January 17th, the host is Buck Henry and the Musical Guests are Bill Withers and Toni Basil

Here's some stuff that happened in the past

Buck Henry begins the monologue from his very first appearance on Saturday Night Live by conceding that he is an unlikely and unusual host because he is not a movie star, stand-up comedian or a famous musician. 

The relatively modest nature of Henry’s fame ended up working in the show’s favor. At forty-five, Henry was ancient by Saturday Night Live standards as well as egoless. 

Henry brought to Saturday Night Live a complete lack of narcissism that made the show’s writers love him because he was up for anything and does not care if he looks foolish. They also appreciated that Henry was a writer with a writer’s dark, daring, conceptual sensibility. 

The twice Oscar-nominated screenwriter of The Graduate, What’s Up, Doc?, Heaven Can Wait and To Die For unsurprisingly chose the kinds of oddball conceptual sketches that comedy writers and comedy obsessives adore and regular people grudgingly tolerate. 

I’m specifically referring to “Citizen Kane 2”, a Michael O’ Donoghue-written parody in which a reporter learns that “Rosebud” was not Charles Foster Kane’s final words. 

This leads to an investigation that reveals that after cryptically uttering “Rosebud” he then said, just as cryptically said “Henri.” Dan Aykroyd plays Charles Foster Kane in a black and white flashback to his days as the wildly unethical publisher of a morally dodgy tabloid. 

How dodgy? Kane begins shooting random people unlucky enough to pass by his open window so that he can sell newspapers about a crazed sniper being on the loose. 

The newspaperman who creates news specifically for the sake of then reporting on it is not unique to this sketch but it’s seldom been done as deftly or hilariously. This would be enough for most sketches but “Citizen Kane 2” has more on its mind. 

The perfect combination of cerebral and silly, “Citizen Kane II” closes with the revelation that instead of pining for a poetic symbol of his lost youth Kane was instead trying to get a nurse to bring him a roast beef sandwich with mustard. 

O’ Donoghue was a true comedy auteur. Citizen Kane II is one of his miniature masterpieces. He makes an indelible impression later in the show doing one of his signature bits, which involved impersonating what it might look and sound like if Mike Douglas had steel needles plunged into his eyes. 

O’Donoghue then screams and wails and stumbles and falls as if in the most extreme pain imaginable. It’s a new school/old school gag that combines the brutal dark comedy of a celebrity “impression” that’s nothing but howls of agony with the perennially satisfying slapstick of a man falling down. 

Chevy Chase’s initial appeal was that he was similarly a meta, post-modern kind of comedian who was forever winking at the audience to let them know he’s in on the joke and as well as a vaudevillian slapstick bumbler. 

In “Operation: Stumblebum” Buck Henry plays Ron Nessen, Gerald Ford’s press secretary, as a sly operator with an unusual strategy for counteracting Ford’s image as a stumbling goofball who is forever falling all over himself, verbally and physically. 

The idea is to make Ford seem like less of a fool by having his secret service agents and Nessen himself repeat anything the President does that’s clumsy or inept to make it seem more normal and less a sign of profound stupidity. 

What follows is a symphony of slapstick as Chase, Henry and secret service agents played by Garrett Morris, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi screw up in roughly identical ways.

Henry was hilarious in a wry, understated way. He’d host the show more than anyone else in its much mythologized first five years. 

Ron Nessen himself would go on to host Saturday Night Live later in the season but that’s a tale for another time. 

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