We had all week to rehearse. An audience would come in at the end of the week and we'd our little show. Most of the ad- libbing happened during the week on the show.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
There's certainly pressure to find your audience early. You need to paint the picture, but it's tough trying to find the balance between a show that people can tune in on any given week while still grabbing the people who are there every week.
People are out of their home on a Saturday night or they're at the movies or they're at dinner and a lot of the people who flip on the television are doing just that. They may have never seen your show before and you can't count on to your audience to be there week in and week out.
We'd dub the one that came off best into the final transcription. It gave us a chance to ad lib as much as we wanted, knowing that excess ad libbing could be sliced from the final product.
It was most exciting when people first came up on the stage and then when they came back for the encore. We wanted to make a show that kept on developing, that was interesting, so we tried to do that with our live shows.
I certainly was performing before my writing was published, because I was performing when I was very young. And the thing is I'm very comfortable on stage, so a large portion of my act did come from ad-libs.
Well, there's much more time to do a weekly show, and much more coverage - as it turns out, it was all preparation for the stuff I'm doing now - but it was interesting to see how much time was spent on how little airtime, compared to knocking out a show a day on the soaps.
Long ago, I did a five-and-a-half-hour-a-day, six-day-a-week talk show for four years, early on, in Los Angeles - local show. And when you are on that many hours with no script, you know, you get very comfortable, maybe overly comfortable with that small audience.
A show needs time to find an audience, and they're very quick to pull them off the air now.
The entire season, the show had never been aired for more than three weeks. You can't get an audience that way. They would never promo the show for the next week.
In the year and a half I was on SNL, I never saw anybody ad lib anything. For a very good reason - the director cut according to the script. So, if you ad libbed, you'd be off mike and off camera.