Before John Belushi, before Bill Murray or Chevy Chase or Dan Aykroyd—before any of them, there was Gilda. Gilda Radner was the first performer Lorne Michaels hired for the cast of Saturday Night Live when it launched, in 1975. She was, at the time, one of the stars of The National Lampoon Radio Hour, the only woman in a cast of men destined to be famous. “I knew that she could do almost anything, and that she was enormously likeable,” Michaels once said of the decision. “So I started with her.” Television audiences immediately fell in love with Radner. How could they not? She was magnetic. She sparkled with a kind of anything’s-possible energy, and stole every scene she was in. She made everything hilarious, and more daring. That was Radner—the tiny woman with the gigantic hair having more fun than everybody around her. Radner’s charm was so off the charts that practically every character of hers wound up with a beloved catchphrase. There was the bespectacled nerd Lisa Loopner (“So funny I forgot to …