Don Kemp wrote me about this post about people being "banned" from TV shows…
I have a book called Live From New York, an oral history of SNL written by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales. It covers the history of the show from its inception through 2014-2015 or so. In it, the topic of "people that will never be back" is discussed and Berle is covered. You're technically correct, he wasn't banned, but he made it to a list of people they knew who would not be asked back. He felt free to give advice to anyone at anytime about how he thought the show should go that week.
He also proudly assumed his reputation preceded him and he felt entirely free to unzip and plop on the table the Berle "anaconda," as one writer called it, if any poor soul admitted before thinking that they had never seen it before. The final straw for Berle though was he arranged to have his own standing ovation at the end of the show. He was singing "September Song" and in the balcony ten people, the amount of seats he was given, stood up and cheered. Lorne Michaels made certain the camera never cut to them. Michaels dislikes the Berle show so much it has never made it to repeats.
For what it's worth, Louise Lasser is briefly mentioned in the book, too. Her drug use was too much, even for them. One former staffer recalls her on her hands and knees coming into an office looking for pot. Why she was crawling no one knew. On show day she demanded a sketch be cut and refused to go on until it was. Aykroyd was all for going on without her and had a plan to do the entire show without a host.
Louise Lasser had three things working against her that prevented her from being asked back: She was difficult to work with, she wasn't very good and she stopped being a star of any note. Either of the first two might rule her out but the last one was the killer.
I've read the book you mentioned. It does say in it that Lorne Michaels would never allow the Berle-hosted episode to be rerun but he has since relented. You can pay to download it here and it's on DVDs and in the syndication package. I agree it's a pretty poor episode for Berle-related reasons but I also think it's one of those "you shoulda known when you asked him" deals. Mr. Berle was quite notorious in the industry for doing that kind of thing. It's like inviting Donald Trump to debate and being surprised when he starts interrupting everyone.
My point — and it's much simpler than some of my correspondents thought — is that on every TV show that brings in guest stars, the producer or producers say/says, "Let's not have that person on again." They say that a lot. The musical guest on the Berle episode was Ornette Coleman, who never appeared on Saturday Night Live again. Was he "banned" from the show? Two weeks before Berle, Margot Kidder hosted for her one and only time. Was she "banned?"
That season, the following people were among the hosts of Saturday Night Live: Fred Willard, Carrie Fisher, Walter Matthau, Cicely Tyson, Rick Nelson, Kate Jackson, Gary Busey and Maureen Stapleton. Now, Lorne Michaels might not have made a public vow not to have them back on but the fact remains that each of them hosted the show the same number of times Milton Berle and Louise Lasser did…which, by the way, was only one more time than you and I did. I would guess that in the thirty years Johnny Carson helmed The Tonight Show, there were several thousand times he and/or his producer declined to ask a guest back for a second visit.
And like I said in the previous piece, you don't get "banned" by a studio. You just don't get hired because the guy in charge decides not to hire you. Carson did not have Joan Rivers on again after she went off to compete with him and Jay Leno didn't invite her onto The Tonight Show either. Jimmy Fallon did. That's how it works.