"Everybody liked making her laugh" - Bill Murray fondly remembers his SNL co-star Gilda Radner

Bill Murray recently shared a heartfelt story about Gilda Radner, his late co-star on Saturday Night Live (SNL), highlighting her contagious laughter and the happiness she offered to everyone in her vicinity. Murray discussed Radner's comic genius and her influence on him and the SNL cast in an interview on The Howard Stern Show. His stories vividly depicted Radner's lively personality and the close relationships she forged while appearing on the show. Bill Murray said:

"Everybody liked making her laugh."

Gilda Radner was one of the original SNL cast members and the first cast member to be hired when the show first premiered in 1975. She was known for playing one of the most iconic characters of SNL Baba Wawa who was a spoof of Barbara Walters and Roseanne Roseannadanna. Radner contributed to the early development of the show and helped make it what it is now. She stayed on Saturday Night Live till 1980, which coincided with Bill Murray's 1977-1980 run.

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Bill Murray on Gilda Radner

Bill Murray talked about how the group took it as a challenge to make Radner laugh. He said:

"Everybody liked making her laugh. She was a really good laugher. She would wet her pants, that's what Gilda would do. You could get her going, and she'd have to run out of the room. But there was sort of no limit to how much she could laugh until her bodily functions broke down."

Bill Murray went on to say:

"To know her for as long as I knew her was, really, sort of a training camp. It was like a real discipline, like, I've got a possibility here to make someone laugh a lot. And she'd see it and go like, 'Uh-oh, here it comes.' And you do, and it's fun."

Reflecting on SNL's recent 50th-anniversary celebration, he said that seeing the old footage of his friends made him emotional and seeing Radner moved him to tears.

"Just now. I could have cried just now. Just when they came up on screen, and they showed, you know, footage of the dance number that she did...with Steve Martin, and it was a beautiful thing."

He added:

"And I was there watching it, and they rehearsed for hours. And they rehearsed until it was, you know, really, really great. And Steve's meticulous, and it had to be really, really great. And it was. She worked like crazy, 'cause he was gonna make it perfect. It was beautiful."

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The last meet

An anecdote was shared by Murray in the book Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live when his SNL alum Laraine Newman threw a party and Radner unexpectedly showed up. At that point, Radner was already battling ovarian cancer and her health had clearly deteriorated at that point. Murray and the other cast members decided they weren't ready to say goodbye just yet as Radner was getting ready to leave the party. He recollected:

"So we started carrying her around, in a way that we could only do with her. We carried her up and down the stairs, around the house, repeatedly, for a long time, until I was exhausted. Then Danny did it for a while. Then I did it again. We just kept carrying her; we did it in teams."

As they all took turns to carry Radner around the house, cracking jokes and preventing her from leaving, this joke turned into lengthy. Bill Murray continued:

"And because these people were really funny, every person we’d drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her, with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there."

He ended:

"It was just one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life. I’ll always remember it. It was the last time I saw her."

Although Gilda passed away at the age of 42 in the year 1989, her legacy lives on in SNL. The Gilda's Club Cancer support group was established in her honor.

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