It seems safe to assume that if Lorne Michaels thought Donald Trump had a good chance of being elected president in 2016, he would not have invited him to host the fourth episode of its forty-first season.
Conventional wisdom held that Trump was a clown and a buffoon, a patently unserious man who would be destroyed in November when Hillary Clinton scored a landslide victory over Trump and became the first female president.
Outside of the true believers, seemingly no one gave Trump much of a chance in 2016. We, as a culture, underestimated both Trump and the reactionary, racist white rage that would catapult him to the highest office in the land in violent defiance of God’s will.
The original Saturday Night Live boasted confidence bordering on arrogance rooted in youth, success, and cocaine. Lorne Michaels’ deathless comic institution was a spectacular success. It might not have delivered boffo ratings initially, but it generated tremendous buzz and was revered as the hippest show on television.
Saturday Night Live was a show for hard-partying young people with a cast and crew of hard-partying youngsters. Most of the people who worked on it had never worked in television before, particularly the Not Ready For Prime Time Players.
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Buck Henry became the first member of what would be known as the Five-Timers Club on November 19th, 1977. Henry is certainly not the most famous member of the Five-Timers Club. It would be more accurate to say that he is among the least famous members of the Five-Timers Club. Yet it’s fitting that Henry would become the first host to pick up what would become a major honor in the years and decades and half-centuries ahead because he was such a fixture of the show’s early years.
Henry was a supremely humble presence in Saturday Night Live’s endlessly mythologized first five years. His fifth episode as host is mainly devoted to setting up the “Anyone can host” contest, in which five fans competed for a chance to host Saturday Night Live.
Henry devotes his monologue to asking the quintet of Wannabes beauty pageant-style questions about why they think audiences should vote for them.
The fivesome is supposed to represent a broad cross-section of America, yet they’re all white, in keeping with time-honored Saturday Night Live tradition. Though the idea was to give a nobody a chance to be a big shot for one magical evening, one of the finalists was the then-governor of South Dakota.
In an episode in which Ray Charles is both host and musical guest, the soul legend announces that he has a very special guest in Ella Fitzgerald. Being a huge Fitzgerald fan (her rendition of “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” might be my favorite song of all time), I stupidly got excited.
So I felt like a real maroon when “Ella Fitzgerald” turned out to be, once again, Garrett Morris in a dress. Writing this series has made me think a lot about Morris and his role on Saturday Night Live.
When I was twelve years old, I remember being slightly confused by Saturday Night Live sketches involving Jon Lovitz’s parody of Harvey Fierstein. Fierstein was an incredibly obscure choice for a mainstream monolith like Saturday Night Live to spoof, but the genius of Lovitz’s impression is that you did not need to know who Fierstein was to find him funny.
Fierstein was like any other recurring character except that he was a real person and a genuine homosexual. As a child, that was not something I was used to seeing on television.
Charles Grodin regularly shows up in those strangely ubiquitous lists of hosts who did such a terrible job that they were banned. This reflects a profound misunderstanding about the comedy of Charles Grodin.
The overarching meta premise of Grodin’s only episode is that the host skipped dress rehearsals and seemingly every other rehearsal so that he could buy gifts for the cast and crew.
I am not proud to admit that I fell for the Playboy mystique with my heart, soul, mind, and other body parts it’s not polite to talk about in mixed company.
As a boy whose restless, traumatic childhood and adolescence were an endless search for naked boobs, I appreciated the central role that Hefner played in disseminating them far and wide for the masturbatory needs of a grateful world.
Hefner devoted his life to naked boobs. He was rewarded with wealth and fame and the life of a Prince. An extremely horny Prince.
Hef was synonymous with sex for decades. He was an icon of the sexual revolution that the younger me foolishly would have defended to the death as an important, heroic cultural figure and not just a pioneering pervert.
When I go to someone’s home for the first time, and it’s big and nice and expansive, my dumb brain always has the same stupid thought. I think that somewhere in their house must be a giant container of quarters, and if I only find it and somehow manage to furtively purloin the moolah, all of my money problems will be over.
There are a lot of problems with this line of thinking. For starters, it’s fucking stupid, something only a real maroon would believe. Yet, in my creaky cerebellum, the concept of a giant container full of spare change that will be my trip to fortune if I can only find it takes up valuable, permanent real estate all the same.
That’s one reason I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Jane Curtin’s impressive 1980 motion picture debut, How to Beat the High Cost of Living.
