January 24th, 1976, Hosts Dudley Moore & Peter Cook with Musical Guest Neil Sadaka

Here's some stuff that happened in the past

Saturday Night Live’s first season was filled with firsts. The eleventh episode featured, in the comedy team of Peter Cook & Dudley Moore, the first duo to host the show as well as the first foreigners. 

As hosts, Peter Cook & Dudley Moore were almost too good. They were so skilled at sketch comedy that they didn’t particularly need the Not Ready For Prime Time Players. 

Two of the episode’s funniest bits don’t involve the American cast at all. The British twosome kick things off in their monologue by explaining the differences between English and American humor and how their particular style of comedy is more subtle and understated than the broad shenanigans favored by Americans. 

This leads to one of the duo’s classic bits, “One Leg Too Few.” The sketch casts Moore as a one-armed, one-legged actor auditioning for the part of Tarzan and Cook as a casting director understandably perplexed as to why the actor would bother trying out for a role he is so ill-suited for. 

The sketch begins with Moore cheerfully hopping about on one foot before Cook forcefully expresses his concerns. It’s broad slapstick but also bone-dry verbal comedy of the erudite variety. It was a bit that had killed in various contexts since the early 1960s, as Cook wrote it as a very young man, and it kills again here. 

Acting is the subject of another standout sketch with Cook as a theater director casting an unconventional adaptation of Gigi at a men’s prison, a leggy Gilda Radner as his sexy, gum-chewing assistant and Chevy Chase, Garrett Morris, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi as lifers auditioning for the show. 

Laraine Newman cultivated a persona as the show’s resident sexy Valley Girl. That would have made her perfect for the role of the hot assistant but Radner is cast against type as a woman whose hotness drives men to desperate extremes.

Radner was seen and loved as an eminently relatable, accessible girl next door but she’s explosively sexy here in a way that adds, rather than detracts, from the comedy. 

In the kind of neat detail that defined the show’s early years Chase’s pedophile steals a lusty glimpse at Radner’s sexpot while singing “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.” This sets up the moment when the prisoner, who has not seen a woman in years, possibly decades, leaps deliriously on Radner in a fit of crazed lust. 

It’s a frank and lively presentation that’s considerably broader than a standout final sketch with Moore as a reporter and Cook as Matthew discussing Jesus’ birth. 

Like the opener it’s a two-hander with the hosts in both roles and traffics in wry absurdism rather than broad physical comedy. 

The hosts are sophisticated and continental but the musical guest, Neil Sadaka, is pure schmaltz. For a show that trafficked in hipness Saturday Night Live’s musical guests could be almost comically square but the hosts and the cast were cool enough to make up for Sedaka’s intense corniness. 

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