NEW YORK — Is it possible that Lorne Michaels is Lorne-ed out?

Even for a man who enjoys being famous, all the hoopla surrounding the 50th anniversary of “Saturday Night Live,” all the extra attention it has brought him, has been a bit much.

“I say this not with any sense of modesty — I was famous enough,” Michaels said recently at Orso, one of his favorite New York haunts. Someone who knew him once sardonically suggested Michaels would like to have “LEGENDARY” stitched into his underwear. And he is, after all, known in some circles by one name, like Beyoncé, Cher, Ichiro. But Michaels demurs.

“Everybody who had to know me, knew me,” he said. “I wasn’t in the public eye. But now, walking over here, a young comedian came up and said, ‘How would I audition?’”

Since the 50th season premiered last fall, the anniversary of “SNL,” one of a fragmented America’s few remaining communal cultural events, has inspired a steady stream of tributes to the show and its creator. There was a Jason Reitman origin-story movie called “Saturday Night,” as well as hundreds of feature articles and listicles in the press. Last month there was a four-part docuseries on the show and another documentary on just the music. An “SNL” concert at Radio City Music Hall on Friday was livestreamed on Peacock. A 600-plus page biography of Michaels titled “Lorne,” by Susan Morrison, an editor at The New Yorker, comes out Tuesday.

It all culminates Sunday with a live three-hour prime-time special looking back on “SNL” and its singular legacy. Like troops from different wars marching by in a Veterans Day parade, “SNL” stars from different decades, among many other celebrities young and old — guests include Paul McCartney, Robert De Niro, Steve Martin, Sabrina Carpenter, Tom Hanks, Kim Kardashian and Dave Chappelle — are swirling around New York, ready to help Michaels celebrate the golden anniversary.

At 80, Michaels is a unique, towering figure who has shaped comedy for half a century, turning the art deco tower at 30 Rockefeller Plaza into a portal for comedy stars on prime-time TV, in the movies and on late-night shows. When he started in the business, he worked with former radio stars; now he is going viral with young viewers who don’t watch the show live or even on a television.

“Without any hyperbole here, I honestly think that Lorne is the most important and influential person in the history of television, including Johnny Carson and Ed Sullivan,” said Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s CEO, who is a comedy buff and loves to catch “SNL” shows in person.

Michaels said he hadn’t seen or read anything of the anniversary coverage except the documentary about the history of music on “SNL,” directed by Questlove.

“Only because something in it will hurt my feelings, and I’m on that thing now where I just have to get the show on,” confessed the man famous for his stoic mien. He asked Tina Fey to watch the show’s 40th anniversary extravaganza, from 2015, because he remembered it as being perfect, and he didn’t want to be disillusioned if it wasn’t. Fey watched and assured him that it was perfect, which caused him to worry that he couldn’t reach that level again.

Those who have worked closely with Michaels say his greatest gift is spotting raw talent.

After watching “SNL” auditions with Michaels, Adam McKay, an acclaimed filmmaker who was a head writer at “SNL” in the ’90s, realized that “Lorne’s eye is his superpower.” He added, “He has had a remarkable run of choosing people that no one else was choosing.”

A proud Canadian who still wears his Order of Canada rosette on his lapel, Michaels moved to the United States from Toronto at 23. It was a long road to being a sophisticate for the son of a Toronto fur dealer.

In Los Angeles, Michaels wrote jokes for Woody Allen briefly, worked on “Laugh-In,” “The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show,” “The Perry Como Winter Show” and did award-winning specials with Lily Tomlin.

“SNL” debuted in October 1975 and quickly became America’s most reliable generator of comic stars. The executive producer’s tentacles now reach everywhere: He produces Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight Show” and Seth Meyers’ “Late Night.” He was a producer of Fey’s “30 Rock,” a sitcom based on “SNL,” and of her hit movie “Mean Girls.” He was a producer of “Wayne’s World” with Dana Carvey and Mike Myers, “Tommy Boy” with Chris Farley and David Spade. Fred Armisen’s “Portlandia,” Kenan Thompson’s “Kenan.” And on and on.