When I think about Saturday Night Live’s early years, one of the first images that spring to mind are Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd in impossibly loud shirts, ineptly hitting on American women in a rough approximation of an Eastern European accent.
Yet the Wild and Crazy Guys were not part of the show’s first or second season. Steve Martin was a popular host in the comic institution’s first two years, but he wasn’t synonymous with Saturday Night Live until he began having his own recurring characters and catchphrases.
When he became a beloved fixture of Saturday Night Live’s endlessly romanticized early years, Buck Henry was certainly not the most exciting or charismatic performer to host the show. He was also far from its most popular host. Yet he was an ideal host all the same.
That’s because Buck Henry was a brilliant comic mind who co-created Get Smart, was nominated for an Oscar for co-writing The Graduate, and another for co-directing Heaven Can Wait, and had tremendous chemistry with the cast.
My name is Nathan Rabin, and I am addicted to new ideas. I can’t help it. My stupid, frazzled brain is constantly coming up with new ideas. I fall in love with these new ideas. I am agog with excitement, atwitter with anticipation.
I become convinced that while my previous seventeen ideas all failed spectacularly, THIS is the one that’s going to succeed. This idea will change things. This idea will capture the fickle imagination of the public and ignite the comeback I’ve been chasing for long, endless, hopeless years.
Then, unfortunately, my brain will come up with a new idea, and I will lose interest in ideas I was previously obsessed with.
If O.J. Simpson’s contributions to American life began and ended with his success as a Heisman Trophy-winning, record-shattering football legend, then his legacy would still be extraordinary.
For initially better and later much, much worse, Simpson’s gifts to pop culture transcended sports. The Buffalo Bills superstar wasn’t just a superstar athlete who segued smoothly into announcing after retirement, along with the requisite endorsements and iconic commercials.
Over the past decade or so, a narrative regarding Shelley Duvall’s life and career has crystallized in the public mind depicting the actress as the devastated victim of Stanley Kubrick's cruelty during the filming of The Shining. This reading is supposed to be sympathetic to Duvall and her struggles with mental illness, but I find it condescending and wrong. It also ignores that Duvall had substantial success post-The Shining, including Shelley Duvall’s Fairy Tale Theater, which she created, hosted, and executive produced.
Duvall is not a victim. She's a survivor. She's not weak. She's strong. You have to be strong to handle the twin crucibles of fame and mental illness. You need to be strong to handle something as intense, stressful, and demanding as hosting Saturday Night Live during their mid-1970s golden years.
The framing device of Eric Idle’s second stint as host of Saturday Night Live has the Monty Python alum hosting a fundraiser to raise money for the United Kingdom. Idle trots out the Queen of England and various oddities in an unsuccessful attempt to raise funds for his home country.
It’s a spectacularly silly conceit for an especially silly episode. Idle isn’t just British; he is exceptionally English. The episodes he hosted are equally English in the extreme.
The third time Elliott Gould hosted Saturday Night Live the show ran a minute or so short. This forced Gould and the Not Ready for Prime Time Players to improvise for seventy-five seconds.
This filled the fearless young cast and host with fear. They were terrified. How could they be asked to ad-lib for such an impossibly vast amount of time? It was sadistic, is what it was. It was inhuman, impossible, and quite possibly a cruel and unusual punishment banned by both the Constitution and the Geneva Convention.
April is a big/weird month for me. It’s when The Dissolve laid me off,and The A.V. Club canceled My World of Flops. It’s also my birthday and this site’s birthday.
I’ve had a rough forty-seven years, so I’ve decided to give myself an obscenely generous gift for my forty-eighth birthday and the site’s seventh anniversary.
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In Living Color successfully branded itself the black Saturday Night Live because Lorne Michaels’ deathless comic institution is so famously white. In Living Color's first big breakout star, Damon Wayans, was a Saturday Night Live reject from one of its worst eras.
Though Eddie Murphy, a mere teenager when he joined the cast, arguably saved Saturday Night Live when it was at its lowest point in the early 1980s, the show has had very few African-American cast members and writers.
I am now officially almost four percent done with my epic exploration of every Saturday Night Live episode. So it’s probably worth noting that up until this episode, Lorne Michaels’ deathless comic institution was officially known as Saturday Night.
That’s because the name Saturday Night Live was already taken by a uniquely ill-conceived, ill-fated sketch and variety show starring funnyman Howard “Chuckles” Cosell and some young people destined for bigger and better things, most notably Bill Murray and Christopher Guest.
