It's October 29th, 1977, the host is Charles Grodin and the musical guest is Paul Simon

Here's some stuff that happened in the past

Charles Grodin regularly shows up in those strangely ubiquitous lists of hosts who did such a terrible job that they were banned. This reflects a profound misunderstanding about the comedy of Charles Grodin. 

The overarching meta premise of Grodin’s only episode is that the host skipped dress rehearsals and seemingly every other rehearsal so that he could buy gifts for the cast and crew. 

I love the fussy specificity of the gag and how, over the course of the episodes, Grodin repeatedly references the silly little tchotchkes he bought the cast as a way of being polite. He contends throughout that the shops where he bought gifts all closed at nine p.m. So he had to make a choice between meaningless formality and a dress rehearsal that would give him a sense of what he was in for as host. 

The idea is that Grodin agreed to host without knowing anything about Saturday Night Live. The hilarious bumbler Grodin plays here does not know, for example, that the show is taped live. 

Like many things he encounters, this rattles Grodin because it does not jibe with the version of the show that exists only inside his cracked imagination. The impressively clueless Grodin doesn’t know that he’s supposed to deliver a monologue as well. 

Grodin devotes his monologue to explaining that he couldn’t visit New York without seeing a few Broadway shows and hitting all the big attractions, like the World Trade Center. Of course, the World Trade Center is best known for the central role it played in the 1976 version of King Kong that Grodin starred in, but it was quite the tourist trap back in the day. 

If you are at all familiar with Grodin’s exquisitely awkward, postmodern sensibility, then it is obvious that Grodin knows what he’s doing. Because Grodin is such a good actor and has such an unrelenting comic mind, he breaks character only during the Goodnights. 

The cold open introduces Grodin as a clueless square who doesn’t even smoke dope and Belushi as a professional, annoyed that Grodin won’t do the bare minimum to prepare for the show. 

Grodin and Belushi embodied two very different conceptions of masculinity. Belushi was a raging id, a gifted physical comedian with an explosive presence. Grodin, in sharp contrast, represents the ego at its most neurotic and self-conscious. 

Grodin talks about Belushi in a manner that is at once admiring and condescending, as if he were a powerful horse or show dog and not a contemporary. 

The beloved character actor plays “Charles Grodin” as someone who overthinks everything, particularly his hosting gig, and can’t make it through a sketch without breaking character. 

The last time we saw The Coneheads, they had traveled back to their home planet. They’re back in “Return of the Coneheads,” providing an alien point of view on the curious human hobby of trick-or-treating for Halloween. 

As usual, they do nothing to fit in beyond acquiescing to tiny humans “demanding small consumables.” When they give a moppet a six-pack instead of a candy-sized Snickers bar, it creates all manner of problems.

Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd return in a glorious spooky season showcase for Irving Mainway, grade A sleazebag and maker of exceedingly dangerous Halloween toys for children, like a superhero get-up that’s just a plastic bag with a rubber band. 

Curtin and Aykroyd make an inspired comic team. Curtin is, as always, a great straight woman, prim and proper, while Irving Mainway is the greatest and most deplorable of Aykroyd’s scuzzy narcissists. 

Aykroyd is in his element, although much of his performance involves reacting to Curtin’s mortified descriptions of toys guaranteed to maim, injure, or even kill your little one. 

As a host, Grodin was a wild card, particularly given the unusual nature of his role on the show and the fact that this episode sustains the same joke from the cold open to the goodbyes. 

So Lorne Michaels, who is never seen but is heard several times as the authority that Grodin appeals to fruitlessly while trying to figure out what’s going on and what, exactly, he can do about it, got a ringer as a musical guest who also happened to be his best friend: Paul Simon. 

No, not the Illinois Senator. The musician. Simon performs “Slip Sliding Away” and “You’re Kind” but his most memorable performance is also the most inept. 

Since he didn’t have time to show a clip earlier in the show, Grodin figured that he’d make up the lost time by duetting with Simon while wearing an Art Garfunkle wig.

I know I recently said that when O.J Simpson came out in a Conehead during his monologue, it was not funny, but Grodin in a Jewfro wig is hilarious because he’s one of the funniest people ever while Simpson is most famous now as a remorseless double murderer. 

But it’s also funny because of the faraway look on Grodin’s face while he incompetently tries to channel Simon’s former partner. Lastly, it’s funny because Grodin, like all of us, knows most of the words to Simon’s most famous songs he doesn’t quite know all of them. 

When a faux-enraged Simon complains that Grodin doesn’t even know the words to the song he’s singing, Grodin deadpans that he’s learning the words to the song by singing them with its songwriter. 

The Bees have always been the most maddeningly meta recurring characters. They never seem to have caught on with audiences or the cast, yet they keep returning all the same, sometimes in sketches that highlight their pointlessness.

So, it’s unsurprising that they’re at the center of the most meta sketch. It begins like a regular sketch before Grodin is so distracted by the cast’s bee costumes and their weird little antenna that travel in various directions, seemingly of their own accord, that he feels the need to comment on them.  

But Grodin also finds them conceptually muddled. Grodin may be intentionally obtuse here, but he speaks for many in the audience when he asks, “Maybe I don’t fully understand the Bees. I mean, what are you? Are you playing children dressed up as bees? Or are you bees playing children who are dressed as bees for Halloween? Am I supposed to believe that you’re real bees? I don’t really know how to relate to the whole bee thing.”

It’s telling and hilarious that the cast doesn’t have a good or consistent answer because the writers probably just thought that it would be funny to have people in bee costumes while extremely high. 

Grodin finally acknowledges the meta nature of his hosting gig by saying it was a joke and that Belushi is not, in fact, angry at him for a lack of professionalism. 

Charles Grodin only hosted one episode of Saturday Night Live, but he made it count. He made the show his own.

Two years later Grodin would join forces with Albert Brooks, the show’s original short filmmaker, for Real Life, a masterpiece and milestone in the art of comic awkwardness from two masters of the form.   

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