Comedy writer Jim Downey is full of words, all words, strange words, Latin words, Midwest words, funny words, the perfect words.

“To write something with Jim means moving slowly, selecting the correct word, noting the comma here, the unnecessary adverb there,” says John Mulaney, a true believer.

Downey, you see, contains words the way a flood contains water. He’s 72, and despite more than 50 years as a revered godhead of comedy writing, the riverbed has never run dry. The first time we talked, the interview went four hours. The second time, five. Mulaney said that when they both wrote at “Saturday Night Live,” Downey would often call him to craft the week’s cold opening: “Once Jim got on the phone, I knew it was my afternoon.”

If you know Downey, you have a story about Downey.

“Saturday Night Live” creator Lorne Michaels gave him a laptop for his birthday in 2004; Downey didn’t crack open the box until 2015. David Mandel, the showrunner for “Veep,” one of Downey’s hires at “SNL” in the early ‘90s, remembers Downey would have videotapes of Joliet Central High School basketball games routinely mailed to “SNL” and urge the writer’s room to watch with him.

“Downey comes to my house sometimes for holidays,” said Bill Murray, “and one Christmas Eve, he came to help wrap presents and assemble gifts, and with my older boys, he had these blimps, and they lost control of one and it ended up on the ceiling. I’m looking at hours of wrapping ahead, and Jim’s planning a rescue operation for a blimp. For like five hours. Just the rescue plan itself.”

Downey seems to be incapable of doing anything partway, from his life to his comedy, which, at its best, is predicated on gently, sweetly, pushing the patience of the audience. He can, and will, walk you through the rise and decline of Joliet, his beloved hometown. As head writer of “Late Night with David Letterman” in 1982, he could milk a week of comedy from the slimmest of notions — Letterman’s fascination with the world’s largest vase, or an off-handed joke about camping with Barry White. He admits his marriage fell apart partly because of the vast amounts of time he devoted to “SNL,” more than 30 seasons as a writer and producer. When he and Norm Macdonald co-wrote their infamous torrent of O.J. Simpson jokes for “Weekend Update,” which eventually got them both fired, Downey went all in, knowing they had become a thorn in NBC’s side. In fact, Downey was fired from the show twice and quit once — and brought back each time.

The legend of Jim Downey holds multitudes.

It’s a widely known tale, at least within the world of television comedy writing, having gathered shape between his leaving Joliet for Harvard in 1970 and the 2000 presidential campaign, which some believe he swayed with his sketches — the pieces starring Will Ferrell as George W. Bush and Darrell Hammond as Al Gore. For one, Downey coined “strategery,” a word so perfect that Bush assumed he really said it.

Still, as “Saturday Night Live” concludes its 50th season this week, maybe everyone else should recognize Jim Downey, too. The secret sauce. The eccentric’s eccentric. The comedy writer’s comedy writer. The Illinois native who made late-night TV smart.

He retired from “SNL” in 2013, and he figures he stayed too long. “He became its heartbeat,” said writer Emily Spivey, who worked with Downey in the 2000s. “Lorne thinks of Jim as the core DNA. He was the continuity, throughout the decades of ‘SNL,’ he crafted the language — with Letterman’s show too — that’s still pretty imitated. Simple observations on life, blown way out of proportion. Blue collar. Midwestern voice.”

Dennis Miller likes to say Downey is the second most important person in the history of the show, after creator Lorne Michaels. Mandel said: “I guess I knew how to write when he hired me, and yet, really, Jim taught me how to write.” Mulaney said: “Even now I will get insecure I’m juicing things too early, going for a big laugh right away. I suppose I’m always chasing the patience and confidence Jim brought to his comedy.”

At Letterman’s show, Downey was credited with inventing the Top Ten List, and with writers like Merrill Markoe and George Meyer, its influential sensibility — ironic, intelligent, eager to dig into the hidden absurdity of nearly anything. At “SNL,” by himself and with others, Downey shaped so much of the show’s legacy that later this year, Peacock is expected to premiere a new documentary titled “Downey Wrote That.”

