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Fresh out of law school in the 1960s, Hart Pomerantz was repping young people on minor drug charges, but still aspiring to a career in comedy, when he got one of those phone calls, the kind with the potential to cleave a life into before and after.

It was from a man called Lorne Lipowitz, who was a bit younger, a casual acquaintance from the Toronto amateur stand-up scene, in which Pomerantz already had a reputation for clever jokes, such as his racy skit about God and Moses trying to sell the Ten Commandments like Madison Avenue ad execs.

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“I want to go into show business, do you want to be my partner?” Lipowitz told him.

That is quite a proposition to put to a young lawyer, to gamble away a steady income for the longshot chance of writing and telling jokes for money. And it was no less risky then because of how it turned out later for Lipowitz, whom Pomerantz helped to legally change his name to Lorne Michaels, under which he went on to become perhaps the most powerful figure in 20th-century comedy, as creator and producer of Saturday Night Live.