Cue Card Nostalgia
Speaking with Wally Feresten about cue cards, plus why we never quite give up on things that remind us of the past.
Good morning and welcome to the Quarantine Creatives newsletter, a weekly companion to my podcast of the same name, which explores creativity, art, and big ideas as we continue to live through this pandemic.
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In today’s issue, I look consider why we love old technology, with insights from my recent interview with Saturday Night Live cue card lead Wally Feresten.
Hello?
I recently finished reading Chuck Klosterman’s amazing new book The Nineties. It’s my first time reading Klosterman, although now I am hooked. The book was like taking a country drive on a familiar winding road. It felt comforting, but some of the sights looked different than I remembered and took on new meaning this time around.
Klosterman’s book explores cultural moments of the 1990s, why those events mattered at the time, and how our contemporary perspective redefines their meaning. There are expected highlights: a deep dive into Nirvana and grunge music, a look at Ross Perot’s role in the 1992 presidential election, the scandals of the Clinton White House, and examinations of the optimism and anonymity of the early internet days. There are even some unexpected surprises, like a retrospective of Michael Jordan’s baseball career.
I particularly liked a section that discusses our relationship to the phone and how that has changed so quickly in the last 30 years. The 1990s were a time when area codes still mattered (and they made appearances in rap music as cultural identifiers). Phones were starting to become cordless, but they were not fully wireless. As Klosterman writes about this recent past:
“Modern people worry about smartphone addiction, despite the fact that landlines exercised much more control over the owner. If you needed to take an important call, you just had to sit in the living room and wait for it. There was no other option. If you didn't know where someone was, you had to wait until that person wanted to be found. You had to trust people, and they had to trust you. If you made plans over the phone and left the house, those plans could not be changed- everyone had to be where they said they'd be, and everyone had to arrive when they said they'd arrive. Life was more scripted and less fluid, dictated by a machine that would not (and could not) compromise its location. Yet within these fascistic limitations, the machine itself somehow mattered less. It was an appliance, not that different from the dishwasher.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about the phone lately, and not just because I read about it in Klosterman’s book. Not long ago, I posted a video on my Instagram showing an antique phone that I have hanging in my house (click here to hear it- it will take you back!).
This phone was installed in my grandparents’ house in the early 1960s and stayed connected there until the mid 2010s when they died. I brought this phone to my house, hardwired it to the wall (it’s so old that it doesn’t have a modular jack), and connected it to a VOIP phone service.
I still pay about $5 a month for a home phone connection, despite the fact that we almost never give out that number anymore and never answer this phone.
However, I have no plans to disconnect it because I absolutely adore how the phone sounds when it rings, which happens a few times a day. It fills the house with a pleasant but urgent bell. When I hear that ringing, I can imagine my grandmother getting up from her seat behind the dining room table, walking over to where the phone was located, and answering in her simple Midwestern: “Hello?”
After posting the video, I learned that there are other people that are equally as fascinated with old phones. One commenter (@pjfiveland) pointed out that there are even devices that turn an old landline phone into essentially a bluetooth speaker for your smartphone. Callers dial your cell phone number, but the home phone rings and you can use it just like a standard old phone.
Why am I so lovestruck by a device that only has one function (there’s no calendar, camera, or social media) and takes forever to dial on the rotary? Perhaps it’s the same reason that technologies like vinyl records and cassette tapes are seeing a resurgence.
There’s something nice about older technology that gives us space to think and process the world. When everything is digital, sometimes it’s nice to have a little analog in your life. This idea was very much on my mind during last week’s episode of the podcast.
Handwritten Notes
Wally Feresten leads the cue card department at Saturday Night Live, Late Night with Seth Meyers, and The Amber Ruffin Show, while also overseeing cue cards on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Yes, he’s a busy man.
Cue cards have always fascinated me. Not unlike my grandparents’ rotary phone, it’s a bit of a wonder that they have survived this long and they feel like a throwback to an earlier era. Cue cards were a part of show business from the beginning, but most modern productions have long since abandoned them for teleprompters.
Producers like teleprompters because they’re fully digital and allow for quick script changes. If the host is struggling with a line or two in a rehearsal, sometimes just changing the spacing with a keystroke can make a difference. They also allow for a direct eye-line to the camera, as most teleprompters are mounted right in front of the lens.
When Saturday Night Live premiered in 1975, cue cards were chosen to help prompt the actors. For sketch comedy, they are more practical than a lens mounted teleprompter, as the performers should be looking at each other, not directly at the camera.
More than 40 years later, cue cards have endured as a part of Saturday Night Live, even though they require a lot of manual labor, raw materials, and time to create. According to Wally:
“Lorne [Michaels, the series creator] considers cue cards part of the show.”
Wally was an aspiring comedy writer when his brother, Spike Feresten, mentioned an opening in the cue card department at SNL back in the early 90s. Wally took the job, figuring it would be a chance to do some networking and meet the right people.
He ended up meeting those people, landing writing gigs for shows like Nickelodeon’s Weinerville, Space Ghost Coast to Coast, and MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch, while also still working weekends at SNL. While his passion was writing, he realized that cue card work could be more lucrative, so he opted to focus on that.
Wally has some amazing show business stories. He has only missed two episodes of Saturday Night Live since he started there, which means that he was an active participant in just about every iconic sketch from the last 30 years. More Cowbell? He was there. Matt Foley in a van down by the river? Yep. Tina Fey as Sarah Palin? Indeed.
