Michael O'Donoghue (January 5, 1940 - November 8, 1994) was a 20th century American writer and performer. He was known for his dark and destructive style of comedy and humor, was a major contributor to National Lampoon magazine, and was the first head writer of the highly influential American television program Saturday Night Live.
Childhood
O'Donoghue was born Michael Henry Donohue (nicknamed "Pete" to avoid confusion with his father's name) in Sauquoit, New York[?]. His father, Michael, worked as an engineer, while his mother, Barbara, stayed home to raise him. O'Donoghue's dark sense of humour was apparently something he inherited from his mother.
Early work
O'Donoghue's early career included work as a playwright and stage actor at the University of Rochester where he drifted in and out of school beginning in 1959. His first published writing appeared in the school's humor magazine "Ugh!"
After a brief time working as a writer in San Francisco, CA, O'Donoghue returned to Rochester and participated in regional theater. During this period, he formed a group called Bread and Circuses specifically to perform his early plays which were of an experimental nature and often quite disturbing to the local audience. Among these are an absurdist work exploring themes of Sadism entitled "The Twilight Maelstrom of Cookie Lavagetto," a cycle of one act plays called "Le Theatre de Malaise" and the 1964 ambitiously dark satire "The Death of JFK."
His first work of greater note was the picaresque feature "The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist", published as a serial in Evergreen Review. This was an erotic satire of the comic book genre, later released in revised and expanded form as a book by that magazine's publisher, Grove Press. Drawn by Frank Springer, the comic detailed the adventures of debutante Phoebe Zeit-Geist as she was variously kidnapped and rescued by a series of bizarre Inuit, Nazis, Chinese foot fetishists, lesbian assassins and other characters.
In 1968, O'Donoghue worked together with illustrator (and fellow Evergreen Review veteran) Phil Wende to create the illustrated book "The Incredible, Thrilling Adventures of the Rock." According to Dennis Perrin's book "Mr. Mike: The Life and Work of Michael O'Donoghue" (Avon Books, 1998):
There is no plot. The same rock sits in the same spot in the same forest for thousands of years. Nothing much happens. Then, while two boys roam the wood in search of a Christmas tree, one sees the rock and is inspired.
Taking the idea to the publisher Random House, the pair sold the book to the young editor Christopher Cerf. Cerf was a former member of the Harvard Lampoon, and O'Donohughe's first acquaintance from that group. Through Cerf, O'Donoghue would meet George W. S. Trow and other former Lampoon writers looking to start a national comedy magazine.
In 1969, O'Donoghue and Trow co-wrote the script for the James Ivory / Ismail Merchant film Savages. This film tells the story of a tribe of prehistoric "Mud People" who happen upon a deserted Gatsby-esque 1930's manor house. The Mud People evolve into contemporary high-society types who enjoy a decadent weekend party at the manor before ultimately devolving back into Mud People. Savages was eventually released in 1972.
National Lampoon magazine
Donoghue was, along with Henry Beard and Doug Kenney, a founding writer and later an editor for the satiric National Lampoon magazine. As one of many outstanding National Lampoon contributors, O'Donoghue created some of the distinctive black comedy which characterized the magazine's flavor for most of its first decade.
His most famous contributions include "The Vietnamese Baby Book," in which a baby's war wounds are cataloged in a keepsake; the "Ezra Taft Benson High School Yearbook;" a precursor to the Lampoon's High School Yearbook Parody; the comic "Tarzan of the Cows;" and the continuing feature "Underwear for the Deaf." He was also the editor and main contributor to the Lampoon's Encyclopedia of Humor.
He co-wrote the album "Radio Dinner" with Tony Hendra, and because of the album's success he was assigned to direct and act on The National Lampoon Radio Hour. After 13 episodes, publisher Matty Simmons asked O'Donoghue to return to the magazine. A week later, O'Donoghue and Simmons argued over what was later revealed to be a simple misunderstanding, and O'Donoghue left.
It was at the Lampoon that O'Donoghue met Anne Beatts, with whom he became romantically involved. The two later moved on to work at Saturday Night Live together.