“Downey and Lorne, for a lot of people on that show, represent two sides of the same coin,” said Robert Smigel, best known as Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and head writer for “Late Night with Conan O’Brien.” Downey hired Smigel to write for “SNL” in the 1980s. “Jim favors writerly stuff, Lorne favors performance-driven, so they balanced each other out. Jim would say, write normal people in weird situations, or weird people in normal situations. Then in the gentlest, most encouraging way, he’d impose very high standards. If he called your piece a ‘first-thought idea,’ he meant ‘Good, but now push.’”

The thing about “SNL” is, other than a crawl of credits during the goodbyes, writers stay mostly anonymous. But Downey was always easily identified. When Dan Aykroyd played Bob Dole during a debate sketch in 1988, you hear him in Aykroyd’s deathless putdown: “I think the vice presidency is the lowest form of political existence, and the only person I know spineless enough to want the job is my good friend, George Bush.” The barbed specificity of “my good friend” — very Downey.

You hear Downey in the “Wild and Crazy” Czech brothers of the late ‘70s, Steve Martin and Aykroyd, cruising for “foxes” in “our tight slacks.” The odd syntax, the “slacks,” sounds like Downey, who had just come off a year of touring Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union before joining the show. You hear him in Chris Farley exhaustingly asking Paul McCartney if he remembers The Beatles, and in his love for pairing history to the crass in “Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber.” And in the addendum from Hammond’s Dan Rather: “CBS is now projecting Geraldo Rivera also has anthrax — both kinds.”

Conan O’Brien, who Downey hired at “SNL,” likes to call Downey’s signature “the comedy of over-explaining everything.” That’s Downey’s voice (and face) in the great First CityWide Change Bank sketch from 1988, describing in great detail how a bank makes change. That’s Downey’s deadpan in a James Bond bit, having gadget man Q carefully describe the features of a new suitcase, only for Bond to realize Q has been explaining an ordinary suitcase, with no special features.

“We hear it’s a waste of time to analyze comedy,” O’Brien said, “but poke around Jim’s comedy, you do see the wiring. My mantra has always been that there is a place where stupid and smart come together, and Jim is the master. His eyes are darting and sharp and, when I was writing at ‘SNL,’ if you got those eyes to brighten, it meant everything.”

“What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

Downey earned that.

He started at “SNL” when he was 22. He shared an office for four seasons with Bill Murray. His life grew so conjoined to the show that he remembers the first time he was fired was the same day he was served divorce papers. The second time he was fired was the same day that he heard Chris Farley had died. Last winter, on the Saturday between a Friday 50th anniversary “SNL” concert and a Sunday 50th anniversary “SNL” show, while he was fine-tuning a new “Weekend Update” piece for Murray, Downey found out that he had just become a grandfather. Clearly, he was meant to exist here. But unlike many other Harvard Lampoon graduates who joined the show after him, Downey never pursued this life. In 1976, when he informed his father that he had been hired to write for a new TV show, his father simply replied: “Jim, for god’s sake, just be on time.”

On a rainy spring morning in Brooklyn, in the brownstone of Downey’s longtime girlfriend, Downey looks worn, his friendly face ruddy and tired. He looks as if he’s spent a lifetime working on a railroad. He has that timeless stare of hardy stock, the kind you see in old photographs — which may be why Paul Thomas Anderson cast him in a small role in “There Will Be Blood” as a 19th century real estate broker opposite Daniel Day-Lewis. But when I ask if he remembers his first laugh, Conan was right: Downey’s face brightens. He does remember, incredibly. Even more remarkably, it was a prescient joke, both political and transgressive.

“I was in Catholic school in Joliet. I’m frightened to say this. This will sound cruel. I was in third grade. We just heard JFK was shot. Yeah, yeah, way too soon. Someone came into the room to tell us, but they didn’t know who shot him. I said it was probably Barry Goldwater (expected to become Kennedy’s GOP challenger in 1964). I’m not proud of that one. A few kids laughed, the teacher was very angry. But that is how a lot of people get a first laugh — playing off an unwitting straight man.”

