How a Canadian Conquered Global Comedy: Lorne Michaels’ Accidental Empire of American Anxiety
**The Last Man Who Could Make the World Laugh Together: Lorne Michaels’ Accidental Empire of American Anxiety**
While the planet burns through its twenty-first century cocktail of crises, one Canadian octogenarian continues to export the same product he’s been shipping worldwide since 1975: the peculiar American art of laughing at itself. Lorne Michaels, the Toronto-born impresario who transformed a bankrupt sketch show into global cultural imperialism, has accomplished what NATO never could—he’s colonized international comedy with a cast of American neurotics performing live from Studio 8H.
The genius of Michaels’ Saturday Night Live isn’t that it’s consistently funny—God knows it isn’t—but that it’s consistently there, like death, taxes, or another Fast & Furious sequel. While other nations developed their own satirical traditions, Michaels figured out that the real money was in selling America’s fever dreams back to itself, then exporting the reruns everywhere else. The result? A planet where teenagers in Jakarta quote Stefon and your cousin in Copenhagen knows what “Live from New York” means, even if she’s never seen a New York minute.
What makes this particularly rich is that Michaels accomplished this cultural coup while maintaining the personal charisma of a particularly successful accountant. In an industry built on oversized egos and undersized impulse control, he’s the anti-Trump: a man who weaponized competence rather than chaos, who understood that the real power lay not in being the funniest person in the room but in deciding who got to be funny on his stage. It’s democracy’s cruelest joke: while we argue about American hegemony, we’ve all accepted its comedy ambassador—a man who turned American political anxiety into the world’s comfort food.
The international implications are deliciously absurd. Russian state television copies SNL’s format while condemning Western decadence. Chinese censors painstakingly edit sketches that their citizens pirate anyway. European intellectuals who claim to despise American culture can quote every Wayne’s World catchphrase. Michaels didn’t just create a show; he created the template for how the world processes American absurdity in real-time, a weekly therapy session where the globe collectively works through its complicated relationship with the United States.
His real masterpiece isn’t any individual sketch—it’s the machinery itself, the production line that transforms unknown comedians into international brands faster than you can say “contract renegotiation.” From Murphy to Ferrell to Wiig to Yang, Michaels has been running the Harvard of Humor for nearly half a century, except the tuition is your twenties and the diploma is worldwide recognition. The man has launched more careers than the Italian Renaissance, all while perfecting the dead-eyed stare of someone who’s heard every possible pitch for a Trump impression.
Now, as streaming services fracture audiences into algorithmic niches and TikTok reduces comedy to fifteen-second attention spans, Michaels’ empire faces its most existential threat: relevance in an age where “live” means anything uploaded within the last week. Yet somehow, like a cockroach in a nuclear winter, SNL persists—appointment viewing for a generation that has appointments with everything but television.
Perhaps that’s the final joke on us all. While we debate globalization’s winners and losers, while nations rise and fall, while technology revolutionizes how we communicate, one Canadian’s sketch show remains our shared cultural touchstone—a weekly reminder that no matter where we live, we’re all equally capable of finding the same things stupid. In a fragmenting world, Michaels has given us the gift of collective eye-rolling.
The empire might be accidental, but the anxiety is authentic. And in an age of artificial everything, that might just be the most honest thing on television.
