Spinning Gaffes Into Gags - Live From New York, It's Debate Night - NYTimes.com He's no President Obama. He's no Mitt Romney. But this bird was big enough to serve as a stand-in on "Weekend Update." All last week, Lorne Michaels, the creator and longtime executive producer of "Saturday Night Live" was working the phone trying to nail down a visit to the show from either of this year's presidential candidates. By late Friday, it looked like it wouldn't happen, at least for this last week. But Mr. Michaels still needed star power. So he put in a call to Big Bird. Mitt Romney had mentioned the Sesame Street character while discussing his planned cuts to financing for PBS on Wednesday, so Mr. Michaels had his writers create a Big Bird segment for the show's "Weekend Update." But executives at the Children's Television Workshop were reluctant to have their beloved character in anything that could be construed as political commentary. After Mr. Michaels made a personal appeal to some friends at the company and let them look at the script, they signed on Friday night. Caroll Spinney, the only actor to play Big Bird since 1969, was told to get his eight-foot yellow-feathered costume ready. "There's always all this swirl," Mr. Michaels said, describing the build-up to the show, "and then you're fighting to get Big Bird on the phone." Political season is high-anxiety season for "SNL," which even in the age of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert is known for its definitive parodies of political debates. That includes Phil Hartman as Bill Clinton promoting his record in Arkansas ("Just this year we passed Mississippi to become 41st in the prevention of rickets"), Dana Carvey as both George H. W. Bush and Ross Perot, and a 2000 debate between a pedantic Al Gore and an addled George W. Bush, in which each offered one-word summaries of their campaigns, "lockbox" and "strategery." Mr. Michaels and NBC, usually protective about the process of putting together "SNL," allowed access to the show's writers, stars and rehearsals this week as they prepared their debate sketch. Pointing to the more than 70 million people who watched the actual debate, Mr. Michaels said, "How else can you get anything that can play as comedy where everyone has seen it?" But the debate itself turned out to be a challenge. There were no big gaffes or obvious springboards for comedy. Instead, the first debate of this election offered up a blizzard of policy details and a lackluster performance from President Obama. At home Wednesday night, Seth Meyers, one of the show's head writers, watched with increasing concern. "It's boring enough when they're talking about all this and how it will affect Americans, but when you're sitting there trying to pull comedy out of it, it's really bad," Mr. Meyers said. "There were people on Twitter saying: "You must be really happy, there's so much in this debate. This is writing itself. I was like: what debate are you watching? The job of turning the debate into comedy gold fell to Jim Downey, the longtime "SNL" writer who has created the show's debate parodies since the 1970s. This one, he said, was the hardest he had ever dealt with. "I can never remember one that didn't have something," said Mr. Downey, who watched the debate by himself at home. Some kind of thing that was odd or weird. Wednesday night and throughout Thursday, Mr. Michaels exchanged e-mails with Mr. Downey, getting the gist of his idea that Mr. Obama would be distracted by the fact that he had forgotten to buy his wife an anniversary present. Mr. Downey's genius, Mr. Michaels said, was summed up in his 2000 sketch that featured the word "strategery." "Bush didn't say it, but people think he did," he said. Mr. Michaels also watched the post-debate coverage on MSNBC where the hosts Chris Matthews and Ed Schultz reacted strongly to the president's weak performance. "Rachel Maddow looked like she had just seen a terrible car accident," he said. Sensing another opportunity, he discussed it with the show's writers, who, like Mr. Michaels, occupy a warren of offices on the 8th floor of 30 Rockefeller Center. Mr. Downey, working mostly alone at home on his initial drafts, which he dictates by phone to his assistant, continued to ponder how to create the main debate sketch. By Friday afternoon, when the first run-through was scheduled, the script still was not complete.