Michaels occupies an outsize proportion of his stars’ psyches; some are scared of him. For decades, an anxious question has reverberated in therapists’ offices from Manhattan to Hollywood: “Does Lorne like me?”

This is partly owed to his management style. Leading a cast and writers’ room riddled with neuroses, his poker face and minimalist reactions have often left a trail of insecure young comedians on edge.

Some former cast members have said Michaels created a kind of royal-court culture prone to petty jealousies. He likes the arch description supplied by his friend William Shawn, a longtime editor of The New Yorker, who teased Michaels about the “pseudo-egalitarian” culture on his show.

But his vision for the show is supreme. Hanks, who has hosted “SNL” 10 times, said Michaels brings “the grand omnipotent overview” that “takes it from this thing that is almost working to this thing that does work.”

Michaels still runs “Saturday Night Live” much the way he’s always run it — the table reads, the hand-lettered cue cards, the after-parties full of “SNL” stars past and present.

The job has gotten more complicated, however, since Donald Trump arrived on the national political scene, beginning with Michaels’ decision to let him host in 2015.

Trump, then a candidate, got the most laughs in one sketch by gamely dancing to Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” a precursor to his “Y.M.C.A.” rally dance. The mood at that after-party was very strange. Some in the cast were furious, believing that the gig could help Trump become president.

But Michaels, sitting at a back table of the restaurant as usual, looked serene that night. A couple of cast members awkwardly came up to tell him that Trump was not such a bad guy; some of them greeted Trump, while others avoided him. Trump himself was euphoric about his performance.

Political sensitivities come into play with a largely liberal cast that is expected to satirize both sides of the aisle. Everything is copacetic when Maya Rudolph does a cozy sketch with Kamala Harris on the cusp of the election. As the famed former “SNL” writer Jim Downey told Morrison, the show sometimes seemed like “the comedy division of the DNC.”

After a show in February 2016 in which Larry David, brilliantly playing Sen. Bernie Sanders, was joined by the real Sanders, Michaels talked about the show’s politics.

“People are always looking for us to be on the side of Clinton, and that’s not what we do,” he said, referring to Hillary Clinton. “If Trump is ascendant, then we will be discussing that.” He was prescient then about the reality show star, noting that the scorn heaped on him recalled the scorn initially heaped on another entertainer-turned-politician, Ronald Reagan.

“There’s a smugness to that attitude that causes the voting public to go, ‘We’re smarter than that,’” Michaels said. “Donald’s giving voice to what polite society sort of sat on for a while, things that are felt but that no one is articulating. There is something happening there, or it wouldn’t be resonating.”

Michaels told me then: “I don’t go along with the idea that the American people can’t make up their own minds and that if you expose them to these things, they will just be swept along.”

Michaels advises cast members to find a drop of humanity in those they regard as blackguards. “In order for your character to work, you have to like the character,” he said. The show’s current caricature of Trump by James Austin Johnson, who replaced Alec Baldwin in the role, captures the way the president’s wacky humor distracts from his cruel remarks and outlandish actions.

“I think Alec was the sort of Satanic Trump,” Michaels said. “I think James is somehow a more familiar Trump and maybe slightly diminished. He’s not world-ending every time.”

Although there has been chatter about successors — Fey could “easily” do it, he has said, and Meyers and Colin Jost are also possibilities — the reigning king is not currently considering abdicating.

Does he want the show to finish in “suttee,” the ritual in which a Hindu wife is immolated upon her husband’s funeral pyre. Would he prefer that “SNL” end with him? “I’m not that guy,” he said with a smile.

Michaels was asked how it felt to have so many big names obsess about him as a mythic figure — talking to their shrinks about him, jabbering about him at dinners, trying to fathom what’s behind that inscrutable mask, trying to figure out where they stand with him.

He looked bemused. “I am, in most instances, a benign force,” he said. “Nevertheless, that’s more when you look back at it than when you’re living through it.”