Weirdly barren of laughs. Across 600 extremely interesting pages, I LOLed exactly once ... Fascinating ... But somehow no one is quite as fascinating as Michaels himself.
An encyclopedic doorstop ... A compendium richer than even Mr. Michaels’s most fervent admirers could ask for. That can be a problem for readers insufficiently smitten by the Michaels mystique or the SNL brand of topical humor.
Morrison...has built Michaels the kind of biographical monument usually consecrated to founding fathers, canonical authors and world-historical scientific geniuses. A fair question might be whether the progenitor and supervisor of a long-running sketch-comedy show...merits such treatment ... That the answer turns out to be yes is largely a tribute to Morrison’s journalistic chops. Briskly written and solidly sourced, Lorne is in essence a nearly 650-page magazine profile — something I mean almost entirely as praise.
Reads more like a very good, book-length Vanity Fair profile. In it, Morrison tells us what makes Michaels tick, and that is no small feat ... The resulting book wields an authority most prior SNL books have lacked ... Morrison is a skilled writer. I think she writes a little too much on Michaels’ formative years ... A definitive profile of the SNL creator, deeply researched and adeptly written. All that’s missing is a cinematic flourish of narrative conflict.
Morrison uses meticulous research and pleasurably crisp writing to tell the life story of a man who has shaped pop culture for a half-century ... A fascinating blow-by-blow.