Saturday Night Live
On the pioneering, late-night sketch comedy program Saturday Night Live, on which creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels assigned him the position of head writer, O'Donoghue appeared in the first show's opening sketch, as an English-language teacher instructing John Belushi in such phrases as "I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverines." and "We are out of badgers. Would you accept a wolverine in its place?" He later appeared in the persona of a Vegas-style "impressionist" who would pay great praise to showbiz mainstays such as talk show host Mike Douglas and singers Tony Orlando and Dawn — and then speculate how they'd react if steel needles were plunged into their eyes. The shrieking fits that followed are believed by biographer Dennis Perrin to be inspired by O'Donoghue's real-life agonies from chronic migraine headaches.
O'Donoghue, in his refusal to write for Jim Henson's Muppet characters which appeared in the early years of SNL, quipped, "I don't write for felt."[1]
Later, O'Donoghue cultivated the persona of the grim "Mr. Mike," a coldly decadent figure who favored viewers with comically dark "Least-Loved Bedtime Stories" such as "The Little Engine that Died." His other SNL sketches range from a black-and-white Citizen Kane parody to a Star Trek spoof that was a tour-de-force for Belushi.
O'Donoghue shared SNL Emmy Awards for outstanding writing in 1976 and 1977. He left the series in the fall of 1978, after three years.
In 1979, he produced a television special for NBC, featuring most of the SNL cast, called Mr. Mike's Mondo Video. Because of its raunchy content, the network rejected the program, which was then released as a theatrical film.
O'Donoghue returned to SNL in 1981 when new executive producer Dick Ebersol needed an old hand to help revive the faltering series. O'Donoghue's volatile personality and mood swings made this difficult: His first day on the show he screamed at all the cast members, telling Mary Gross she was as talented as a pair of old shoes, and forcing everyone to write on the walls with magic markers. This horrified Catherine O'Hara so much that she quit before ever appearing on air. The only one he liked was Eddie Murphy, reportedly because Murphy wasn't afraid of him. According to the book Live From New York O'Donoghue tried to shake things up on that first day by saying "this is what the show lacks" and spray-painting the word "DANGER" on the wall of his office.
Arguably the most memorable sketch O'Donoghue created during this short-lived tenure was a spoof of the old Superman "Bizarro" world (where up is down, etc.) set in the Ronald Reagan administration.
According to a question in the SNL edition of Trivial Pursuit, O'Donoghue was fired after writing the never-aired sketch "The Last Days in Silverman's Bunker" (which compared NBC network president Fred Silverman's problems at the network to Adolf Hitler's last days in charge of the Third Reich). It was planned that John Belushi would return to play Silverman, and a great deal of work had been done on creating sets for the sketch (which would have run for about twenty minutes), including the construction of a large Nazi eagle clutching an NBC corporate logo instead of a swastika. Another unaired O'Donoghue sketch from around the same period, "The Good Excuse," also involved Nazi jokes. In the sketch, a captured German officer berated by his captors for Nazi war crimes explains that he had a good excuse, which he whispers into their ears, inaudible to the viewers. His captors are quickly persuaded that the unheard "good excuse" was, in fact, a good excuse for the crimes of the Third Reich.
Other work
O'Donoghue acted in a supporting role in the 1985 comedy Head Office. He had small parts in the 1979 movie Manhattan (which poked fun of SNL), the 1987 movie Wall Street, and the 1988 movie he co-wrote, Scrooged. O'Donoghue said he loathed the theatrical release of Scrooged, insisting until his death that he and co-writer and best friend Mitch Glazer had written a much better film. He also wrote or co-wrote a number of unproduced screenplays of which Saturday Matinee (aka Planet of the Cheap Special Effects) remains legendary in Hollywood screenwriter circles.[citation needed] O'Donoghue also found some success as a country music songwriter, his most notable credit being Dolly Parton's "Single Women" (1982).
Death
On November 8, 1994, O'Donoghue died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 54, after a long history of what were thought to be chronic migraine headaches.
References
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