Joe Piscopo, Frank Sinatra, Phil Hartman, and Nick Land

this is silly....but then again, so am I

Note: Some of you younger readers might not enjoy this (and maybe some of you older ones won’t care for it, either), but I wanted to put it together for the sake of just doing so. There is no larger point (nor even a single point) being made below. It’s just me having a little bit of fun.

Saturday Night Live alums Dana Carvey and David Spade have a podcast called “Fly on the Wall” in which they interview comedians and comedic actors, especially those that have appeared on that same show in the past as they did. Last month, they did an episode with Joe Piscopo, an SNL cast member from the non-Lorne Michaels early 80s era.

Joe Piscopo, an Italian-American comedian, singer, and all-around entertainer from New Jersey, was a big, big deal in US popular culture….but only for a very brief time, and only during his SNL tenure.

At the end of the 1979-80 season of Saturday Night Live, the show was in a serious crisis. Lorne Michaels, the producer and creator of the hit comedy show, decided to leave in order to focus on other projects. He wanted the show to be put on hiatus and await his return, but NBC wouldn’t agree to it. They gave his role to Jean Doumanian, an associate producer and close friend of Woody Allen. The entire remaining cast left that summer, as did almost all of the writing staff. Doumanian was forced to find and hire new talent, and with a severely reduced budget for production for the next season.

The first post-Michaels season was a commercial and critical disaster. It would always be very, very difficult to follow the original cast, who were akin to rock stars in the late 70s. Doumanian was sacked less than a year after being given the role, and was replaced by Dick Ebersol, a producer more accustomed to sports than to comedy. The entire cast was dismissed as well, except for two people: Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo.

Piscopo was best known for his impersonation of his own hero, Frank Sinatra. In the brief Doumanian regime, he actually had more air time than did Eddie Murphy, a then-largely unknown stand-up comic who didn’t appear all that much on the show, but was described in “Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live” as a “secret weapon”:

………Doumanian actually had a tremendous secret weapon in her arsenal—so secret that, sadly for her, even she didn’t realize it. This was a young, brash cast member who spent most of the season in small bit parts, except in the seventeenth-floor offices, where he kept coworkers continuously entertained. He was not a “great white hope.” Au contraire. Definitely great, however. His day would come, but not in time to save the very doomed Doumanian.¹

When the Ebersol regime can into power, Eddie Murphy became bigger than a rock star. This era was before my time (and after my bed time), but my older cousins would watch the show religiously, making references to Murphy’s turns as “Mr. Robinson” (a ghetto/streetwise parody of Fred Rogers), “Gumby” (a cartoon character played very cynically), and most popular of them all, as “Buckwheat” from The Little Rascals.

Piscopo was often paired up on the show with Murphy, making them almost a “double act” in the eyes of many. One of their more classic pairings occurred in 1982, where Piscopo’s Frank Sinatra and Murphy’s Stevie Wonder team up to spoof the Paul McCartney-Stevie Wonder song “Ebony and Ivory”, a song about bridging racial divides. Start at 3:05 for the best part:

Piscopo was very respectful of Murphy’s overwhelming talent, and to some, he appeared almost syncophantic in his presence.:

Murphy had another loyal ally, or perhaps fervent disciple, in cast member Joe Piscopo. Offscreen, Murphy and Piscopo played the role of campus cutups—though to some observers, Piscopo seemed sycophantic in his adulation of Murphy and basked to the baking point in Murphy’s refracted glow. And more than one insider reportedly remarked, “Eddie Murphy’s success went to Joe Piscopo’s head.”²

Eddie quickly outgrew the show, and Piscopo was dropped for the first post-Murphy season. One went on to star in huge hits like “Beverly Hills Cop”, “Raw”, and “Beverly Hills Cop II”. Piscopo went on to make “Johnny Dangerously” in 1984 with Michael Keaton, a movie that earned mixed reviews. After that, he was relegated to making appearances in shorts and specials of declining quality, along with one-off TV appearances in shows such as Star Trek: The Next Generation.

By the late 80s, Piscopo became better known for his bodybuilding than for being a comedian or an actor.

He developed thyroid cancer in 1990, something that he battled successfully in due time. Over the next three decades Piscopo continued to perform, and continued to celebrate his idol, Frank Sinatra.

His birthplace of Passsaic, New Jersey is less than ten miles away from Hoboken, where Sinatra was born. To Italian-Americans of three generations, Frank Sinatra is the most important Italian-American of all time, and second only to Christopher Columbus with respect to Italians and the New World.

Sinatra was a titan. He was someone to not only be loved, admired, and to fiercely defend, but also to fear. Sinatra was a notorious tough guy with a short temper, and the fear that he generated was multiplied many times over by the fact that he was close with many Mafia figures, especially those within the Chicago Outfit, such as front boss Sam Giancana, the man who fixed the election for JFK in Illinois in 1960.

