Guest, who’s married to actress Jamie Lee Curtis, has written comedy for Lily Tomlin (for which he shared a 1976 Emmy) and music for the National Lampoon albums in the ’70s and “This Is Spinal Tap.” From these varied endeavors one would logically assume Guest to be a wacky, goofy, fun-loving fellow prone to loud guffaws and even louder ties. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The man who shakes my hand firmly in the sparsely furnished offices of Castle Rock Entertainment is silver-haired and quietly intelligent. He moves with a dignity that suits his title as Fifth Baron Haden-Guest of Saling (a role Guest inherited after the recent death of his father). He is wearing a gray cable-knit sweater and khakis, and his soft lilting voice is nearly inaudible. He does not guffaw. He does not instruct me in the ways of Olympic synchronized swimming or regale me with the benefits of an amp that goes to 11.

Instead he smiles gently and speaks of both the disparities and the intangible connections between “All in the Family” and “The Beverly Hillbillies,” the structural necessities of improv and the abstract essence of comedy.

What drew you into wanting to do comedy as a kid? Comedy is such a wonderfully abstract thing, I imagine it’s hard to even pinpoint your motivations.

I’m glad you figured it out. I’ve only done 400 interviews and no one has said that. I do think it’s very hard to talk about. First of all, there’s a million different kinds of comedy. And there’s a lot of different sensibilities within comedy. You have comedians who don’t think other comedians are funny. You just have to find your own place in what you do and what makes you laugh.

As a kid of 5 or 6 years old, I knew that there was something about what I did that was funny. I mean, you’d have to get into a serious sort of analysis to say how or why, and then it does become very abstract — as does trying to interpret what makes people laugh.

Rob Reiner has this incredible story that really sums up this whole world. Someone came up to him while he was doing “All in the Family” and they said, “Mr. Reiner, I just wanted you to know how much the show means to me. You tackle issues that nobody else does; the whole family sits around and watches it and discusses it after — your performance is wonderful.”

And Rob says, “Oh, thank you.”

And the person says, “Yeah, that and ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ are really, for us, just …”

So you have a person who likes both of those shows, which is fine. You can’t be a sort of comic dictator. People like what they like. But when Rob told me that story I laughed and I thought, Why am I laughing? I’m laughing because I would think one show is more sophisticated, but you can’t dictate what people are going to like.

People have said versions of that to me, surprised me by saying, “I like your stuff and X’s,” and I think, I don’t understand. How? I think as a young comedian especially, you tend to think, Well if you like what I do, then you certainly can’t like that. But then you have to get past that. I hope. You really can only worry about yourself. These are the kind of movies I make. If people like them, great. If they don’t, then what am I supposed to do?

It’s definitely difficult to verbalize. Humor is intangible. With the people who make me laugh, like Peter Sellers, it’s something about his body language, the way he speaks, the way he looks.

Peter Sellers was my idol when I was a kid. He was the first person I looked at and thought, If I can do something like this, I’ll be happy. If I can distill what he specifically did for me, it was: This is not sketch comedy. This is a deep, deep, profoundly deep character he creates. A seamless world, which was very different than other things I was seeing, which were very superficial, not thought out and ultimately uninteresting characters. If I can describe what he does for me, that’s the best I can do. Because as you said, beyond that, why is that funny? I don’t quite know.

I think it’s also a shared sensibility. Perhaps, because of the visceral response people have to comedy, it ultimately creates an intimacy. You feel close with certain comedians if they tap into that place, if they share a certain outlook with you.

You’re probably right. I’ve been asked about this for a long time and I find it hard to talk about because I end up going around in circles. Someone recently asked me, “Why is ‘Best in Show’ funny?” I said, “That’s a strange question. First of all, is it funny? Is it funny to you? Is it funny to me?” Because that’s a very different thing. And without getting into this thesis of comedy again, basically the question should be, “Is this movie funny to you?” But then there’s still no real answer, so we end up chasing our tails.

