Candice Bergen I

Here's some stuff that happened in the past

November 8th, 1975 Host: Candice Bergen, Musical Guest, Esther Phillips 

It may be hard to imagine now but in the mid 1970s there were only about three or four entertainment options. The most appealing was watching Chevy Chase fall down and get all mixed up playing President Gerald Ford. 

Chase revolutionarily played Ford as an affable bungler who was always tripping over himself linguistically and physically. It’s an almost perversely gentle depiction of the most powerful man on earth as a bit of a well-meaning goober. 

So while early Saturday Night Live boasted the visionary conceptual genius of Albert Brooks and Andy Kaufman it also understood the timeless comic appeal of an elegantly executed pratfall and parodies of recent hits. 

The fourth episode of Saturday Night Live, and the first to be hosted by a woman, features one of the show’s most beloved early recurring characters in its Jaws parody, which cast John Belushi as its Richard Dreyfuss figure and Dan Aykroyd as its Roy Scheider surrogate. 

But the real star of the sketch is a super-intelligent shark that has learned to both walk and breathe on land and trick human beings with cynical ruses as a way of gaining entry to a woman’s home for the sake of biting off her head. 

It’s a spectacularly silly bit about a sentient killing machine who has figured out how to lure humans to grisly deaths by offering to deliver something they might like. Sharks may be apex predators in the ocean but here they’re forced to use savvy and guile. 

The Landshark is voiced by Chevy Chase, who later makes a series of goofy and insulting faces at Jane Curtin as she delivers a serious editorial. It is canonical that Chevy Chase was a juvenile asshole from the very beginning, a brash, sexist bully, high on self-regard and also cocaine, but he was at least a funny jackass. 

In the decades ahead Chase would remain a jackass but he would no longer be funny. 

On the opposite end of the likability spectrum Gilda Radner has a lovely two-hander with Candice Bergen where she talks about her jealousy towards women who are as pristinely, impossibly beautiful as the host. 

Radner was the first cast member to establish herself as a personality and not just as a sketch comedy performer. Where Chase, the show’s first breakout star, exuded confidence bordering on cockiness, Radner radiated warm, squirmy vulnerability. It was impossible not to love her or identify with her struggles as a person and a performer. 

Andy Kaufman, dressed like the world’s oldest, tallest prep school prodigy, is the rare performer who seemingly wanted to be both hated and misunderstood. The divisive comic genius courts the audience’s anger and confusion with an appearance by his “Foreign Man” character in which he tries and fails to tell a joke, then seems to suffer a low-level nervous breakdown as he tries to understand a culture and a world that is utterly bewildering. 

It’s an anti-comedy psychodrama more interested in challenging audiences than making them laugh. For madmen like Kaufman, making audiences laugh famously represented one of the lowest forms of humor. 

Albert Brooks’ brilliant short film is just as gloriously prickly as Kaufman’s performance but also has the advantage of being laugh out loud funny. It’s a preview of shows coming to NBC that includes a medical show with the timeless one-liner “I’m a registered nurse, not a registered prostitute”, an intense melodrama about a black vet and a Three’s Company-style romp where Albert Brooks plays a creep who is constantly trying to pressure his girlfriend into having a threesome with her best friend. 

The parody generates laughs of the deeply uncomfortable variety but what makes it riotously funny is that it’s played completely straight. Brooks’ would be womanizer is intent on realizing his sexual fantasies and the women in his life are just as clear in articulating their complete disinterest in catering to his desires. 

Brooks and Kaufman, true originals in a world where that is a rare and valuable commodity, made Saturday Night Live weirder, funnier and more relevant. The show would miss them terribly but even after they left, the show was still lousy with comic geniuses. 

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