In the above photo, Sinatra can be seen with both Carlo Gambino (top row, third from right), head of NY’s Gambino Family, and Paul Castellano, who would go on later that year to succeed his cousin Carlo to run the family until he was notoriously killed by John Gotti’s men in 1985). There have long been rumours that Sinatra was a “made man”³, but they have never been proven. What cannot be denied is that he palled around with mafiosos from many families, especially during his time leading the Rat Pack in Las Vegas.

Andrew Smith (Head Writer of SNL during Piscopo’s tenure) described Joe’s impersonation of Sinatra as more of a “tribute” than performed in comedic terms.⁴ Piscopo would constantly annoy the writing staff by rejecting pitches they made for sketches involving his Sinatra impression by saying that “Frank would never do that”:

BOB TISCHLER:

We had a piece on one show where people were jumping off a building, and in the sketch Frank Sinatra was supposed to jump, as was Mayor Koch, who played himself, and Joe says, “Frank wouldn’t jump off a building.” And Eddie turns to him and says, “Oh yeah—and Mayor Koch would?” That was one of many “Frank wouldn’t do that” stories. There was another time where Billy Crystal was going to play Sammy Davis, Jr.—Billy and I wrote this piece—and Joe was supposed to play Frank, and it was supposed to start in the Carnegie Deli and end up where Sammy would break-dance in front of the NBC studios, which we did. But when we told Joe that we wanted to start in the Carnegie Deli, he said that Frank would never eat in the Carnegie Deli, and he refused to do it until we put Frank in a limo.

Then there’s the Stevie Wonder story. It was a sketch called “Ebony and Ivory,” and it was supposed to be Frank Sinatra and Stevie Wonder—Joe and Eddie. In the sketch, which Barry and David wrote, Frank was supposed to be waiting for Stevie Wonder to show up at the recording studio, and Joe said, “Frank wouldn’t wait for Stevie. Stevie would have to wait for Frank.” And refused to do it that way.

It was sick.⁵

Piscopo on doing his Sinatra impersonation and Sinatra’s reaction to it:

JOE PISCOPO:

The Sinatra stuff was early on, and they had to talk me into that, because I didn’t want to disrespect my hero. When I first started doing him, I wrote him a letter and I sent him an album through his attorney—we put out this “I Love Rock and Roll, Sinatra Sings the Rock Tunes” kind of thing. I was a North Jersey Italian American just like the Old Man, as we affectionately referred to Mr. S., and he couldn’t have been nicer. Matter of fact, he sent out cease-and-desist letters to anybody who’d even think of doing him and he never sent me a letter. And he used to call me Jusep, which was Italian for Joseph. He would invite me to everything. He just liked it. And when I look at it now, it had a real edge to it, you know?

But he couldn’t have been nicer, and I have the fondest memories, rest his soul, of the Old Man. He was just the greatest. When I first did him on SNL, he was at Caesar’s Palace in Atlantic City and he was about to step onstage—the opening act was an old comic named Charlie Callas—and everybody was waiting for the Old Man, and at eleven-thirty for the first time it was me doing him, and everybody stopped in the room, and I heard this from everybody, and they just said, “How is this guy crazy enough to do Sinatra?” And Callas breaks his silence and says to the Old Man, “What do you think, Captain?” And Sinatra looks at me doing him and he says, “He’s pretty good—the little prick.”⁶

Here’s the absolute best part:

And when I met him, he said, “Hey Joe, baby, come here.” I felt so comfortable, I said, “Can I call you Frank?” He said, “No.” It was great, you know? He was just a wonderful, wonderful guy.⁷

“No.”

The Sinatra Group

On January 19, 1991, the following sketch aired on Saturday Night Live:

I’ve heard it said by many that a person’s favourite era of the show was when they were teenagers. This makes sense to me, as this era of SNL is by far my favourite. Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, Jon Lovitz, Kevin Nealon, Jan Hooks, Dennis Miller….all great…….but no one could compare to Phil Hartman. He took on the task on impersonating Frank Sinatra, and instead of treating it as an homage to the legend, he instead made Ol’ Blue Eyes out to be a mean, vindictive, and out-of-touch relic of a bygone era.

Written by Robert Smigel, the sketch was a spoof of weekly political talk show “The McLaughlin Group”, which aired on PBS every weekend, and which yours truly used to watch religiously. That show was also my introduction to Patrick Buchanan. The actual show had John McLaughlin hosting a panel of four well-known pundits who would answer questions about big issues of the day by way of hot takes returned to the rapid-fire host.