He also remembers the first “SNL” sketch he wrote by himself, a college parody for host Ralph Nader that went so badly — — Lorne Michaels turned to Downey and said: “Well, it struck a blow for surrealism.” Downey skipped the afterparty: “I wandered onto Sixth Avenue and threw up in a trashcan and went home.” He describes bombing as leaping into a pool only to notice: No water. Yet he also came to accept that some of the writing he was proudest of would usually play to relative silences. Indeed, sketches he still loves — Bob Newhart as a Civil War officer who keeps forgetting to write the parents of a dead soldier, John Malkovich selling the government on a hot 19th century innovation called canals — watch them online and he’s right: Crickets. Still, there’s a humbleness that shouts Midwestern. As Mulaney, a Chicagoan, says: “It’s the comedy of someone completely unreasonable patiently explaining why they are reasonable.”

Pat McGuire, a retired Illinois state senator and old friend of Downey’s from Joliet, said the writer once told him that East Coast humor was about Henry Kissinger but Midwestern humor was just your mother reminding you to wear clean underwear.

Downey’s childhood was a model of postwar placidity. He was the youngest of three children, solidly middle class. Joliet didn’t seem like a Chicago exurb yet. Its steel mills had just begun drying up. “I remember feeling like we had the run of the place,” Downey said. Downtown was vibrant then: James Bond at the Rialto, department stores, bookstores. Downey steeped in a lifetime of references, Edward Gorey, Zap Comix, “The Twilight Zone.” He remembers a couple of students at school who staged an elaborate wrestling match with homemade costumes; it forever reminds him of the value of overcommitting to even the dumbest of ideas. He became fixated on rigorous, fussily crafted provocations. He excelled at languages and went to Harvard, where, to his parents’ consternation, he turned to the impractical: Russian folklore and Harvard Lampoon, the famed campus magazine, which had launched a spinoff, National Lampoon.

“Jim was a good boy when we met,” said Ian Frazier, the now-longtime New Yorker writer, who became close to Downey while they were at Harvard Lampoon. “Apple-cheeked, blonde curly hair, sunny — like a happy boy in a commercial. We were simpatico at the Lampoon. I’m from Ohio, he’s Illinois, and so much of the student body felt sophisticated East Coast, I was basically a hick. But Jim knew a plethora of funny nouns, knew every dinosaur name and, like me, was good in Latin.”

Downey was so involved with Lampoon that he became president, then was later instrumental in luring a right-wing John Wayne to their lefty Vietnam-era campus (an event covered by newspapers worldwide). That was Downey’s first taste of showbiz. After graduation, Downey ended up living on the couch of Doug Kenney, Lampoon royalty, who was working on a screenplay called “Animal House.” Here’s how he got his job at “SNL”: “Kenney ran into Lorne at a party. He said there’s a guy living on his couch, he’d love for him to get him a job and find his own apartment.”

Downey and Bill Murray began on the same day.

Two Illinois natives forced into tight quarters. Initially, they were not close. As Downey sees it, Murray, who just replaced Chevy Chase, found Downey a bit too Ivy League, a guy who writes rivers of dialogue for five-minute bits, and Downey found Murray a touch lowbrow. As Murray sees it, “I wouldn’t say we didn’t like each other. We didn’t know what the other was about. I think Illinois was really the reason Lorne put us together.”

Downey acclimated quickly. He bonded with John Belushi over shared connections to Wheaton, Belushi’s hometown. He also became part of a loose, prolific team, writing with Al Franken, Tom Davis and Aykroyd. “Right away I thought he was smart and we could write political stuff together,” said Franken. “Jim came up with a great rule: Reward people for knowing stuff, don’t punish them for not knowing. Essentially, people who follow the news should think ‘Wow, this is on my level,’ but if they’re not into current events, there’s still laughs. There’s a real art to that.”

