Call it WME’s Comedy Book Club.
At the Megatalent Agency’s weekly comedy division meeting on February 26, co-director and senior partner Mike Berkowitz told agents they would get new mandatory reading assignments, sources told Hollywood reporters.
After reading on Susan Morrison’s 656-page Tome Lorne: The Man Saturday Night Live in One, Berkowitz noted that WME would talk about the history of comedy and that, given the producers discovered creative talent, they would buy copies for everyone in the department as a necessary reading assignment.
The random housebook was billed as an authoritative biographer of a television producer and was released on February 18th. The title reached No. 4 on the New York Times bestseller list in the non-fiction category.
Berkowitz is said to be looking for a Lorne biography to begin regular new book allocations for the Beverly Hills-based agency’s comedy division, which encourages employees to read.
In particular, WME has a major roster of star clients in SNL, including Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Steve Martin, Martin Short, John Mulanie, Pete Davidson, Adam Sandler and Eddie Murphy. Many of these names took part in SNL50: Anniversary Special Taping on February 16, which hit 14.8 million viewers on NBC and Peacock, the network’s biggest number of entertainment programming since the 2020 Golden Globe.
When asked to comment, Morrison’s representative David Kuhn of Aevitas Creative Management added: The mechanics of comedy are as mysterious as Lorne Michaels himself, and the book unlocks those mysteries. ”
