Marc Maron interviewed A. Whitney Brown on the WTF podcast and it was better than I expected. Many good anecdotes. The problem is, I listened a couple of weeks ago and delayed posting to the group until now, so I can’t remember most of them. Maybe others in the group can add some. Brown said he joined Saturday Night Live the first year that Lorne returned and it was basically a bad year. The one breakout character was Jon Lovitz’s liar guy. Lovitz originated the character and Brown wrote the sketches. As Brown told it, Lovitz’s character was enough of a hit that NBC brass decided not to cancel the show. Dennis Miller was on that season and I recall him as an asset for the show. Brown did not like Miller, said he was not funny. I wonder how much of that has to do with Miller’s conservative bent. Brown was fairly left wing. For his second season back, Lorne tried a different approach, Brown said. Lorne hired someone he thought was talented and then asked that person who he or she worked well with. That worked better. I was surprised at Brown’s background. Given his name, A. Whitney Brown, I assumed he was an Ivy League product like so many other SNL crew. Turns out he was a drop out and an actual criminal. He learned to juggle in prison and busked as a juggler. Busking led to telling jokes to help keep crowds and that led to his stand-up career. He said he made as much as $500 a day busking in San Francisco in the 1970s. Brown glumly said he was the person who introduced Chris Farley to heroin.
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