October 16th, 1976, Host Karen Black and Musical Guest John Prine

Here's some stuff that happened in the past

In the first of two hosting stints, Karen Black flagrantly defies the old show business dictum never to work with children or animals.

Black brought her baby son Hunter onstage with her when she delivered her opening monologue, but the little bugger goes delightfully off-script. Instead of resting peacefully on her hip, the tot makes an unabashed play for her milk and life-giving boob in a way that's funny, spontaneous, and more than a little awkward.

Later, the glamorous movie star plays Catherine the Great in a sketch that once again attempts to glean naughty laughs from history's most famous act of bestiality. The writers are up to their usual horseplay. Things get sillier until Catherine exchanges sweet nothings with a talking horse in the Mr. Ed mode.

Musical guest John Prine performs with just an acoustic guitar and an excess of brooding literary genius. In full-on Dylan mode, he performs songs about the agony of aging and a family that dies a watery communal death. It's the kind of performer and song that was semi-common in the early years and unthinkable afterward.

Saturday Night Live was once a safe space for Loudon Wainwright III, John Prine, and Kinky Friedman. That is not the case anymore.

Mr. Bill returns triumphantly in a considerably more involved and substantial short film. But the best sketch of the evening is a lovely character piece written by Marilyn Suzanne Miller, who specialized in sketches that were wise and incisive about human nature and the human condition, that was about more than laughter.

In it, Dan Aykroyd plays a motormouth geek who reconnects with the most popular, beautiful girl from his high school (Jane Curtin) at a Woolworth's lunch counter long after high school has ended.

Aykroyd's excitable Poindexter is delusionally convinced that the old hierarchy no longer applies and that they're equals in a post-high school universe when nothing could be further from the truth.

The sketch gets some of its kick and poignance from Aykroyd playing someone he might have become if he was just a geek and not a comic genius. It's a beautifully observed two-hander in which Curtin doesn't act so much as she reacts to her former classmate's hurricane of banal banter.

She looks like she wants to crawl out of her skin and become invisible, but he's too oblivious to realize that high school may be over. He's still a dork, and she's still an untouchable beauty.

Very late in the episode, the men of Saturday Night Live perform a musical tribute to American coinage that morphs weirdly and inevitably into a Chyron spiel about how John Belushi has been stealing change around the Saturday Night Live office and other things as well.

It's one of those uncomfortable bits where you can't help but reflect that the show is making a bad-taste joke out of the bad habits that would make Belushi one of comedy's greatest martyrs.

The bit is weirder than funny, but tragic future events would give it a bitter aftertaste.

Black was an unusual choice for a host in the show's early going, but the next host would be so heavily identified with the show that many people incorrectly assumed he was a cast member. That's right: up next, we have the debut of Steve Martin with musical guest Kinky Friedman.

Grade A-

Best sketch: "Lunch Counter Reunion"

Worst sketch: "Love, Russian Style"

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