January 15th, 1977, The Host is Ralph Nader and the Musical Guest is George Benson

Here's some stuff that happened in the past

The tenth episode of the second season of Saturday Night Live marked the triumphant return of Andy Kaufman. The anti-comedy icon and peerless human irritant hadn’t appeared on the show for over a year. His last appearance was November 8th, 1975, and Saturday Night Live both had and had not changed an awful lot in the interim. 

Kaufman brings back his Foreign Man character. The professional oddball’s alter-ego was a consummate outsider from somewhere in Eastern Europe who trepidatiously tells jokes that don’t make sense and aren’t funny. Then this awkward, eternally out-of-place misfit does impressions that are alternately comically, deliberately terrible, to the point of all sounding the same, and uncannily accurate. 

It’s a weird and unique act. Even on Saturday Night Live, it stood out as particularly daring. Kaufman was a standout, or Michaels would not keep bringing him back. He was an island on the show, a one-man band, an iconoclast who managed to be on the show fairly regularly doing something utterly unlike anything else on Saturday Night Live.

Then again, Andy Kaufman's genius in the mid-1970s was that no one else anywhere was doing anything like his act. He was that rarest and most wondrous of entities: a true original. 

Kaufman performs his longest and most elaborate routine so far here. He begins with the Foreign Man nervously killing a joke, then segues to impressions that sound exactly like the Foreign Man before climatically changing into appropriate garb and performing two Elvis Presley songs with the confidence, brio, and joy of an accomplished Elvis impersonator. 

At this point, audiences had a sense of what was to come based on Kaufman’s reputation, but he still managed to wow the crowd. Michaels was savvy about delivering old-school, conventional entertainment alongside weird, challenging, brainy conceptual stuff. 

For example, Kaufman’s act was famously unique and boundary-pushing, but it also involved a kick-ass Elvis impersonation. Everybody can enjoy something like that, as Elvis is one of our most beloved entertainers.

Elvis is so popular that impersonating him represents a sizable profession. “Elvis Impersonator” is an actual job title many hold. 

The crowd, which I suspect was stoned out of their gourd on marijuana, and consequently probably hallucinating and shit, goes apeshit over a funny-acting family introduced in the final fifteen minutes, when the stakes are lower, and anything goes. 

These soon-to-be recurring characters would become so popular that they’d spawn both a failed animated pilot and a commercially unsuccessful but underrated and winning 1993 feature film adaptation. 

I’m talking about the Coneheads: father and husband Beldar (Dan Aykroyd), wife and mother Prymaat (Jane Curtin), and Laraine Newman as daughter Connie. 

They’re a parody of space invaders from 1950 science-fiction movies who somehow manage to fool humanity despite their incredibly strange, foreign, and literally alien ways. 

The Coneheads use clinical language when talking about everything, speak in a robotic monotone, and, for good measure, have giant coneheads. That’s why they’re called the coneheads! On account of their coneheads. 

We start with the origin story of the popular alien brood. They were dispatched by the five High Masters of their home planet Remulak on a mission of conquest. They were to seize all manners of communication and tell Earthlings that they were taking over, but things went a little screwy, and Beldar ended up working as a driving instructor.

It’s a deliciously ridiculous premise executed with a perfect deadpan. Beldar is the perfect Aykroyd character in that he doesn’t even pretend to be a human being rather than a freakishly smart, technical, scientifically minded alien. 

In their maiden appearance, they meet their teen daughter’s date, played by Bill Murray in his first episode as a cast member. 

It’s an audacious and confident debut, even if the audience seems a little slow to warm up to the new guy. That’s understandable. How could anyone possibly compare to the handsome guy who brought us all together and united a nation by falling down? 

Saturday Night Live is famously competitive. It’s a cutthroat, Darwinian realm where the strongest and funniest thrive. Even then, the stakes were high. The ultimate reward, perversely enough, was a ticket off the show that made you a star. 

Chevy Chase, whom Bill Murray famously dubbed a “medium talent” in a legendary scuffle, had already attained that level of success and popularity. Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi would be next. 

Bill Murray would eventually be a bigger movie star and icon than any of them. But on January 17th, 1977, he was just a hungry young sketch comedy prodigy from suburban Chicago with an enviable and impossible new gig. 

Lorne Michaels threw this gifted young man into the deep end and hoped he could swim. 

This episode is so dense with incident and importance that I haven’t even mentioned that Belushi is absent except for a phone call to “Weekend Update,” and the host is Ralph Nader. 

Nader is a surprising host for a raunchy sketch comedy show. It’s even more surprising that he did an excellent job and scored his share of laughs by being willing to do just about anything, including a sketch involving him and a pair of sex dolls he was ostensibly “testing” but that he was obviously shtupping. 

The show gets off to an inspired start when Nader shows up wearing something akin to a Nudie suit. He admonishes everyone to call him Ralphie, but his attempts to recreate himself as Mr. Fun are compromised by his need to tell everyone of the hidden dangers lurking everywhere. 

The bit ends with Laraine Newman hugging Nader. At that point, an airbag was supposed to inflate. That was the punchline, the gag it was all building towards. 

Because this is live TV, the airbag did not go off. It was a dud. It ballooned a little, but it was obvious that the opening had gone wrong due to a technical snafu. 

Nader handles it like a pro. He sees the mistake, pauses for just a moment, and then recovers by booming, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night Live.” 

Nader handles himself with aplomb in all his sketches. In “Carter’s Confederate Takeover,” he daydreams about meeting with Jimmy Carter at the White House. After exchanging pleasantries, the 99-year-old ex-president and living saint returns in a Confederate uniform and announces that the real reason he ran for president was to avenge the Confederacy’s loss in the War of Northern Aggression. 

Aykroyd’s Carter is dead on. Like “Ronald Reagan Mastermind,” this gets big laughs by envisioning a version of the president that is not just different but antithetical. Carter was the opposite of a racist Big Daddy type yearning for the days of yore, just as Reagan was not a sleek man of action. 

Nader has been a role model and a hero for decades. He’s squeaky clean and scandal-free, so it’s hilarious to see him in a sketch predicated on having a robust sex life with a pair of “blow up party dolls” (AKA sex dolls) that he pretends are part of his work in a ruse that is not fooling anyone. 

Garret Morris makes for a fine straight man, but the sketch relies on Nader’s delivery and his ability to make fun of himself in an uncharacteristically ribald manner. 

A twenty-six-year-old Murray makes his debut playing an old man who couldn’t be more excited for his grandson to call him for their weekly chess match. He begins the sketch with a twinkle in his eyes and affection in his voice, but his mood darkens until he’s wishing death upon his piece of shit ingrate of a grandson. 

It’s darkly funny, as is the Ghostbusters star’s next sketch. It finds him playing the director of a televised execution as one of his signature showbiz phonies. He’s an air-kissing narcissist in love with the sound of his own voice who sees the killing of a criminal as just another razzle-dazzle spectacle. 

Murray would go on to specialize in those types of characters, but he nailed them in his very first at-bat. 

This a remarkable episode notable for a whole lot more than the shockingly good job Nader does as host. 

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