Norm MacDonald Recounts His Work on the ‘Saturday Night Live’ 40th Anniversary in Detail on Twitter

And so it was Saturday and Bill Murray may not make it and Eddie Murphy may not do Jeopardy and who was in charge of Update?

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

Norm MacDonald turned to Twitter recently to recount his work on the Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special. MacDonald wrote the Celebrity Jeopardy! sketch that was part of the show and was in charge of getting Eddie Murphy to play Bill Cosby in it. (Ultimately, the part was played by Kenan Thompson.) All of MacDonald’s tweets on the topic have been collected in chronological order in a Storify page by Joe Petro.

MacDonald created the recurring Celebrity Jeopardy! sketch for SNL. And by created, he explains, he means he stole it “note for note” from the SCTV sketch Half-Wits. Before using the sketch on SNL, MacDonald got permission from Eugene Levy who created Half-Wits. 

I came up with the idea of Celebrity Jeopardy years ago by stealing it, note for note, from an SCTV classic, Half-Wits.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

Eddie Murphy, I realize, is not like the rest of us. Eddie does not need the laughs.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

Eddie Murphy is the coolest, a rockstar even in a room with actual rockstars.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015