Michael O'Donoghue

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Michael O'Donoghue
Born January 5, 1940
Sauquoit, New York
Died November 8, 1994
New York, New York

Michael O'Donoghue (January 5, 1940 - November 8, 1994) was a 20th century writer and performer noted for his dark and destructive style of comedy, and as the first head writer of the highly influential American television program Saturday Night Live. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 54, after a long history of chronic migraine headaches.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early work

O'Donoghue's early career included work as a playwright and actor in regional theater. His first work of greater note was the picaresque feature "The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist", published as a serial in Evergreen Review and later in book form 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.

O'Donoghue also co-wrote, with George W. S. Trow, the script for the James Ivory film Savages.

[edit] National Lampoon

O'Donoghue was a writer for the satiric magazine National Lampoon. His most famous contributions include "The Vietnamese Baby Book", in which a baby's war wounds are catalogued 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.

[edit] 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. We are out of badgers". 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.

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". That sketch's catchphrase — "I think I can, I think I can - HEART ATTACK! HEART ATTACK! Ohmygodthepain! Ohmygodthepain..." — turned out to be strangely prescient of O'Donoghue's own last words. 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 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 started yelling and screaming 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.

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 being berated by his captors for the war crimes of the Nazis explained he had a good excuse, which he whispered 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.

[edit] Later work

O'Donoghue had small parts in the 1979 movie Manhattan, 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 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".

[edit] Death

On the morning of November 8, 1994, O'Donoghue awoke early in the morning to what he thought was just another migraine. He took some medication for the pain and went back to bed. He later woke up a second time in immense pain and exclaimed "Oh, my God!". His wife, Cheryl Hardwick whom he married in October 1986, immediately called an ambulance. On the way to the hospital, he went into convulsive seizure. Three hours later, Cheryl was informed that he was brain dead. He was taken off life support and his organs were donated to children.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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