February 14th, 1976 Peter Boyle with musical guest Al Jarreau

Here's some stuff that happened in the past

As we will re-learn repeatedly over the course of the remaining 983 entries in Every Episode Ever putting on a new ninety minute live comedy program every week is difficult to the point of being impossible. 

The exciting and daunting thing about sketch comedy is that you constantly have to start over with new characters,  new settings and new dialogue. That’s why recurring characters and catchphrases are so useful. They allow the show to build upon past successes while establishing an element of continuity and consistency that audiences find soothing. 

Success begets success. On television at least, familiarity tends to breed familiarity rather than contempt so it’s not surprising that Saturday Nigh Live embraced recurring characters early on. 

Saturday Night Live still offered some curveballs in its lucky thirteenth episode, most notably in a Gong Show style segment where a trio of cute little girls named The Shapiro Sisters singing and lip-syncing to Natalie Cole’s “This Will Be" and a viewer-submitted “home movie” that is literally just a movie showing a home. 

Al Jarreau sings a pair of soulful songs that are adorably enhanced by the kind of trippy visuals the show would abandon immediately afterwards. 

Astonishingly, there was a time when telling Lorne Michaels at a party that your daughters are cute and should be on his show would lead to opportunity and not having the parent in question ejected by security. 

Otherwise the show had found a structure that was exhausting but sustainable because it relied extensively on repetition and giving audiences what they want. 

The 1976 Valentine’s Day episode brought back John Belushi’s samurai yet again for “Samurai Divorce Court”, a slapstick showcase for Belushi and Jane Curtin as his soon to be ex-wife battling it out in divorce court with swords and great fury. 

Endings are often the hardest part of a sketch but “Samurai Divorce Court” peaks by having the squabbling Samurai duo reach a Solomonic compromise by splitting the child they’re fighting for custody of in half. It’s a solution that, needless to say, might actually be worse than the problem it’s ostensibly supposed to solve. 

Dan Aykroyd and Laraine Newman introduce Jason and Chloe, a pair of hippie drug freaks who keep the hippie dream alive by both using and selling a wide variety of mind-altering substances and pursuing free love or at least gratuitous sex. 

It’s a character that’s firmly in Newman’s wheelhouse of playing sexy hippie chicks with Valley Girl cadences while showcasing Aykryod’s chameleonic ability to play just about anyone. 

Just as it paradoxically takes grace to execute sublime slapstick it takes a mind as sharp as Ackroyd’s to so convincingly and hilariously play a space cadet with a fuzzy brain and drug-addled psyche. 

Hippies weren’t exactly a fresh satirical target in 1976 but the topic is less important than how it’s handled and Aykroyd and Newman’s virtuoso takes on these stock characters breathes new life into a hoary subject. 

Saturday Night Live didn’t have to invent some of its beloved characters because they’re real people. Chevy Chase’s Gerald Ford is the most obvious example, followed by John Belushi’s pitch-perfect Marlon Brando impersonation. 

The classic sketch “Dueling Brandos” finds Belushi and Peter Boyle taking turns delivering the Streetcar Named Desire star’s most famous dialogue before coming together  and doing his most iconic lines in unison. 

Saturday Night Live started repeating itself in its first season but at the glorious beginning, at least, there was joy in repetition. 

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