December 20th, 1975, Host Candice Bergen with Musical guest Martha Reeves & The Stylistics

Here's some stuff that happened in the past

If you had asked me who the first person to host Saturday Night Live twice was I probably would have guessed Buck Henry or Steve Martin or another professional funnyman synonymous with the show’s early years. 

I would have been wrong. The first person to host Saturday Night Live twice was Candice Bergen. According to Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s essential Saturday Night Live history Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live when Bergen first hosted the show pretty much every man on staff fell in love with her. She, in turn, fell in love with Saturday Night Live. It would prove to be an enduring romance.

Bergen was gorgeous. She was famous. She was a movie star. She was utterly enraptured with Saturday Night Live and its cast and crew and was up for anything, including a sketch where John Belushi, as Sam Peckinpah, beats the crap out of her. 

So when Bergen, with palpable nervousness in her voice says during her monologue, “I don’t have a snappy monologue.I don’t have any sassy repartee because, in fact, doing this show is my Christmas present to myself. I hosted it last month and it was one of the nicest experiences I’ve ever had in my life. So I would like to thank our producer, Lorne Michaels, for giving me such a swell Christmas present, and for creating a show that is so special, with such special people” she seems earnest and sincere, a passionate true believer rather than another Hollywood phony. 

The appeal of Saturday Night Live from its inception was that it was a hip, happening Manhattan party populated by funny, explosively talented twenty-somethings in the prime of their radiant youth, rock stars and some of the most famous and talented people in the world. 

The December 20th, 1975 episode of Saturday Night Live was a Christmas party for the ages, a swinging shindig that finds the show firing on all cylinders. 

“The Elf” suggests what 2003’s Elf would look and feel like if it were a thinly veiled allegory for homosexuality. A riotous Chevy Chase plays a young man with a whimsical secret. 

He may look like everyone else but he’s secretly an elf. When Chase asks a sister played by Bergen if she thinks he’s disgusting she replies, with the perfect combination of acceptance and concern, “No, just impish and spry.” 

The elf isn’t just impish and spry; he also sports a telltale twinkle in his eye and both prances and frolics. It’s Yuletide silliness done right, the perfect combination of naughty and nice. 

Bergen takes center stage in another installment of Michael O’Donoghue’s Minute Mystery, an extremely niche parody of ancient crime shows that casts the future Murphy Brown star as a black widow who manages to bewitch detectives played by Dan Aykyroyd and John Belushi despite literally still holding the gun she just used to commit murder. 

Bergen’s cynical femme fatale tells the lovestruck shamuses that what really gets her hot and bothered are detectives who cannot solve crimes. In a related development, the men then immediately cop to having no idea who the murderer might be. 

This very special episode made me laugh. More surprisingly it made me cry more than once. Late in the show Bergen gives the show over to Maggie Kuhn, an old woman who represents the Grey Panthers, an organization devoted to the perpetually embattled dignity of senior citizens. 

It’s the kind of adventurous, civic-minded segment that would be inconceivable in the years and decades to come, as the show became more rigidly formatted and conventional. 

Bergen talks to Kuhn with deep empathy and compassion. The beautiful young movie star with the mega-watt smile is substantially older now than Kuhn was when she appeared on Saturday Night Live. 

Bergen is not dead, thank god, but watching this meeting of minds nearly fifty years later I couldn’t help but think about how Bergen has lived a good life and had an extraordinary career. I think that the Bergen of 1975 would have been very proud of the woman that she would become. I don’t think it’s necessarily a coincidence that she would achieve her greatest and most lasting fame not as a dramatic film actress but as the star of Murphy Brown, a long-running television comedy about the television industry. 

The next segment is even more shattering. The first short film by Gary Weis is a compilation of images of travelers being greeted by their families on Christmas set to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound.”

There’s nothing remotely comic about the piece. It isn’t going for laughs. Saturday Night Live had already proven that it could make people laugh. At its best it could do so much more than that. It could make people feel and make people think. 

Bergen showed here that you did not need to be a comic genius on the level of Richard Pryor or Lily Tomlin to be a great host. 

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