Delanceyplace.com 07/13/06-Saturday Night Live

In today's encore excerpt, thoughts from the early- day cast members of "Saturday Night Live":

"Bill Murray: 'When you become famous, you've got like a year or two where you act like a real a**hole. You can't help yourself. It happens to everybody. You've got like two years to pull it together--or it's permanent.'

"Steve Martin: 'When you're young, you have way fewer taboo topics, and then as you go through life and you have experiences with people getting cancer and dying and all the things you would have made fun of, then you don't make fun of them anymore. So rebelliousness really is the province of young people--that kind of iconoclasm.'

"Dan Akroyd: 'It's (the show is) too stressful, because you worry about quality, you want things to be so right, and that really weighs heavily--plus the adrenaline pump, it's like being in combat or a cop or something. You can't take that week after week. It's a young man's game, there's no doubt about it. It is satisfying when you pull something off, and it is tremendously debilitating and anxiety producing when you don't.' "

Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, Live From New York, Little, Brown, 2002, 121-178