It seems like that intimacy I was talking about is there between you and the other actors you work with in your films. You use an ensemble cast that has many of the same players. What draws you to them? What makes you decide “I want to work with this person”?

As you said earlier, these are people who, when you meet them, you immediately know are on your wavelength or whatever you want to call it. Not to say that it’s all based on intuition. But if you are in the world of comedy, you can tell immediately if they are sharing a sensibility. And then they’re basically in the club. For what I do, it’s a small club. I’m not saying it can’t expand. It’s just that there’s not 20,000 people walking around who share that sensibility. It’s very specific. You meet them and you immediately recognize something in them. You know instantaneously. Eugene Levy makes me laugh. Why? Here we are again: I don’t know.

You’ve done two mockumentaries. It seems like that is a framework that works for the type of improvisation your actors do.

I think it’s very important to say that we start with more than a loose idea. It’s many, many months of preparation. It’s building a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, describing the characters, describing the characters’ history. It’s setting up a format that grids down every scene, as far as function, as far as plot and how each scene is moving the story along. And then you hang improvisation on this skeletal structure.

Without that framework, it’s nothing. You can’t just show up and start talking. I equate it with playing jazz. You have to know what key you’re playing in, you have to know the music, you have to know where you’re going to end up. After that it’s up to finding players with good chops. And these actors have the chops.

Even without an official announcement, Wiig’s twirly, teary departure is enough to make even the most casual fans of the show crank up the Adele and mainline a tub of Edy’s Grand. It doesn’t matter that fellow castmates Andy Samberg and Jason Sudeikis have reportedly moved on from the show as well. They leave behind established male cast members like Seth Meyers, Fred Armisen and Bill Hader. Wiig, on the other hand, blows a gaping hole in the show’s female lineup. The 24-year-old Abby Elliott, who moves up the rung to the show’s senior lady cast member, is now its biggest female star. But she’s yet to display that versatility or command the clout that Wiig has. Kate McKinnon may yet bust out into full-blown “SNL” stardom, but she’s only been on the show for five minutes.

And so, after years of cultivating a stunning roster of formidable female talent — Tina Fey, Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler and Wiig — the show is, for the moment anyway, back to a state of relative desolation it hasn’t seen since the ’90s, an era that reached its nadir when Janeane Garofalo bailed midseason. It’s a strange, disconnected moment for “SNL,” right as women are making grand enough strides in television and film comedy that we’ve magically attained “labia saturation.” And though Wiig will no doubt continue to dominate in movies as a writer and performer, it’s sad that she leaves behind no true heirs on a show that, especially in an election year, remains so influential.

Visibly emotional and flanked by current cast members as well as the likes of Chris Kattan, Rachel Dratch, Steve Martin and Chris Parnell, and an especially rollicking Amy Poehler, new alumna Wiig didn’t depart “SNL” alone. She took with her Gilly,  the tiny-handed Judice,  Target Lady, Suze Orman and even Tan Mom. Why were so many people red-eyed on Saturday? Because on the stage that night stood a woman with incredibly big shoes to fill – and one very small hat.

At the time, “SNL” creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels pronounced them “the wave of the future” and Fey likened herself to a senior seeing “exciting freshmen” arrive. But as this latest season of the sketch institution comes to a close this Saturday night (with host Mick Jagger, and musical guests Arcade Fire and the Foo Fighters), there’s a growing sense that another “SNL” class is nearing graduation.

Wiig, Samberg and Sudeikis have been reported to be leaving, though Michaels has said any decision will wait until the summer. With a presidential election looming, an immediate exodus of all three is unlikely. Sudeikis plays both Republican candidate Mitt Romney and Vice President Joe Biden, and “SNL” has previously taken an all-hands-on-deck approach to election season shows.

Of course, the 2008 election season was a historic one for “SNL,” one that saw record ratings for the show as Fey returned — to much fanfare — to play Sarah Palin. This time around, no one is expecting Romney to choose a running mate that looks exactly like Andy Samberg.

