July 31, 1976, the host is Kris Kristoferson and the musical guest is Rita Coolidge

Here's some stuff that happened in the past

It’s poetically apt that Kris Kristofferson opens the final episode of the first season of Saturday Night Live with “Let Me Make It Through the Night.” 

Making it through the night is the goal of every Saturday Night Live host. Before every episode, hosts say a silent prayer that they won’t forget their lines, freeze up, swear, go off-script, or otherwise mess with Lorne Michaels’ finely tuned comedy machine by adding a terrifying element of spontaneity into the proceedings. 

Making it through the night becomes considerably more difficult if you do the show drunk. Kris Kristofferson clearly started partying prematurely during his time at 30 Rock. 

Kristofferson was so tipsy that the cast began divvying up his roles in case the country music star and actor proved too out of it to host. 

The monologue is rough. It begins boringly and professionally enough, with a nervous and intoxicated Kristofferson delivering the usual boilerplate introduction: “Thank you! It’s been great to be here. We’ve been looking forward to working with these wackos for quite a while. We don’t get to do all that much television, so it’s pretty exciting for all of us, and I know Rita had been dying to meet Chevy.”

Then things take a turn. Kristofferson starts talking about delivering the monologue in a way that doesn’t make sense and also suggests that, despite being a Rhodes Scholar, Kristofferson apparently does not know what certain words mean. 

He follows with a confused and confusing, “Usually at this point in the show, they let the host, uh, jar the audience, spar with them, and set some kind of atmosphere for the rest of the show. They didn’t think I could do this. Also, they have been getting in trouble lately. This has a little controversy on it every now and then.

You see why they didn’t let me do the monologue?”

What does he mean by “jar the audience?” I suppose it could be jarring for the audience to see a host who has clearly been pounding them back immediately before going on live television. But I’m guessing that’s not what it’s supposed to mean. 

Krisofferson’s monologue does, indeed, set some kind of atmosphere for the rest of the show. That atmosphere is ragged, randy, rock and roll, and country, exhilaratingly on the verge of falling apart. 

Kristofferson riffs on his outlaw troubadour image when he tells the audience that he wrote “Me and Bobby McGee” about a real woman who happened to be in the audience that night. 

Gilda Radner plays her as the living embodiment of bourgeoisie propriety. The free spirit settled down for a life of dull middle-class respectability alongside husband Larry Farber (John Belushi), a dweeb who works in women’s pocketbooks. 

Being a rock star means never having to grow up, but adulthood is an unfortunate inevitability for the rest of us. Bobbie and her endearingly dorky hubby became normie grown-ups while Kristofferson remained an ageless God. 

Belushi and Radner create fully-formed characters with minimal screen time and dialogue. The gulf between the romantic past and the embarrassingly corny present is funny, but it’s also oddly poignant. 

Kristofferson answers, “Can you host Saturday Night Live successfully while completely hammered?” with a surprising “Yes.” 

Saturday Night Live has Kristofferson sing a lot. This fills the show with wonderful music and ensures that the host spends much of his time singing lyrics he already knows instead of dialogue he might have forgotten. 

Kristofferson has fun lampooning his image as country’s greatest intellectual with a fake ad for a book called Talking Country, all about how you can overcome having a prestigious education and sound like a proper hillbilly. 

The Star is Born matinee idol was fortunate in that he got to act opposite comic geniuses in their prime. A sketch about a woman discovering that her blind date is her gynecologist, for example, is carried by Jane Curtin. She does all the heavy lifting; Kristofferson just has to react. 

Throughout the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, entertainment had such a widespread drug problem that a lot of the people you see onscreen in old movies or TV shows were high or drunk when they filmed them. 

The history of pop culture is consequently the semi-heroic, semi-shameful story of extremely high-functioning drunks and dopers. 

Kristofferson proved here that it was possible to host the show while drunk, but you should probably refrain from knocking back until the show ends. 

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