Ironically, Michael O'Donoghue, who spent much of his career battling for the right to mock tragic topics as one of the founders of National Lampoon and "Saturday Night Live," died suddenly of a massive brain hemorrhage in 1994. Now, with the Lampoon a bare shadow of its former self and SNL tamed into a movie-spawning mainstream institution, writer Dennis Perrin has fashioned "Mr. Mike," a rippingly good reminder of the man and the qualities that inspired his best work.
Taking us back to O'Donoghue's middle-class childhood in upstate New York, Perrin reveals that Mr. Mike (as his purely evil SNL alter ego was known) initially developed his bitter and intelligent humor during a yearlong bout with rheumatic fever at age five. Confined to bedrest, the young O'Donoghue read great works of Western literature, fueling his imagination as he came to hate the kids who could play outside. This combination of anger and resentment took Mr. Mike to the heights of the television industry, but his scathing personality burned every bridge he came across and ultimately prevented him from attaining the same feature-film success as those (such as Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd) who tempered their anarchic early SNL comedy styles.
Perrin's work reveals the creative process that spawned classic SNL bits, including "The Last Voyage of the Starship Enterprise," serving as a primer in the overall movement that shattered mainstream comedy mores (as such, it perhaps limits its audience to students of comedy, passionate "old SNL" fans and the darkly curious). Ultimately, though, "Mr. Mike" proves to be a touching portrait of a man whose unwillingness to compromise his artistic vision rendered him an almost-forgotten figure in a movement that changed entertainment - a man whose writing launched dozens of careers before changing tastes left him unemployed for the last decade of his life. We may still laugh at the memory of O'Donoghue's comic genius, but we should remember the dark urges that spawned the sketches.
(Carl Kozlowski)
- Mr. Mike:
The Life and Work of Michael O'Donoghue
copyright 1998 New City Communications, Inc.