(FORTUNE Small Business) – There's no commandment that says thou shalt not pose nude!" says Garrett Morris over a dinner of crab cakes and pineapple juice at the tony Sugar Hill Bistro on 145th Street in Harlem. All around him, necks crane and eyebrows arch. "You know that?" Well, sure. Pat Robertson does too, but that doesn't change the fact that Savant, a new magazine Morris is hoping to launch next year, will never be sold in Christian bookstores. "It will be like a multicultural Playboy," Morris explains. "Instead of nine out of ten women being white, there'll be two white girls, two black, two Asian...."

If you went to college in the late 1970s, or even if you just watch reruns on cable, you know Morris from the early days of Saturday Night Live. Among his classic roles: retired big- leaguer Chico Escuela ("Base-a-boll been berry, berry good to me!") and my personal favorite, headmaster of the New York School for the Hard of Hearing, who cupped his hands and shouted the headlines on "Weekend Update" as "a public service to those of our viewers who have difficulty with their hearing." Morris left SNL in 1980 to pursue a career in television and movies, with intermittent success. Now 65, recently separated, and two years removed from his last gig--he co-starred with Darryl Hannah in Jackpot, an indie film about an itinerant karaoke singer--Morris is in New York auditioning for a real-life role in magazines.

That Morris has chosen this path at a time when established magazines are folding all around him doesn't seem to faze him. "None of them are doing what I'm doing," he insists. (Frankly, the project appears uncertain. The day after my meeting with Morris, I called Wardell Bourgeois, a mortgage broker and Smoothie King franchisee from New Orleans and an investor in Savant. "When all is said and done, there will be more potential investors for that project than we have room for," Bourgeois told me. But he wouldn't name any other investors, and neither he nor Morris would say how close they were to their goal of raising $30 million.)

Savant will target white, black, Asian, and Latin adult males--"WAMs, BAMs, AAMs, and LAMs," says Morris. It will feature political commentary ("I'm trying to get James Carville. The way he handles those right-wingers, it just knocks me out!"); a Maxim-inspired ranking of X-rated videos; a regular column presenting famous blacks "who absolutely no one believes to have been black," such as Ludwig van Beethoven, Aleksandr Pushkin, and Alexandre Dumas ("Jesus is in there too. Jesus is going to be in December"); a section "completely devoted to demystifying and understanding fetishes"; and, yes, pictures of naked women.

"Hey, our thing will be that there are no limits," Morris cackles, his voice rising above the quiet tinkle of silverware on china. "So long as it's classy and the best you can do. We prefer to have every picture by [Alfred] Eisenstadt or something like that. Because, you know, if it's Eisenstadt, it's great art, right? You go across the street to the porno shop, and it's dirty!"

With that, Morris suddenly realizes that nobody else in the restaurant is talking. They're all listening to him. He swivels his neck from side to side, beaming.

"I know you," says a young man at the next table, pursing his brow. "I know you."

Morris grimaces. "You a cop?"