I wrote a blog post not too long ago on the problematic nature of Bill Murray’s persona and his image as not just an unusually talented and beloved actor but also a modern-day folk hero with much to teach us about living life to the fullest.
This veneration of Murray and his unwillingness to follow the rules or respect boundaries, particularly those of his female costars, has troubling ramifications that speak to the dark side of hero worship in general and hero worship of the Caddyshack star in particular.
As much as I like Buck Henry, Steve Martin, and Elliott Gould, I prefer unconventional, unexpected hosts. Since the very beginning, much of the appeal of Saturday Night Live has been seeing whether the week's host is able and ready or whether they'll make a fool of themselves with the whole world watching.
That's why I was excited that Sissy Spacek, who was very young when she hosted Saturday Night Live but seemed much younger, is this week's host and genuine old person Broderick Crawford. This is in sharp contrast to Buck Henry, who was the Not Ready For Primetime players' weird uncle even though he was a mere forty-five when he first hosted. I'm forty-seven now and in the full flower of my radiant youth. Yet Henry was even younger than me when he became the default host when someone more famous bailed.
In a perhaps unsurprising development, I'm going to be posting Saturday Night Live recaps three times a week from here on out.
I'm sorry. I pour my heart and soul into all my projects. I believe in my ideas. I don't know why.
Then, I'm inevitably devastated when they fail to meet even modest expectations. So, I'm going to slow down here. I love the work, but it's exhausting and depressing trying to make something succeed when the universe seemingly just isn't interested and doesn't care.
Other dreamers have get-rich-quick schemes. I have vow-to-do-an-insane-amount-of-work-for-an-exceedingly-modest-sum-of-money schemes. That would not be the smartest strategy, to begin with, but I never even come close to making the modest sum of money I'm hoping for.
Steve Martin’s second episode as host, like a previous Elliott Gould-hosted episode, begins with Gilda Radner nervously approaching a host she presumably has recently slept with.
In both instances, Radner is the vulnerable one seeking to turn a one-night stand with a handsome, famous man into a relationship, or in Gould’s case, a marriage.
Here at Every Episode Ever, we’re thirty-seven episodes into the epic complete history of Saturday Night Live. I don’t like to brag, boast, be arrogant, or waste words unnecessarily, but I am NEARLY done with four percent of the project.
How you like them apples, huh? Yet, we’re still encountering firsts. The twelfth episode of the show’s second season, for example, marks the first time the show has been hosted by an athlete.
One of the reasons I wanted to watch and write about every episode of Saturday Night Live for my Every Episode Ever project at Buttondown is because Lorne Michaels’ comedic institution (which is so crazy sometimes that I think it belongs in an institution) has created more superstars than any other show in television history.
That’s at least partially attributable to the show’s longevity and constant turnover. Saturday Night Live is undoubtedly the only television comedy to have hundreds upon hundreds of cast members over a nearly half-century.
Part of what makes my epic journey through the entirety of Saturday Night Live so fascinating as well as melancholy and bittersweet is knowing the tragic end some of its most distinguished alum would suffer.
John Belushi and Chris Farley were both cursed to die young and hungry, with the talent and promise in the world.
The tenth episode of the second season of Saturday Night Live marked the triumphant return of Andy Kaufman. The anti-comedy icon and peerless human irritant hadn’t appeared on the show for over a year. His last appearance was November 8th, 1975, and Saturday Night Live both had and had not changed an awful lot in the interim.
Kaufman brings back his Foreign Man character. The professional oddball’s alter-ego was a consummate outsider from somewhere in Eastern Europe who trepidatiously tells jokes that don’t make sense and aren’t funny. Then this awkward, eternally out-of-place misfit does impressions that are alternately comically, deliberately terrible, to the point of all sounding the same, and uncannily accurate.
In a recent blog post that proved shockingly popular—it’s been read three times as often as any other Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place yet somehow did not attract any new subscribers—I wrote about how Saturday Night Live has been ending a few minutes short for nearly FIFTY years now. Yet in all of that time, no one seems to have figured out what to do in those awkward in-between moments when the show has ended, but the time to run end credits has not yet arrived, and they’re called upon to fill that dead air with words.
I was inspired by the famously clever and quick-witted Dick Cavett nearly having a panic-induced heart attack when called upon to improvise a minute or two on live television.