In this sketch, Phil Hartman plays Frank Sinatra, who has taken on the role of John McLaughlin. His guests include:

• English singer Billy Idol (played by that week’s guest host, Sting) - a “punk who sold out” but still did everything with a snarl

• Sinead O’Connor (played by Jan Hooks) - Sinead had offended many by not only ripping up a photo of Pope John Paul II during a performance on SNL, but also stating that she would refuse to sing in any concert venues where the American flag appeared

• Luther Campbell (played by Chris Rock) - a rapper from Florida’s “2 Live Crew”, a group known for its very raunchy and sexual lyrics, leading to their album being banned in places

• Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme (played by Mike Myers and Victoria Jackson) a married couple of singers on the lounge circuit who were Sinatra hangers-on

This sketch is my all-time favourite of any that SNL ever produced. Every line is a hit, even the ones that I couldn’t understand at the time. I wasn’t the only one who didn’t get all the jokes and references. Future cast member Seth Meyers also said that it his favourite sketch as well, and he, like I, didn’t ‘get’ all of it:

“Sinatra Group” was Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Mike Myers and Chris Rock. Sting was the host. I loved Hartman’s Sinatra. Victoria Jackson and Myers played Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme. I had no sense of who they were, but you learned pretty quickly in the sketch what their status level was compared to Sinatra. Rock played Luther Campbell and Hooks played Sinéad O’Connor and Sting played Billy Idol. There are lines from that sketch that my family and I quote all the time.

There were issues of the day on The McLaughlin Group. Frank’s issue of the day was to ask something like, “Rita Hayworth or Ava Gardner – who would you rather nail? I disqualify myself because I’ve done ’em both.” And he just kept getting so angry and aggressive. He also couldn’t understand anything Luther Campbell said, until Luther says that he likes big butts. Then Frank said, “I hear you loud and clear.” It was a crystallization of someone who was at one point the biggest thing in show business, but now attention was on younger generations.

To highlight Meyers’ excellent point about generational change, the sketch ends off with the following line⁸ from Hartman’s Sinatra:

“Next week, the Grammy Awards. Where the hell is Vikki Carr’s album?”

Who the hell in 1991 even knew who Vikki Carr was? I certainly didn’t.

The panel gets very heated very quickly, and Sting’s Idol threatens Sinatra:

Billy Idol: You watch it, mate!

Frank Sinatra: Easy, baby! And what’s with the sneering crap? [ Billy sneers ] Don’t do that to the people, they want to like you! That’s what killed Dennis day – contempt for the audience. Luther Campbell! What about the chick’s head?⁹

For some strange reason, this line about “contempt for the audience” stayed with me for decades. I had no idea who Dennis Day was, and it wasn’t until at least twenty years later that I decided to google him because the sketch managed to pop back into my head. The fact that this line occupied space in my memory for so long is a testament not just to how well written the sketch is, but also to Hartman’s incredibly funny performance. He was known by cast members and the writing staff as the “glue” who held it all together by way of his excellent performances, talent, and professionalism. He is, without a doubt, my favourite cast member of all time.

Not everyone took kindly to this sketch, however.

JOE PISCOPO, Cast Member:

The Sinatra family was not happy with the impression Phil was doing at all, again rest his soul. To this day I’ll go out and do these Sinatra tributes with a seventeen-piece band—which is a riot, by the way. It’s all tongue-in-cheek, because they know me from the SNL thing. But I always check with Tina and the family to make sure it’s okay. When we did the Brisk Lipton Iced Tea campaign, they had me do the voice.

There was a meanness there to the Hartman thing. That was Lorne too, man. And I think there’s some kind of law: Don’t even attempt to do Sinatra unless you’re Italian.¹⁰

“Dennis Day” and “contempt for the audience”……..forever stuck in my head, for reasons that are completely unknown to me.

In December of 2020, English philosopher and novelist Nick Land¹¹ tweeted the following two replies to a fan of his writing:

When I first read his replies, I laughed uncontrollably for a few minutes straight because I was instantly reminded of Phil Hartman as Frank Sinatra telling Sting’s Billy Idol not to sneer because contempt for the audience is what killed Dennis Day’s career.

Those minutes of cackling laughter took decades to produce. Memory is a powerful thing.

1. "Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests”, James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales (2015 edition)

2. ibid.

3. term to denote someone who is officially made a member of a mafia family in the USA

4. Miller, Shales (2015)

5. ibid.

6. ibid.

7. ibid.

8. You can find the script in its entirety here

9. ibid.

10. Miller, Shales (2015)

11. Nick Land praised my interview with with Darren Beattie, calling it “the best one that I have ever read”. I pitched an interview proposal to him, which he politely rejected.