Weirdest ‘Bridgegate’ Revelation: SNL’s ‘Richard Feder Of Fort Lee’ Is A Real Person!

If you were watching SNL during its earliest years, you will recognize the name “Mr. Richard Feder of Fort Lee, New Jersey”, frequent letter-writer to Weekend Update correspondent Rosanne Rosannadana (played by the late Gilda Radner). If you thought he was a fictitious entity, think again:

A Mr. Richard Feder, famously from Fort Lee, N.J., has a question about the rather infamous closings of lanes to the George Washington Bridge.

“What were they thinking?” he asked on Friday. “What the hell were they thinking?”

More than 30 years ago, Mr. Feder, 64, was perhaps Fort Lee’s best-known resident, celebrated by a recurring character played by Gilda Radner on “Saturday Night Live.” The character, Roseanne Roseannadanna, would begin her segment on “Weekend Update” by saying, “A Mr. Richard Feder from Fort Lee, N.J., writes in and says …”

Mr. Feder did not write any letters. A co-creator of the segment, Alan Zweibel, was Mr. Feder’s brother-in-law, and Mr. Feder, the show’s faceless sad sack, bore little resemblance to Mr. Feder, the husband who served then as vice president of a textile printing plant.

This week, as Gov. Chris Christie confronted a growing scandal about his administration’s role in shutting down the lanes, Mr. Feder’s public role, long dormant, arrived at a trying moment. “I’m getting emails to my website,” Mr. Zweibel said. “What would Richard Feder say about this?”

It turns out that Mr. Feder, who is still in textiles, is in a distinct position to comment: He was stuck in that very traffic jam.

By: dave-dr-gonzo

David Hirsch, a.k.a. Dave "Doctor" Gonzo*, is a renegade record producer, video producer, writer, reformed corporate shill, and still-registered lobbyist for non-one-percenter performing artists and musicians. He lives in a heavily fortified compound in one of Manhattan's less trendy neighborhoods.

* Hirsch is the third person to use the pseudonym, a not-so-veiled tribute to journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, with the permission of his predecessors Gene Gaudette of American Politics Journal (currently webmaster and chief bottlewasher at Liberaland) and Stephen Meese at Smashmouth Politics.