I could’ve done a two-hour podcast with just behind the scenes stories, but I decided to focus most of my questions toward the craft of creating cue cards. After all, I have my own collection of cue cards from appearances on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon that I had produced with the cast of Ask This Old House.
These cards used to hang on my office wall and I would look at them anytime I was feeling writer’s block or needed a burst of creativity. In the same way that there’s a warmth to the ring of my rotary phone that I can’t quite describe, there’s a certain poetry in how cue cards are written that bring me comfort.
Wally described why cue cards are such a unique keepsake:
“You can’t buy them. I can’t sell them from the show. We can give them away to the writers or the actors. When a host comes and it’s their first time, I’ll put a package together like their monologue and like 2 or 3 cards from each sketch and I’ll send it to them. It’s a cool keepsake for them to have, whether they give them to friends, or they put them somewhere, or they take a couple and throw the other ones away, it’s just a cool thing to remember their hosting time and what that whole process was.”
It turns out, I’m not the only collector of cue cards:
“Bobby Moynihan, when he started on SNL, when I came up to introduce myself his first day, he was like ‘I know who you are, Wally. I’ve had one of your cue cards on my apartment wall for three years, and every sketch I get for the next couple of years, I’m taking from you.’ I think he’s got a storage unit filled with cue cards of his sketches, because he got a lot of sketches on and a lot of cool things on.”
Cue cards are fascinating to me because they capture a particular moment in time and are invaluable to those who collect them (a set of Johnny Carson monologue cards sold at auction for $512 several years ago), but Wally and his team go through thousands a week, many of which are destined to be reused by the art department when painting sets.
“They’re great comedy one week and then they’re just used to catch paint the next week.”
Why do people like me, Bobby Moynihan, and whoever paid for that assortment of Carson-era Tonight Show cards have such a deep, emotional attachment to a piece of white cardboard with a few words written in thick marker?
Looking at the cards on my wall, there’s an excitement that leaps off of them. Perhaps it’s the curvature of the font, almost a handwritten Comic Sans MS, that gives the cards this life.
Cue cards energize a sketch in a way that a printed script or teleprompter never could. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t value having a copy of an SNL script in my collection, but there is something more immediate and visceral about those cards that hang on my wall than having a script filed away in a drawer.
For the last decade, my Fallon cue cards have adorned my wall, with new additions to my collection made after each subsequent appearance. I spent a lot of time reading them and thinking about them over the years, so I was really curious to ask more about how they were made. Here’s a few of Wally’s insights into that process:
“It’s all capitalized, every letter is capitalized, it’s block capitalized letters.”
“The tips of the pens we use are flat, so that’s what makes it bubbly and thick.”
“It’s not really writing, we print the cue cards because you’re more drawing than you are writing. The pens are bigger than a regular pen. When you write with a pen, you move your fingers, but when you’re using the markers we use, you're kind of moving your whole hand, so you’re drawing the letters.”
Wally also discussed how colors are used on cue cards:
“The host is always in black. They’re the only one in black, unless they’re not in the sketch. Kenan [Thompson] was always in red, but Kate [McKinnon] is always in red. So Kate, we always put in red if she’s in a sketch with Kenan. Kenan can do green, he can do blue, he knows his lines so well it doesn’t throw him off. Cecily [Strong] is in blue, they all have their own colors, but if they only have a couple of lines in a sketch, then we’ll defer the blue to somebody else that has a bigger part.”
If you’re interested in learning more about the actual making of the cue cards, SNL produced a great behind the scenes video a few years ago that looks at the process:
While Wally has enjoyed brief cameos on SNL, Last Call with Carson Daly, and 30 Rock over the years, he’s started to become a more regular presence on air during appearances on Late Night with Seth Meyers. Wally described how that happened:
“Sal Gentile, who writes A Closer Look with Seth, they put me in one night and it went over really well, and then the next thing I know, I’m in it twice a week, sometimes three times a week, and then Amber Ruffin started her show and I’m on that show, they’re putting me in things. It’s just turned into this crazy, crazy thing.”
Luckily for Wally and his team, Seth Meyers paid them throughout the pandemic, even when shows weren’t being produced with a full crew. But Wally was looking for a new project that could keep him busy and bring some light to people isolated by COVID.
He launched Cue Cards by Wally in the spring of 2020, a business where he will write out a personalized cue card and send it to you for events like birthdays, weddings, baby showers, and more. It’s a great keepsake for comedy fans, and people seem to love it!
In a world where technology moves fast, cardboard cue cards may seem as quaint as a printed copy of the evening newspaper delivered to your door. Yet, they also bring an immediacy and intimacy to the performances in a way that only a human can deliver.
As Lorne Michaels alum continue to be hired to host late night shows, it seems a safe bet that they will prefer cue cards just like Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, and Amber Ruffin. Perhaps a piece of that is related to the cards themselves, but I think an even bigger piece is the hard work that Wally and his team put in to making the cards feel human.
You can listen to my full interview with Wally Feresten on your favorite podcast platform.
What Do You Think?
Would you hang a cue card on your wall? Would you pay Wally to write one out for your loved one? What about those old rotary phones- are you a fan? Leave a comment and let’s start a conversation!
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Stay Safe!
Heath