Profile of Michael O'Donoghue on Famous Like Me

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. He was born in Sauquoit, New York and died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

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 comic adventure Phoebe Zeitgeist for the Evergreen Review. Drawn by Frank Springer, the comic detailed the adventures of debutante Phoebe Zeitgeist as she was variously kidnapped and rescued by a series of bizarre characters, such as Eskimos, Nazis, Chinese foot fetishists, and lesbian assassins.

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

National Lampoon

O'Donoghue was a writer for the National Lampoon during its glory days. O'Donoghue's most famous contributions to the Lampoon 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 a continuing feature called "Underwear for the Deaf."

Saturday Night Live

On SNL, O'Donoghue appeared in the first show's opening sketch, as a speech therapist 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 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 on, 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 John Belushi.

During his years at SNL he shared Emmy Awards for outstanding writing in 1977 and 1978.

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 and instead was released as a theatrical film.

O'Donoghue returned to SNL in 1981 when the new executive producer Dick Ebersol needed an old hand to help revive the faltering show. 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 that she was as talented as a pair of old shoes, and forcing everyone to write on the walls with magic markers. The only one he liked was Eddie Murphy, 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, death is good, happiness makes you sad, etc.) set in the Ronald Reagan administration. He used real details and plans from the administration in a showcase of what he considered the insanity of that presidency.

According to a question in the SNL edition of Trivial Pursuit, O'Donoghue was fired after writing the never-aired sketch "Silverman in the Bunker" (which compared the NBC network president to Adolf Hitler).

Later work

He had small parts in the 1979 movie Manhattan, the 1987 movie Wall Street, and the 1988 movie he co-wrote, Scrooged. It is worth noting that O'Donoghue loathed the theatrical release of Scrooged, insisting until his death that he and co-writer Mitch Glazer had written a much better film.

Further reading

• Mr. Mike: The Life and Work of Michael O'Donoghue by Dennis Perrin, 1999. ISBN 038072832X.
• Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, as Told By Its Stars, Writers and Guests by James A. Miller and Tom Shales, 2001. ISBN 0316735655.
• Saturday Night by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, 1986.
• Going Too Far by Tony Hendra, 1987. ISBN 0385232233.

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Michael O'Donoghue