Actors - Michael O'Donoghue

Home > Listing Index > Actors > Michael O'Donoghue

	Actors - Michael O'Donoghue

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 picaresque Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist originally published as a serial by the Evergreen Review and later in book form by Grove Press. Drawn by Frank Springer, the comic detailed the adventures of debutante Phoebe Zeit-Geist as she was variously kidnapped and rescued by a series of bizarre characters, such as Eskimos, Nazis, Chinese foot fetishists, and lesbian assassins. See for yourself: .

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." Oddly enough, the sketch's catchphrase - "I think I can, I think I can, oh my God, oh my God..." - turned out to be strangely prescient of O'Donoghue's own last words. 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 1976 and 1977.

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 "The Last Days in Silverman's Bunker" (which compared the NBC network president's problems at the network to Adolf Hitler's last days in charge of the Third Reich). It was planned that John Belushi would return to play Silverman, and a great deal of work had been done on creating sets for the sketch (which would have run for about twenty minutes), including the construction of a large nazi eagle clutching an NBC corporate logo instead of a swastika. Even today the sketch (which was cowritten with Nelson Lyons) remains controversial, with some who have read it considering it to have been O'Donoghue's masterpiece, while others - including Ebersol - feel that it was nothing more than an excuse to kick a guy while he was down and add insult to injury by comparing him to Hitler.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Michael O'Donoghue ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Michael O'Donoghue; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay