It's October 2, 1976, the host is Eric Idle and the musical guest is Joe Cocker and Stuff

Here's some stuff that happened in the past

I read recently that Eric Idle met his wife at a Saturday Night Live afterparty. I’m sure he’s not alone in finding his soulmate at an SNL soirée.

Idle got much more than a wife from Saturday Night Live, however. The show led directly to his biggest success outside Monty Python: The Rutles.

Idle introduced Americans to a pre-fab four whose legacy would last a lunchtime on the third episode of the show’s second season.

Lorne Michaels introduces Idle’s brainchild by explaining that Idle assured them that for three thousand dollars, he could bring The Beatles to Saturday Night Live, but that, due to a mix-up, he brought The Rutles to Saturday Night Live instead.

The seeds of The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash were planted in a classic segment introducing Idle’s ingenious Beatles parody.

Incidentally, the reason that “Weird Al” Yankovic has never released a Beatles pastiche is because The Rutles did it so brilliantly.

What’s fascinating to me about the early Beatles pastiche featured in the episode is that there aren’t really any jokes in it.

It’s not like The Lonely Island, where there is a big conceptual idea for a song, but there are also hard jokes in every lyric.

Idle instead amps up the overly caffeinated pep of A Hard Day’s Night-era Beatles by ten percent in a way that’s hilarious precisely because Idle gets all of the details right.

This extends to the visual vocabulary of documentaries. There’s a wonderful gag where Idle’s pretentious narrator is speaking into a camera that keeps moving away from him so that he’s forced to run at top speed just to keep up with it.

Joe Cocker and John Belushi have the show’s other iconic musical moment.

By this point, Belushi’s Cocker impersonation was so popular and ubiquitous that when Cocker performed, it seemed like he was imitating Belushi rather than the other way around.

When Belushi performs with Cocker AS Cocker he seems like a bizarro version of the English belter. It’s as if they’re both blue-eyed soul werewolves and at the end of the song, they should both have made a full transformation into a lycanthrope.

The sketches unsurprisingly have a Pythonesque flavor, most notably in the form of a standout segment where Idle plays a doctor informing an expectant couple what features they’d like in their child.

Matters start out sane but it isn’t long until the apoplectic doc is offering unique options like a Shrimp head.

The Python’s predilection for cross-dressing inspires a meta-exhausted Dragnet parody with the macho male cops in women’s clothing.

The fourth wall is broken when the actors concede that the sketch just doesn’t work, and what’s funny to the English may not be chuckle-inducing to Americans. This leads to a film bit of people in drag racing that’s also tired and annoyingly meta.

Thankfully that sketch is the exception rather than the rule. Idle’s collaboration with the cast and crew of Saturday Night Live got off to a strong start but the best was still to come.

A-

Best sketch: Rutles

Worst: Dragnet

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