There are certain things children should not do for the sake of their mental health and emotional development. Playing a child prostitute in a brutal, gritty character study of madness and obsession for Martin Scorsese is one of them.
Venturing into the tension-filled drug den that was Saturday Night Live to be the show's very first child host is another endeavor perhaps best left to those 18 and older.
The last time Paul Simon hosted Saturday Night Live, the show was in its infancy. The legendary singer-songwriter turned the second episode of his best friend Lorne Michaels' comic institution into The Paul Simon Show.
Instead of being a comedy show with music, Simon's first episode as host became a music show with comedy. Nabbing a figure as iconic as Simon was a coup for the raunchy new sketch comedy show. It was even impressive that Michaels secured a Simon & Garfunkel reunion for Saturday Night Live as well.
Saturday Night Live began repeating itself early. Audiences for its second season undoubtedly experienced a feeling of deja vu over hosts like Lily Tomlin, Buck Henry, Dick Cavett, Candice Bergen, Elliott Gould, and Paul Simon, all of whom hosted in the first season. Audiences for its second season undoubtedly experienced a feeling of deja vu over hosts like Lily Tomlin, Buck Henry, Dick Cavett, Candice Bergen, Elliott Gould, and Paul Simon, all of whom hosted in the first season.
It’s easy to see why Lorne Michaels kept inviting hosts back. With a returning host, the show didn’t have to start from scratch. A returning host understood the assignment. A returning host understood the process. A returning host understood how things worked. And if they were being asked back, it was probably because they’d done a good job the first time, and the cast and crew enjoyed working with them.
We've talked a lot about firsts here at Every Episode Ever. That makes sense, considering how new the show was at that point. But it was old enough to have logged some meaningful endings, whether audiences knew it or not.
Two staples of Saturday Night Live's endlessly mythologized beginnings ended when Jim Henson's Muppets appeared in their final sketch and, on a more auspicious note, the last short film from Albert Brooks ran.
Who is your favorite Muppet? Is it King Ploobis? Or are you more partial to Queen Peuta? Alternately, you might be a die-hard fan of the Mighty Favog although I know that there are a lot of Vazh and Scred obsessives out there as well.
Unless you are a Saturday Night Live super-fan, or subscribe to this nifty newsletter, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about.
Steve Martin was made for Saturday Night Live because he was hip and popular and game for anything, but also because his persona as the ultimate show-business phony has so many commonalities with the personas of Albert Brooks and Andy Kaufman.
In his 1970s heyday, purposeful insincerity was Martin's trademark. Everything was a put-on, a goof, a lark, a gag. Martin protected his fragile artistic soul by harnessing the incredible power of irony.
I hated high school. I hated everything about it. I’m not doing too well these days, but I take comfort in knowing I am not in high school.
But I particularly hated the part where my fellow students would congregate in front of the school before classes and talk to their friends. I had no friends, and the idea of talking to strangers filled me with fear. On a related note, talking to strangers still fills me with fear.
In an unsurprising turn of events, I cannot sustain a seven-day-a-week publishing schedule here without going insane or abandoning or ignoring the many other parts of my life and career.
I was hoping that I'd make so much money from the Indiegogo campaign that I'd be able to focus on this project, but that did not happen. In an unfortunate turn of events, I might lose money on the Indiegogo thing because I want to end it and refund everyone's money but Indiegogo seems intent on getting their suspiciously large cut of the exceedingly small total all the same.
In the first of two hosting stints, Karen Black flagrantly defies the old show business dictum never to work with children or animals.
Black brought her baby son Hunter onstage with her when she delivered her opening monologue, but the little bugger goes delightfully off-script. Instead of resting peacefully on her hip, the tot makes an unabashed play for her milk and life-giving boob in a way that's funny, spontaneous, and more than a little awkward.
Television mogul Norman Lear was not the first non-entertainer to host Saturday Night Live. That distinction belongs to Ron Nessen, the presidential press secretary whose performance on a famously vulgar episode failed to impress the White House.
Lear was consequently the second host who wasn't a musician, a stand-up comedian, or an actor. The show used the same blueprint that it used for Nessen and would go on to employ with the many non-performers to come, including many politicians and athletes guaranteed to score big ratings, if not big laughs.
The premiere of Saturday Night Live's second season opens with host Lily Tomlin making an ironic superstar entrance surrounded by an entourage worthy of Elvis or Vinnie Chase. She now has her own personal magician, various hangers-on, and a little person chauffeur whose job duties include topping off everyone's champagne.