Downey and Franken wrote hundreds of sketches together across 15 seasons. They became a kind of “SNL” ideal, with Downey a sort of model writer for Michaels. He had his signatures — sketches less fixated on pop culture than language translation, Ancient Rome, Greek myths, pirates — but also, with writer Rosie Shuster, he could veer edgy and broad. Together, they shaped characters for Aykroyd like Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute; and Irwin Mainway, a shady toymaker of Johnny Human Torch costumes (rags and a lighter) and black body suits sold as Johnny Invisible Pedestrian. As Downey and Murray grew closer, they worked on Murray’s iconic lounge singer.

“It seemed remarkably like college,” Downey said. “You start around Labor Day, you finish around Memorial Day, you cram for a kind of weekly test, then stay up all night to work.”

Downey was still in his 20s, writing for a show that, in a three-network, pre-internet age, would sometimes attract nearly half the TVs in America on a Saturday night. “After Saturday, you’d get home at dawn, wake up at noon, go to brunch,” Downey said, “and ‘SNL’ was so big, I’d go to use the bathroom and as I passed tables, I’d hear this table, that table quoting lines I wrote from the night before — and usually getting the words wrong.”

According to “Lorne,” Susan Morrison’s recent biography of Michaels, when the original cast and crew decided to leave in 1980 and NBC was unsure whether to continue, Michaels told the network they could find a new cast, but they needed Franken, Davis and Downey. Instead, soon, Downey left and began shaping a new show for David Letterman.

Downey turned 30 at “Late Night” but already had an aura, said George Meyer, who later became synonymous with “The Simpsons.” “Nobody knew what ‘Late Night’ would be, but Jim was very different. Comedy writers will take a laugh any way they can, and Jim, he would not go with a joke he believed unworthy. He had to take the audience to a new place.” Downey and Letterman, both sports fans, both Midwestern, paired nicely. “I spent four hours a day with Dave pitching ideas while he sat back in his chair and listened and threw pencils into the ceiling,” Downey said. But whereas “SNL” was 22 shows a season, “Late Night” was 42 weeks a year, five episodes a week. “That show devoured ideas at a furious rate,” Downey said. He lasted only a year and a half.

He rejoined Michaels for a new NBC sketch series, “The New Show,” which only lasted nine episodes. By the mid-‘80s, they both returned to “SNL” and Downey became head writer and producer. He started hiring a murderers’ row of future greats, O’Brien, Smigel, Bob Odenkirk, Greg Daniels, who later adapted the British series “The Office” for NBC. Mandel said Downey had turned into the show’s “the main tastemaker,” a Mr. Fix-It who could also improve recurring favorites like “Hans & Frans” and “Sprockets.” He also still wrote his own pieces — Farley’s Chippendales dancer, Jon Lovitz as the devil in “People’s Court,” Gulf War press conferences — but was feeling more like an office manager.

When ratings sank in the mid-‘90s, he was fired along with most of the writers and cast.

Smigel thought he got scapegoated, having been stuck with less versatile casts. But O’Brien is blunt: “It would be a disservice to describe Jim as a manager of people. He’s a sketch writer. Those genes do not exist on a management chromosome. I don’t think Jim should be in charge of a parking lot, but then, I shouldn’t operate on people’s eyes.”

Downey recalls this as “a bad time.” He was going through a divorce, not seeing his young son enough, feeling guilty about devoting too much to TV. Kathy McConaghey, Downey’s sister who lives in Naperville, remembers: “Mom told me if she couldn’t get hold of Jim, she’d call (“SNL”) and ask whoever answered to hand him the phone.”

After Michaels quietly rehired Downey, he focused on writing “Weekend Update” with its new anchor, Norm Macdonald. “Norm didn’t think you should sell a joke,” Downey said. “He liked uncomfortable silences.” They spent hours debating word choices. They were peas in a pod. Their O.J. Simpson jokes, trimmed to the bone, were precise and caustic. An example: “Well, it’s official. Murder is legal in the state of California.”

