The Counterculture Squared: Albert Brooks’s Saturday Night Live

This chapter considers how Albert Brooks’ conflicts with Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels and the films Brooks produced for the show represent a key moment in the counterculture and the role the professional class would play not just in entertainment, but also in American political life from the 1970s onward. With Brooks’ anxious conformity appearing only in pre-filmed shorts, the more anti-statist energies of the live-in-New-York performers both on screen and in production. The success of the show on television and some of it performers in film promoted not Brooks’ anxious responsiveness to the requirements of his job—such as a comic pleasing an audience—but instead a posture of indifference toward work, and in doing so helped to put in place a structure of feeling that would accompany the economic restructuration of the neoliberal era.