With the crazed narcissism of a true diva, Tomlin very confidently calls her old friends in the Not Ready for Primetime Players by their wrong names. Chevy becomes Jerry, she mistakes Radner for her Laugh-In colleague Goldie Hawn, and Jane Curtin becomes Jane Belushi.
As you have almost undoubtedly forgotten, the end of the Indiegogo campaign for my Saturday Night Live-themed books We’ve Got a Great Show for You Tonight and We’ve Got a TERRIBLE Show For You Tonight recently ended.
I don’t blame anyone for missing the end of the fundraiser because, like a big old idiot, I myself missed the end of the fundraiser. And it was MY fundraiser. For MY project. That could have had a huge positive impact on MY career had it succeeded.
It’s poetically apt that Kris Kristofferson opens the final episode of the first season of Saturday Night Live with “Let Me Make It Through the Night.”
Making it through the night is the goal of every Saturday Night Live host. Before every episode, hosts say a silent prayer that they won’t forget their lines, freeze up, swear, go off-script, or otherwise mess with Lorne Michaels’ finely tuned comedy machine by adding a terrifying element of spontaneity into the proceedings.
The story of Saturday Night Live is the story of time. There is the fifty years that it has been on the air, an astonishing run by any standard. More importantly, the show has to fill ninety minutes every Saturday night.
As I have written, ninety minutes can fly by like a pleasant dream or linger for a veritable eternity. The infamous Louise Lasser episode seems to drag on interminably.
It's easy to see why Elliott Gould became an early member of the vaunted five-timers club. He was an ideal host: funny, cool, hip, up for anything, blessed with great comic timing, and popular with the stoned kids that made up the show's core demographic.
Gould can even sing and dance. That's a skill he showed off on Broadway, where he met ex-wife Barbra Streisand, and it's a talent that he shows off in place of an opening monologue in both of the episodes he hosted during the show's first season.
Like Steve Martin, Buck Henry was so strongly identified with Saturday Night Live that many wrongly assumed that he was a cast member. Henry was the Fifth Beatle of the original incarnation of the Not Ready For Prime Time Players.
The show could call him at any time when a more famous guest, such as Truman Capote, had fallen through and he'd come running, enthusiastic, ready to play, and willing, even eager to debase himself for our amusement.
Lorne Michaels conceived Saturday Night Live as a show for the first generation to be raised by television and grow up with an innate awareness and understanding of the medium’s cliches and conventions.
It was made for an audience all too familiar with commercials, talk shows, game shows, and all sorts of other wonderful garbage that fills the airwaves and pollutes our minds.
If you were to make a list of ideal Saturday Night Live hosts, Madeline Kahn would occupy a place of distinction at the very top. She possessed the unique and impressive skillset necessary for hosting. She had the glamour and beauty of an old-school silver screen siren and the physical comedy genius of a silent screen comedienne. She was gorgeous yet relatable, intimidatingly talented and beautiful yet oddly relatable and accessible. Audiences loved her. The Not Ready For Prime Time Players loved her. How could they not? She was irresistible, a uniquely gifted and blessed human being.
One of the reasons I have such an intense emotional connection to Saturday Night Live is that we're roughly the same age. Lorne Michaels' venerable show business institution is slightly older, however.
On April 24th, 1976 I was born in a hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. Hundreds of miles and a universe away in Manhattan the Not Ready For Prime Time Players were dealing with the fallout from the previous week's controversial and notoriously ribald Ron Nessen episode.
Before I rewatched the Ron Nessen episode of Saturday Night Live I did not know whether it belonged in We've Got a Great Show For You Tonight or We've Got a Terrible Show For You Tonight.
I knew that the episode was historic but I did not remember whether it was historic in a good or bad way. Nessen, as only politics and/or comedy nerds know, was the press secretary for Gerald Ford and the first politician to host Saturday Night Live.
One of the stranger aspects of Saturday Night Live's first season is that Jim Henson and Frank Oz, two of the greatest entertainers of the twentieth century, contributed regularly to the endlessly mythologized beginning of Lorne Michaels' deathless comedy institution in such a regrettable and forgettable fashion that the Muppets are little more than a footnote in the show's history.
That's sort of like Jimi Hendrix playing lead guitar on a Rolling Stones album, then never collaborating with them again due to a lack of chemistry and nobody talking about that auspicious collaboration as anything other than a mistake.
