Saturday Night Live and the Underappreciated Influence of Carol Burnett

What makes Lorne Michaels laugh?That’s no small question.Half a century of aspiring stars have thought hard on it.

The answer has launched and stymied many careers while going a long way to defining modern comedy.The hagiographic new movie “Saturday Night” focuses on Michaels as he puts together the 1975 premiere episode of “Saturday Night Live,” but the comedic vision of the man who has gone on to oversee the show for decades remains maddeningly, pointedly remote.Played with a determined calm by Gabriel Labelle, the young Lorne Michaels comes off as a blandly generic maverick, struggling repeatedly to explain his idea for the show.

In an early scene, he compares himself to Thomas Edison, and while one can detect some mocking of the hubris of that statement, there’s not enough.To the extent that his sensibility is illuminated in the screenplay by Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan, it’s through opposition.

In scene after scene, Michaels is the counterculture hero confronted by a procession of squares, suits and old-school naysayers.They’re not just skeptical executives or scolding censors, either.

Actors playing Jim Henson, Johnny Carson and Milton Berle make appearances, in roles designed, thematically at least, to show us everything this hip new show is not.What stands out about this parade of aesthetic antagonists is that perhaps the most important one to the formation of the identity of “Saturday Night Live” goes unmentioned: Carol Burnett.Despite the sense you get from this cinematic love letter, “Saturday Night Live” did not invent must-see television sketch comedy.It wasn’t even the first important live one on Saturday nights on NBC.

(That would be “Your Show of Shows” in the 1950s, with a writers room that included Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner and Neil Simon.) The dominant sketch comedy when “S.N.L.” got started was “The Carol Burnett Show,” a CBS staple since the late 1960s that also featured topical satire, flamboyant perform...