February 28, 1976, the host is Jill Clayburgh and the musical guest is Leon Redbone

Here's some stuff that happened in the past

Actors and actresses often make for good Saturday Night Live hosts because the gig is fundamentally about comedy and making people laugh but it also involves acting, dialogue and playing not just one character but a series of characters, live, over the course of 90 magical minutes.

Good acting makes everything funnier and Jill Clayburgh is a fine actress as well as an engaged and amusing sketch performer.

Clayburgh's finest moment in the fifteenth episode of Saturday Night Live is "Jill Larson, Guidance Counselor." It is a hilarious parody of inspirational teacher movies that casts the Gable & Lombard star as a guidance counselor at an inner city school delusionally convinced that she can get through to even the most hardened juvenile delinquent.

She has more specifically deceived herself into thinking that she can save a homicidal hood played by John Belushi who is less a troubled young man than a murder machine in the making.

Everyone else has given up on this terrible young man for a very good reason—he's clearly beyond redemption—but Jill is willing to literally die for her misplaced Liberal convictions.

Clayburgh plays the role with the perfect note of daffy determination. She's an idealist foolishly willing to die for her beliefs.

Elsewhere Clayburgh sings "Sea Cruise" backed by the Saturday Night Live Band immediately after a performance from The Idlers, the Coast Guard Chorus.

Why were the Coast Guard's chorus on Saturday Night Live? Hey, it was the seventies, man. Things were wild. Also, 90 minutes is a lot of time to fill. Finally, marijuana and cocaine.

Musical guest Leon Redbone makes an indelible impression with his cartoon hounddog of a voice and melancholy New Orleans musical stylings but the most memorable segments feature the return of Andy Kaufman and the introduction of Mr. Bill.

Clayburgh sets up Kaufman's act by soliciting four volunteers from the audience who then get up and lip-sync to an ancient phonographic recording of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" with looks of child-like glee and excitement.

As with many of Kaufman's contributions to the show, it's really just lip-syncing to weird old records in a bizarre new context but it absolutely destroys. The audience is in hysterics. Kaufman was a big part of the show's first season because he was a revolutionary comic genius but also because audiences loved him. He made people guffaw. He had the highbrows but the lowbrows as well.

To help fill 90 minutes of airtime Saturday Night Live solicited home movies of under two minutes from viewers. They aired lots of miniature films from viewers but only one caught on in a big way and became a regular.

That would be Mr. Bill, a helium-voiced glob of clay who suffers the trials of Job at the hands (no pun intended) of his cruel God Mr. Hands and his psychotic enemy Mr. Sluggo.

Mr. Bill is so crudely animated, written and performed that it feels like it could be the work of a small child but the pitch-black comedy and cruelty as Mr. Bill is abused and violated in myriad cheerful ways is unmistakably adult.

Like Kaufman, Mr. Bill was a home run with the studio audience, which meant that he was probably equally successful with home viewers. That meant that he would be returning to the show.

Home movies from viewers may have been one of the show's more homemade and challenging segments but in Mr. Bill it yielded something the show prized over just about anything: a crowd-pleasing recurring character who could be trotted out again and again and again.

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