A transition period, whether sooner or later, seems on the horizon. Perhaps more than any previous cast, this one has already expanded considerably from the show.

Wiig, of course, starred in and co-wrote the hit “Bridesmaids,” but even before that had notable roles in “Friends With Kids,” ”Paul,” ”Adventureland” and “Knocked Up,” among others. She has six films in some form of development, along with plenty of interest in a “Bridesmaids” sequel from her and her writing partner, Annie Mumolo.

Hader, who played Wiig’s husband in “Adventureland,” co-starred in “Superbad” and has numerous projects lined up, including a bit as Andy Warhol in the upcoming “Men in Black III.” Samberg, who made the film “Hot Rod” with his Lonely Island cohorts, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Shaffer, costars with Adam Sandler in the soon to be released “That’s My Boy.” Sudeikis’ films have included “Horrible Bosses,” ”A Good Old Fashioned Orgy,” ”Going The Distance” and “Hall Pass.” He’ll also be in Jay Roach’s comedy “The Campaign.”

The typical path used to be to exit “SNL” with a film based on a popular character — as Will Forte did recently with the box-office disappointment “MacGruber.” But this cast has been as visible outside of “SNL” as it’s been on it. Armisen even managed to launch another sketch show at the same time: IFC’s “Portlandia.”

With a cast of half-a-dozen stars, there hasn’t always been a lot of airtime for younger cast members. Most avid viewers would like to see more of featured player Jay Pharoah, whose knack for impressions of Denzel Washington and Will Smith is so good that he deserves a chance to show more range. The same goes for the more consistently used Bobby Moynihan (who’s made his strongest impact on “Weekend Update” appearances, including as “Drunk Uncle” and as “Jersey Shore’s” Snooki) and Nasim Pedrad, most famous for her sharp Kim Kardashian impression.

But this season has made clear that if anyone is being groomed for a larger role, it’s Taran Killam. As a featured player, he’s become a regularly highlighted performer, including impressions of Brad Pitt, Michael Cera and Bravo’s Andy Cohen. More than the other of the younger cast members, he’s frequently gotten sketches into the show, like the Parisian parody “Les Jeunes de Paris” and “J-Pop America Fun Time,” a similar, Japanese spoof of American perspectives on foreigners.

Still, it’s been an uneven season for such a strong cast. The show has sometimes been overly reliant on predictable cable news frames for political sketches and leaned too heavily on recurring character sketches with so little variety as to seem like reruns.

But when “SNL” is firing on all cylinders, it can be as good as it’s ever been. This year, those moments have typically come when an alum has hosted: Maya Rudolph in February and Jimmy Fallon for the Christmas show.

Such occasions usually bring back other former cast members, as well. If anything, the “SNL” universe has grown larger, spread out across TV shows and myriad movies — making a kind of constant revolving door for “SNL” cast members, past and present.

In that way, “Saturday Night Live” has more in common with the mafia than any other TV show: No one ever really leaves.

As the horror unfolded in real time, the Twitterverse gaped in astonishment. Juliette Lewis dryly noted, “Wow watching this ‘singer’ on SNL is like watching a 12 yearold [sic] in their bedroom when theyre pretending to sing and perform #signofourtimes.” And though Lewis graciously later deleted the tweet, praising her “great haunting melodies!” others were not as generous. As Eliza Dushku asked, “Who…..is…..this wack-a-doodle chick performing on #SNL..? Whaaaa?”

In the aftermath, the horror did not subside; it seemed to take on a morning-after life of its own. Mediaite opined that “The level of excruciating badness was so palpable, it felt like a wake” and none other than slow-jam master Brian Williams sent a note to Gawker about “one of the worst outings in SNL history… booked on the strength of her TWO SONG web EP, the least-experienced musical guest in the show’s history,” in the hope of receiving a trademark Gawker “withering, detailed critique.”

