It's January 31, 1976, the Host is Dick Cavett with Musical Guest Jimmy Cliff

Here's some stuff that happened in the past

Highbrow met lowbrow when Dick Cavett hosted the twelfth episode of Saturday Night Live. 

The smartest man on television connected with the counterculture’s favorite dope-smoking smartasses for ninety minutes of sketch comedy that’s crude and cerebral, sometimes simultaneously. 

Cavett goes solo for a literate and irreverent sketch parodying Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Cavett plays the iconic play’s folksy narrator. Only instead of describing the homey, reassuring sights and sounds of small town life he talks about New York at its apocalyptic sleaziest.

The host, who retained the air of being the brightest, most eager prodigy in prep school deep into middle age, talks about the city’s sex workers, hard drugs, violence and everything else that made New York great in the homespun cadences of an archetypal middle American.  

Cavett gets even more uncharacteristically raunchy in a sketch where he plays himself as an unlikely procurer of female flesh promoting the book Nebraska Pimp. It’s more audacious than hilarious but it speaks to Cavett’s eagerness to make fun of himself and his intellectual image. 

Cavett is absent from a standout sketch spoofing Marabel Morgan’s controversial best-seller The Total Woman, which advised women to change everything about themselves in order to be more attractive to men.

Jane Curtin plays a follower of Morgan’s eminently questionable philosophy who is so eager to find a husband and a father for her two children that she doesn’t seem to mind when the bumbling fool, played by Chevy Chase, accidentally kills her family with a hunting rifle. 

Curtin’s desperate true believer is literally dying for a halfway decent man; the sketch ends with him killing her by accident. It’s a satisfying conclusion that ratchets up the deranged self-negation and deeply ingrained misogyny of Morgan’s worldview to satirical and homicidal extremes.

Saturday Night Live sometimes delights in having a musical guest who doesn’t seem to belong in the same world as the host, let alone the same stage and the same show. So it prankishly paired the whitest man in America with reggae legend Jimmy Cliff, who contributes an incendiary performance of his career-defining hit “The Harder They Fall.” 

Just about anything could conceivably happen in the show’s early days, including an exceedingly strange if well-received performance by a curious gentleman named Al Elen Peterson who comes onstage dressed as a hardhat and disrobes while singing “I’ve Gotta Be Me” until his blue collar garb has given way to a bra and panties. 

It’s a performance better suited to The Gong Show than Saturday Night Live and does not seem to have led to anything for Petersen, whose only other screen or film credits seems to be a bit part on The Richard Pryor Show and a handful of appearances on Don Kirschner’s Rock Concert.  

The talk show host welcomed the opportunity to do comedy with some of the best in the business. He brought his A game to the much buzzed about show. Even more surprisingly, he brought his pimp game as well. 

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