It's November 19th, 1977, the host is Buck Henry and the musical guest is Leon Redbone

Here's some stuff that happened in the past

Buck Henry became the first member of what would be known as the Five-Timers Club on November 19th, 1977. Henry is certainly not the most famous member of the Five-Timers Club. It would be more accurate to say that he is among the least famous members of the Five-Timers Club. Yet it’s fitting that Henry would become the first host to pick up what would become a major honor in the years and decades and half-centuries ahead because he was such a fixture of the show’s early years. 

Henry was a supremely humble presence in Saturday Night Live’s endlessly mythologized first five years. His fifth episode as host is mainly devoted to setting up the “Anyone can host” contest, in which five fans competed for a chance to host Saturday Night Live. 

Henry devotes his monologue to asking the quintet of Wannabes beauty pageant-style questions about why they think audiences should vote for them. 

The fivesome is supposed to represent a broad cross-section of America, yet they’re all white, in keeping with time-honored Saturday Night Live tradition. Though the idea was to give a nobody a chance to be a big shot for one magical evening, one of the finalists was the then-governor of South Dakota. 

There are consequently more governors than people of color in the final five. Of course, this is not the last we see of Morris. Later in the episode, he is once again dressed in drag so that he can play a maid in a series of still images.  

Beyond the South Dakota governor, an eighteen-year-old freshman from Vassar says she’s been a Saturday Night Live groupie for two years. I encourage everyone not to do the math on that one or to guess whether she was referring to herself as a “groupie” in the sense that she’s a big fan of something or someone or something or a “groupie” in the sense that she has sex with famous people. 

The co-ed’s bold strategy is to throw herself at Henry sexually, something he seems to find both flattering and perplexing. The finalists include a middle-aged divorced mother of three and an eighty-year-old grandmother. 

Last and least we have Dave from Oregon, who is introduced as “unemployed.” Here, “unemployed” defines both Dave’s employment status and his existence.

Dave tries to win the crowd over by being funny, weird, and aggressive. This proves a poor choice. When Dave starts doing his Dave shtick, meek Henry looks like he wants to punch Dave in the nuts. Dave wants to show the world that he’s so funny and crazy that maybe he could be a cast member after his triumphant first episode. He succeeds only in being annoying. 

Dave tries way too hard and only embarrasses himself. The eighty-year-old woman, Miskel Spillman, succeeds by not trying at all. Her whole shtick is that she’s an old woman who will be dead soon, so she might as well have one last thrill before the sweet release of the grave. 

THIS understandably resonates with audiences more than doing crazy shtick or broadcasting your sexual hunger for the co-creator of Get Smart. 

Henry and Belushi made for a terrific twosome, with Henry as the milquetoast straight man and Belushi the wild-eyed maniac. Henry is consequently the perfect guest for “Samurai Psychologist.”

A running joke in the Samurai series of sketches involves Belushi’s sword-wielding man of honor threatening to commit hara-kiri anytime someone criticizes him for anything. 

The Samurai psychologist’s final patient calls him on his bluff. Following his unlikely shrink’s manipulative ploy, he refuses to retract his criticism, which leads to him actually committing hari-kari. 

It’s a standout Samurai sketch marred by a little dose of old-fashioned racism at the end when Henry says that his final word was “Losebud.” 

With Henry, there was no such thing as too dark or transgressive. The wondrously wrong “Stunt Baby” casts Henry as an actor playing an abusive father who is encouraged by a smarmy director played by Bill Murray to go wild on the stunt baby doubling for the baby actor.  

There’s not much to the sketch beyond Buck Henry pretending to physically abuse a defenseless infant. It’s hilarious all the same. It’s not darkness for the sake of darkness; it also has the benefit of being funny. 

Henry’s sensibility wasn’t dissimilar from Michael O’Donoghue, the show’s original Prince of Darkness. So it makes sense that O’Donoghue would finally get his Ralph Bakshi-esque parody of The Mickey Mouse Club on the air with Henry as host. 

“The Rickey Rat Club” replaces the dewy, freshly scrubbed innocence of The Mickey Mouse Club with a feral, rancid nastiness. Instead of presenting an idealized version of life, the Rickey Rat Club exposes children to all of life’s ugliness and despair. As a Ratketeer, played by Jane Curtin, guilelessly enthuses, “Real life is full of horrible things, and the faster we learn to like it, the better!”

When the comedy team of Franken and Davis appeared on Saturday Night Live, it could only mean one thing: the show was nearly over, so the pressure was off. They leaned into pioneering anti-comedy with a sensibility fascinated by the phoniness and artificiality of showbusiness. This installment of The Franken & Davis Show offers an alternate past for kids in their mid-twenties. It involves appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and their Norman Lear-produced vehicle, Frankenbaum & O’Davis. 

Musical guest Leon Redbone looks and sounds like a cartoon dog from a Disney movie from the early 1970s. As the musical guest, he performs two ostentatiously old-timey tunes that the audience politely tolerates. 

This episode is largely devoted to setting up a later episode to be hosted by either a complete nobody or an acting Governor, but it works spectacularly on its own terms, largely because its host was clearly an absolute joy to work with. 

Grade: A-

Worst Sketch: Reunion in Kieve

Best Sketch: Stunt Baby

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