How did no one see this coming? Del Rey told MTV last week that she was “a little nervous” about the gig. “You just hope it goes well and you don’t f*** it up,” she said, but promising  “I’m sure it will be good.” And when she did a similarly catatonic performance on Jools Holland’s show in the U.K. last fall, the performance passed without notice. Anyway, with her distinctively David Lynch movie sound and the kind of looks that have landed her a modeling contract, you’d think she’d be money in the bank.

But putting a virtually untried performer on such an iconic platform was a move fraught with potential pitfalls. And for all her moody, Guess? jeans posturing, there seems an air about Del Rey of a woman who has not yet found her true voice. She is, after all, a self-proclaimed “gangsta Nancy Sinatra” — which is perhaps her way of warning us that she’s intentionally going for that naughty blond deer in the headlights effect. And just like Nancy — and Rebecca Black, for that matter — she owes a big career debt to her bigshot dad. Del Rey’s father, millionaire investor Rob Grant, helped with the marketing of her first album two years ago. Back then, she was still Lizzy Grant, the rich kid who grew up in upstate New York and went to boarding school in Connecticut. Months later, she had morphed into Lana, a mystery lady who “at one time lived in a New Jersey trailer park” and whose name sounds like a Mexican brand of cigarettes. The image, she explained, “came from a series of managers and lawyers over the last five years who wanted a name that they thought better fit the sound of the music.”

The former Elizabeth Grant will likely solider on. Both Ashlee Simpson and Ke$ha managed to bounce back from their disastrous “SNL” performances and, God help all our ears, live to sing another day. Del Rey has just been booked for a coveted spot at the South by Southwest festival, and “Video Games” is a respectable No. 44 on the iTunes singles chart. It’s far from the kind of post-national television debut bounce any artist would hope for, but it’s a better deal than most working singer-songwriters ever get. And if you saw the rest of the “SNL” episode, you know that Del Rey was far from the only cringe-worthy element of the show.

The week’s host, the ever-gracious Daniel Radcliffe, said this week that “It was unfortunate that people seemed to turn on her so quickly. I also think people are making it about things other than the performance.” But really it’s just the opposite. In an elegantly orchestral music video or on a well-produced track, Del Rey is all smolder and pouts. She can sing of being a “bad girl” and sell it. On live national television, she’s a still inexperienced girl, awkward and stiff and, frankly, boring. Her album will be released Jan. 30. Only then will we learn whether anybody’s really buying the woman who seemed to be the next big thing.

But even that was funnier than the cold open the week before, following Rick Santorum’s near-victory in the Iowa caucus. Santorum lost to the monotoned Mormon by just eight votes, and his statements on the trail since his rise in the polls must have seemed like belated Christmas presents to comedy writers. Surely Andy Samberg, the goofiest cast member, would let his freak flag fly, right? Instead, Samberg spent five minutes setting up a joke about Santorum’s 100-day, 99-county Iowa campaign, pledging to visit every county in America to beg for votes, even braving the “heavily armed population” of Monroe County, Tenn., that inspired “Deliverance” and the “thousands of angry pillow biters and doughnut bumpers” of San Francisco county. Why? Get ready for the punch line: “This is about the country that has given so much to me and to which I want to give something in return,” says Samberg-Santorum, “so that maybe one day, long after I’m gone, my grandchildren can look me up on Google and find something, you know, different from what’s there now.”

Samberg’s Santorum would’ve gotten more meaningful laughs if he’d just turned up wearing a foamy mocha-latte mustache, promoting the chocolate-frothy caffeinator as his official campaign beverage. Even Jay Leno had sharper barbs (“He lost by only eight votes … You know what’s ironic? He could have won if he’d just gotten the gay vote”).

It’s been that kind of year on “Saturday Night Live.” The Republican presidential field is an embarrassment of crazy-train riches. But the writers have been lazily broad-stroking caricatures of the candidates, and the result has been surprisingly edgeless and increasingly lame sketches. There’s no bite to Sudeikis’ Romney, played as a mere socially inept square. Kenan Thompson’s Herman Cain was a clueless, oversexed black man with dumb luck and box loads of pizza metaphors. “Fences. Jesus. Papilloma. Eyeballs,” is the essence to Kristin Wiig’s Michele Bachmann — exact words borrowed from Wiig-Bachmann’s actual post-Iowa closing statement on the Jan. 7 “Weekend Update” (even the pith of “Weekend Update” anchor and “SNL” head writer Seth Meyers has dulled this year).

