Comedy fans love to complain about the current quality of Saturday Night Live, but Laraine Newman believes two of her former castmates would be fans. “Well, I think they’d be amazed,” she told People. “It’s hard to know whether they would have been excited about the evolution of comedy tone, but I think they would be. Both Gilda and John had a very progressive perspective on the world, as well as comedy.”

While much about the show has changed over the past 50 years, the way SNL is assembled from Monday to Saturday night has remained remarkably consistent. “In format, that hasn’t changed,” Newman explained. “The behind-the-scenes function of pitching to the host, assigning sketches, writing all night and preparing for the live show — that’s all the same.”

What’s different? “They have technology that we didn’t have,” she said, although it’s not clear exactly...