The problem was, Simpson was friends with NBC president Don Ohlmeyer. You probably know the rest: Macdonald was fired. But less known is this: NBC offered to keep Macdonald if Downey was fired. Macdonald refused to accept those terms and they were both fired.

Then again, two years later, Michaels quietly rehired Downey.

This time, Downey, approaching his 50s, spent most of the week writing from home, coming into the office only at week’s end. He also focused on politics. Once more, a perfect fit. “Politics were never big on the show until then,” Downey said. “It was eat-your-vegetables time. The casts were not even that political.”

Downey, whose own politics veered from far left to conservative democrat by 2000, said the Bush-Gore election was simply rich material; he downplays the impact of those sketches. Franken, who left the show in 1995 and became a United States senator in 2009, said: “Our ethos with political comedy was not to make a statement or tell people what to think, and just be well-observed.” He also says that Downey’s portrait of a relatable Bush got him elected.

Downey, indeed, loathed “political comedy that kisses the audience’s ass so you get more claps than laughs when they agree.” Nevertheless, his sketches in the 2000s, from Bush to Obama, became so must-see, campaigns studied them to hone images and messages. A 2008 primary debate sketch in which moderators shot hard questions at Hillary Clinton while fawning over Barack Obama — “Senator Obama … are you comfortable?” — is often credited with shaming the media into toughening its approach.

“Jim, no matter what he says, left a tremendous impact on elections,” said Lawrence O’Donnell, the MSNBC anchor and a close friend since Harvard. “Just Bush-Gore alone — he identified character aspects that their campaigns had not been able to get across. As a journalist, I remember thinking that Jim was making everything else written a waste of time.”

Downey still remembers the exact phrasing of jokes he scripted 40 years ago. He can recount entire sketches, word for word, and he’s an uncannily good mimic of those he wrote for. Still, our conversations were winding, digressive, never became particularly nostalgic. The longer he stayed at “SNL,” he said uneasily, the more he felt like “someone’s sweet old coach.”

The staff shifted to writing on laptops. Downey kept writing longhand on legal pads then dictating scripts to production assistants. He felt a shift towards, as he refers to it, “teacher’s pet comedy,” making sure the politics of a joke flatter the audience. He related less and less, grew less productive. He retired in 2013.

Then continued writing for “SNL.”

Time to time, he texts Michaels an idea. Sometimes it makes it on, sometimes it doesn’t. He contributed to Mulaney and Bill Hader’s Stefan bits. A few weeks ago, he wrote a joke for Mike Myers’ Elon Musk, about a new self-vandalizing Tesla. Lately, he’s spending more time acting in small roles: He has a part opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Paul Thomas Anderson’s upcoming “One Battle After Another.” He shot a recurring role for “The Chair Company,” the upcoming HBO series from Tim Robinson. Adam Sandler, too, brought him in for a cameo in the upcoming “Happy Gilmore 2.”

At the 50th anniversary show in February, during his song about the show’s history, Sandler name-checked Downey: “50 years of Downey not writing the cold open until five minutes before dress …” Downey, of course, was there. He spent the weekend writing with Murray. During rehearsal, he fell off stage at Radio City Music Hall, hit his head and wore an eyepatch all weekend. He hadn’t planned to go at all. But Michaels knows how to pressure. He’s glad he went. He ran into old friends. But there were too many to keep up with, too much history to recount.

“At some point, I just came apart,” Murray said. “Those montages — Gilda dancing with Steve Martin. I loved Gilda so much. Belushi dancing on the graves of the cast, though he was the first to actually go. My emotions took over and OK, this is happening and there’s nothing I can do now. At some point, you simply feel, you know? I was unable to walk or talk to anyone for a while after.”

Downey, like Murray, began to get the sinking feeling this would likely be the last time these people, his quasi-family for decades, would be together in one place. Because of age, if nothing else. During the finale, Downey didn’t head to the stage with others for farewells. Then as he left, he thought of all the things he would have said. “You know that German word ‘Treppenwitz’? It’s the witty remark you think of after you’ve left the party. Some people, they have a word for everything.”

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