my favorite overall is probably Hartman, followed by Eddie Murphy.
I’ll agree that “steady” only gets him so far up the list.
You want to get laughs with a dead-on impression of Bill Clinton at a McDonald’s, or Ronald Reagan the evil genius? Yes, obviously you go with the guy who can lead off a terrific sketch as Frank Sinatra or mimic Charlton Heston for a running gag or bring the house down as Phil Donahue or bolster Dana-Carvey-as-Johnny-Carson with a perfect Ed McMahon or deliver zingers as Liberace or Ted Kennedy or whoever. That ain’t enough.
You want a straight man to read the “Happy Fun Ball” disclaimer, or play the low-key dad opposite Chris Farley IN A VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER, or give the reassuring lead-in for The Continental or Deep Thoughts or whatever? Sure, you go with the guy who gets tapped whenever they need a doctor or a CEO or a soap-opera actor or a serene Jesus or a solid TV pitchman or someone who “should want to cook him a simple meal, but I shouldn’t want to cut into him, to tear the flesh, to wear the flesh, to be born unto new worlds where his flesh becomes my key.” His default delivery is perfect for all of that. That ain’t enough.
But if you want someone who’ll put on the heavy makeup and ham it up to good effect before stepping it up for the stinger – well, of course he’ll bring it as Frankenstein’s Monster, or the worst possible contestant on a German game show, or he’ll coo “Happy Birthday, Mister President” as Ben Franklin in drag for a Quantum-Leap-esque misadventure. But what gets him the extra rung past “steady” is Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer for the win.