Show Bidness Report: No Onionheads

A Victoria Jackson story from Mark Evanier.

Years ago when I was friendly with Victoria Jackson and she didn’t think I was out to serve Satan and destroy America by not hating Barack Obama, she asked if I had any ideas as to how she could get back on Saturday Night Live at least once. This was some time after she’d left the cast and thought that another appearance on the program would have boosted her visibility and therefore, job offers. I suggested she submit a sketch idea where the host and some members of the then-current cast wander into a corridor of long-unused dressing rooms and find her in one, like she’s been there all along, waiting for someone to put her in a sketch and wondering where Phil Hartman was. It would have been like one of those supposed Japanese soldiers who was on an island for years after World War II because no one had told them the war was over.

She liked the premise but I don’t know if she ever presented it to anyone there. A year or two later, I was at a party with some current SNL writers and I mentioned it to them. They all laughed and said it was funny but that it was the second-least-likely thing they could imagine Lorne Michaels allowing on the show.

Naturally, I asked what the least-likely thing Michaels would ever allow on the series was. They said, almost in unison, “A current cast member who has grey or no hair.”