Rosie Shuster (born June 19, 1946) is a Canadian-born comedy writer and actress. She was a writer for Saturday Night Live during the 1970s and 1980s.
Shuster was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada to Ruth (née Burstyn), an interior designer, and Frank Shuster, of the Wayne and Shuster comedy duo. She is a cousin of Superman co-creator Joe Shuster. She is of Jewish descent.
Shuster was married to Saturday Night Live's creator, Lorne Michaels, from 1967 to 1980. The pair first met in junior high school, when Michaels, born Lorne Lipowitz, followed her home hoping to meet her famous father. Together Shuster and Michaels wrote and performed comedy sketches through high school, summer camp, and college. They began their TV career on The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour show for Canadian TV on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Appearing on the show were Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner, among others. Shuster and Michaels moved to Los Angeles to work on The Lily Tomlin Show for ABC, where they also met Laraine Newman, whom they invited, along with Aykroyd and Radner, to join the Not Ready for Prime Time Players for Saturday Night Live. Shuster would be hired as one of the original writer of SNL in 1975, being one of three women during the original era of the show.
Of the beginnings of SNL, Shuster has said, "There was a long incubation period where everybody was kind of falling in love with each other and cracking each other up, trying to find their place, have a voice. We were stockpiling a lot of commercial parodies. You could feel something organically happening amongst us."
Shuster's comedy legacy at SNL includes some of the show's most memorable characters and sketches from its early days, such as the beloved Killer Bees, and the Todd and Lisa sketch, played by Bill Murray and Gilda Radner. Radner's character of Roseanne Roseannadanna first appeared in a sketch by Shuster. Teaming up with Radner and writer Anne Beatts, she wrote the first sketches featuring Emily Litella, Radner's confused yet outspoken elderly woman, and Baba Wawa, her spoof of Barbara Walters.
On the social impact of SNL, Shuster noted, "You have to remember in the mid-seventies, there was Watergate and Vietnam. Rock music had broken out in the sixties as well as a lot of films like the Jack Nicholson kind of movies, Five Easy Pieces. They reflected the revolution in consciousness that came out of the sixties but television was still square as hell. So part of the impetus of the whole show was to just shake things up and to reflect back what was happening in the culture, the edginess and spontaneity that wasn't happening on television." Shuster initially left along with Michaels, the rest of the original cast, and most of the writers in 1980.
However, she returned to SNL for season 7, then-producer under Dick Ebersol, which was a revamped year for the show, with only Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo returning to the show as cast members. She wrote a Tyrone sketch for Murphy, which he performed when he was honored with the Mark Twain Award at the Kennedy Center.
She left at the end of season 7, and then returned for the show for Season 12, Michels had returned to the show the previous season, and had a new cast including Dana Carvey, Jan Hooks, and Phil Hartman (alongside returnees like Jon Lovitz, Dennis Miller, and Nora Dunn). Shuster helped Carvey develop his recurring character Church Lady, the uptight, smug, and pious host of Church Chat. She last wrote for the December 19, 1987 episode, for Season 13, and permanently left the show after 7½ non-consecutive years writing for the show.
SNL Career[]
- 1975-1980; 1981-82; 1986-1987: Writer (last episode: December 19, 1987)