When Saturday Night Live and country music collide.
Who would have thought that one of the underlying sketch guidelines for Saturday Night Live would be a comparison to the guiding light of how country music should be produced? I wouldn’t have guessed it necessarily, but it certainly makes a lot of sense now with hindsight.
The long-running sketch comedy show just recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. Though many would say it’s not as good as it once was (most people say their favorite cast was the one that was there while they were in high school or college), it does have some impressive longevity.
In other words, Saturday Night Live is doing more than a couple of things right.
And back in the 1980s, when the show was struggling to come out of a slump that may or may not have been triggered by Lorne Michaels leaving (and then returning to try and get it back on the right track), there was one strong, guiding mantra that kept many of the writers on the right path when it came to building sketches.
In the book Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, a portion of it focuses in on SNL‘s longest tenured writer: Jim Downey. The comedy writer, producer and actor worked on the show from about 1977 to 2013, and was the mind behind many of the show’s most beloved sketches. He was undoubtedly critical to the success of Saturday Night Live, and show creator Lorne Michaels once called him the “best political humorist alive.”
And in the late 1980s, Downey was the “Head Writer” on the show, and many younger writers looked to him for guidance on how to write good, concise comedic sketches. The book explains that the writers initially tried to look to Lorne Michaels for it, but he… wasn’t as available or accessible as they’d like.
When Downey was asked for advice about sketch comedy writing, he likened it to the famous phrase about the simplicity and effectiveness of some of the best country music songs of all time:
“Failing to get the attention and instruction they craved from Lorne Michaels, the writers looked to Jim Downey, who set the bar high; he always liked to evaluate sketches according to ‘degree of difficulty.’
He’d cite the old line about country music – that it was made up of ‘three chords and the truth,’ and said that a good sketch needed five or six jokes around an interesting and original idea.”
Three chords and the truth… effective in country and comedy.
Harlan Howard, a talented country music songwriter in his own right, is often credited with coining the famous phrase. The phrase points out that, more than anything, people just want something authentic. There doesn’t have to be a ton of moving parts to be successful. Sometimes something straightforward – like three chords – will do just the trick.
For Downey, who helped generations of sketch writers hone their craft, those “three chords” in a sketch comedy sense were:
-A character to root for
-An arc
-A payoff
Crazy that the approach to comedy and country music can be so closely related, right? Just as some of the best country songs are simple, non-flashy and straight-to-the-point, some of the most memorable sketches in SNL’s history were also formed with the idea that “three chords and the truth” is all you need.
You can hear Downey talking about some of his favorite sketches in the video below:
