Before he created Saturday Night Live, Lorne Michaels used to send jokes to Woody Allen ... A sample: He was obsessed with the notion that, somewhere in the world, there is a person having exactly the same thought he was at exactly the same moment. He decided to call that person, but the line was busy. Just the right amount of existential angst for Allen, right? Allen told Michaels that this joke was “brilliant,” and according to Michaels, the compliment “kept him going for the next several years.” Excellent anecdotes in Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live.
The acid days of Lorne Michaels
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Which is weird, as (IIRC) Allen has never been a fan of SNL, even though a (now-former) friend ran the show right after Lorne left.
Yep, I’m no expert on SNL, but I don’t recall any involvement by Woody Allen, even in the early days. The writers and performers of the early days seemed to take a fairly antagonistic approach toward anything too mainstream or “establishment,” and maybe Woody Allen had achieved that status by the mid-70s?