SNL UK is 'smarter and funnier' than the original

– says the man who started it all, Lorne Michaels

Saturday Night Live founder Lorne Michaels has hailed the UK version of his venerable show as ‘smarter, funnier and more original’ than its American counterpart.

The creator of the US comedy institution is also an executive producer on the British version, which launched on Sky last month.

‘The mandate there is, it had to be British,’ he said at an event in Hollywood yesterday. ‘My design for it was that it would be the cooler of the two shows, and it would be the thing they beat us up with that.

‘It’s smarter, funnier, more original. And it had to be that. It had to be its own thing. It couldn’t be an imitation of what we do.’

He pointed to the Prince Andrew sketch, saying he would haeve done it differently.

‘The way I would have done it is an austere room with the right looking people in an MI5 meeting. And then I would have had an entrance for Andrew, and then I would have explained the plan, which would be logical to me.’

The UK team ‘found a way that it’s working for them, and the audience is taken to it … There is no better way, there’s only what works.’

Speaking at the screening of a new documentary about him, Michaels said that after 51 years the NBC original ‘brings culture, it brings politics, it brings a way to make sense in the world’.

In comments reported by Deadline, the 81-year-old said: ‘I like being around funny people – there’s not that many of them… And also to be able to comment on what’s going on from that perspective, particularly in a time which is almost always serious.

‘At this point, because we’ve been on for 51 years, I think we’re almost a branch of government. We’re allowed to say things, somehow we earned it, and whoever the President is so far has allowed it to go on. No one’s thinking, we can’t do it or we shouldn’t do it.’

However he said: ‘I think in the face of totalitarian government, I don’t think comedy really does much good; I think the totalitarians win every single time.

‘But there is something as a safety valve in a culture which comedy is a really important part, and being able to even think those thoughts.

‘Last week on Update, [Colin] Jost and [Michael] Che really went after things but it was what was bubbling up in the air, with the war, with all of that.’

In One Joke in the segment, Jost countered President Donald Trump’s claim that Iran has ‘no cards’ with the punchline: ‘They’re literally holding a strait.’

Here’s a trailer for the documentary: