NEED TO KNOW
Garrett Morris was part of Saturday Night Live’s original dream team in 1975
His ’70s film credits included Cooley High and Car Wash
He remained on SNL until 1980
Garrett Morris is looking back at his Saturday Night Live origins in the new issue of PEOPLE magazine.
The pioneering cast member, who starred as one of SNL’s original “Not Ready for Prime Time Players” from 1975 to 1980, tells PEOPLE that his gig on the sketch comedy show was partly a result of his performance in the 1975 comedy Cooley High, which was released in June of that year, just months before SNL’s October debut.
Morris, 89, was already tapped to be a writer on SNL when he learned Lorne Michaels sat down to watch Cooley High, in which Morris appeared as Mr. Mason.
Garrett Morris in the 1975 film ‘Cooley High’
THA/Shutterstock
“My assignment was to try and write, which I was really not very good at, I think, because I’d written plays, which is a two-hour thing. A play you can stretch out, but at Saturday Night Live, they want 30 seconds, 15 seconds, a minute,” Morris recalls.
He adds of Michaels, “I was really very inspired by the fact that the cast had told him to watch the film, because it meant Laraine [Newman] and Gilda [Radner] and John [Belushi] and Jane [Curtin] and them. I had people who were on my side. And sure enough, when he got through, his words were, ‘Garrett, I want you to audition for the Not Ready for Prime Time Players.’ “
Garrett Morris and Chevy Chase on ‘SNL’ in 1976.
NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty
Morris, SNL’s first Black cast member (and the only one until Eddie Murphy’s arrival in 1980), remained with the show for five years. In the decades to come, he appeared on sitcoms including The Jeffersons, Martin and 2 Broke Girls, before returning to New York City’s Studio 8H in 2025 for the show’s 50th anniversary special.
“Well, with arthritis, it felt sort of painful going up the f—ing steps,” Morris says of his SNL return last February, when he introduced a short film starring Belushi. “But it was great to know that I had been a part of — a small part of — something that lasted 50 years.”
He adds, “I was very proud of Lorne because I know that in the beginning he had a lot of opposition, not only about me being in it, but about a lot of the ideas he wanted to explore. And he held to his guns and showed them they were wrong because the first five years, he blew it away.”
The ‘SNL’ original players in 1975. From left: John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, Bill Murray, Laraine Newman and Garrett Morris.
NBC/courtesy Everett Collection
Morris remains “proud” of the work he did with the original SNL crew. “And also it meant that I admired and had myself been admired by Dave Chappelle, Eddie [Murphy], of course, Chris Rock, one of my favorites, Tracy [Morgan], who, by the way, came up to me and said some things I never expected them to say.”
While he sees himself as “a very small part of the comedy part of the world of entertainment,” Morris says the cast members that followed in his footsteps “whispered stuff in my ear that really made me feel very good about how they viewed my contribution.”
“And it’s part of that I’ll take to my grave,” he says.
Read the original article on People