The “SNL” writers wrote off Newt and Ron Paul as viable candidates early in the game — surge be damned — so Bobby Moynihan has been left to grin idly in his Phil Donahue wig, when he could have, at the very least, seized an opportunity to spoof Gingrich’s amazing concession speech in Iowa, a study in aggressive passive-aggression, directed at Romney. Why wasn’t more made of Romney’s relationship to Jon Huntsman, a distant relative from a rival Mormon clan — where’s the “Big Love” sketch? At the very least, a “Romeo and Juliet” number with one of Huntsman’s daughters and one of the Romney boys. I’d even take a “Brady Bunch” skit. With each GOP contender flitting away — after Huntsman’s exit on Monday, we might never see two Republican Mormons running for president — so too goes another missed opportunity, the unrealized jokes piling up like stacks of yesterday’s newspapers.

Though “SNL” is not strictly a political-satire show like “The Daily Show” or “The Colbert Report” — two shows that have had no problem doing both smart and funny work in recent months — it does have a reputation for edgy political commentary, for shaping the national conversation. And while the “SNL” cast and creators often dismiss criticism of the show by suggesting that everyone believes the show’s heyday is when they were in high school, you don’t have to go back far to find a golden age of political comedy. During the 2008 election, the sketch-comedy show was even lauded for being a game-changer: Tina Fey’s entitled, ignorant Sarah Palin (“I can see Russia from my house”) was spot-on, and Amy Poehler perfectly evoked the rage and righteous indignation of her Hillary Clinton, and made viewers appreciate her plight for the White House, her resentment of Obama, her outright hatred for Palin. Neither required too much embellishment — that was the beauty of the sketches, and the performances — and as a result, our hunches about the various candidates were confirmed, through these laugh-out-loud depictions, during an election when so many Americans were sitting on the fence. And so these enter the pantheon of iconic “SNL” political impressions: Chevy Chase’s buffoonish and clumsy Gerald Ford, Dana Carvey’s catchphrase-obsessed George H.W. Bush, Phil Hartman’s white-trashy fast-food-bingeing womanizer Bill Clinton (and later, Darrell Hammond as a cool-headed smooth-talker through Whitewater and Monica), and Will Ferrell’s willfully ignorant playboy Dubya.

“SNL” has had an undeniable impact on the culture, on the way candidates are perceived, and as recently as the last election, it has proven how persuasive it can be — or, at least how it can nudge us in a direction we were considering. And edgy is best left to the professionals, the Stewarts and Colberts. To be fair, that’s not “SNL’s” aspiration or mandate. They just need to make viewers laugh. Because if viewers are laughing, it means they’re listening.

And this is where “SNL” is failing viewers right now, by resting on those laurels of 2008. They’re writing as if, in the words of Vanessa Bayer’s moderator in “Yet Another GOP Debate” sketch from October, “No one is watching, so the stakes are low.” As the race whittles down, and Republicans seem more and more likely to settle for Romney, pens need to sharpen — right now, it is too easy to watch “SNL” on DVR, with a finger on the fast-forward button, searching for a chuckle. Sudeikis is leaving at the end of the season: It’s an opportunity to have more fun with Romney (please let it be Taran Killam). And must we really endure another year of Fred Armisen’s Obama, as a too-calm, emasculated, disempowered world leader? It’s a dreadfully boring narrative thread.

But if these writers had a hard time making the present cast of GOP characters interesting, it’s hard to imagine that they’ll be inspired by the next 10 months of Romney and Obama. We expect Romney and Obama to be cautious candidates — but that’s hardly an excuse for such timid and uninspired satire.