May 8, 1976, the Host is Madeline Kahn with Musical Guest Carly Simon

Here's some stuff that happened in the past

If you were to make a list of ideal Saturday Night Live hosts, Madeline Kahn would occupy a place of distinction at the very top. She possessed the unique and impressive skillset necessary for hosting. She had the glamour and beauty of an old-school silver screen siren and the physical comedy genius of a silent screen comedienne. She was gorgeous yet relatable, intimidatingly talented and beautiful yet oddly relatable and accessible. Audiences loved her. The Not Ready For Prime Time Players loved her. How could they not? She was irresistible, a uniquely gifted and blessed human being. 

When Kahn and Gilda Radner share the screen it’s almost too adorable. An early standout sketch casts Kahn as Marlene Dietrich and Radner as Barbara Walters in what is incontestably silly, lisp-based verbal comedy. Deriving big laughs from the funny way the journalistic legend and international icon of androgyny talk might not represent the highest or most sophisticated form of humor but the sketch is low comedy done by two masters of the form, true virtuosos whose respect for each other is as palpable as it is understandable. 

In a bit so cute I literally vomited up rainbows, puppies, and sunshine while watching it—in a good way—Radner and Kahn take turns doing their impressions of, respectively, a parakeet learning its first words and a baby eating ice cream for the first time. 

The ambitious, precocious comic geniuses at 30 Rock generally went for long, hard laughs, which is why it resorted to popular favorites like sex, destruction, drug references, double entendres, and general anarchy so often. 

But the parakeet/baby routine doesn’t go for hard laughs or even soft laughs but rather “awwws.” It’s a boldly, brazenly gentle segment that leans on the audience’s love for Radner, the most popular female cast member and the most lovable.  

According to Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s Saturday Night Live: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd and later Bill Murray were known as the “bully boys” because they were macho and aggressive and weren’t about to let women get laughs or attention they felt belonged to them. 

The bully boys, along with Chevy Chase’s breakout popularity, made things hard for the show’s female writers and cast members. So it was always nice when a host like Kahn stopped by to even things out and give women a fighting chance in the show’s deeply rigged battle of the sexes.

Kahn ensured that the female cast members women had a lot to do during her week as host. She takes center stage in one of the show’s early perennials: the painfully relatable character-based comedy of young girls talking about sex from a place of deep ignorance. 

These sketches were a way for the women on staff to get sketches about women and their inner lives onto the air by making them about the discomfort children feel around the very idea of sex. 

Like the parakeet/squealing baby bit, this sketch is not going for hard laughs or big laughs but rather knowing, gentle laughs of recognition. 

The show aspires to big laughs and gets them in “Last Days”, a classic sketch with Kahn as an inebriated Pat Nixon, Dan Aykroyd as a feral, Jew-hating sociopathic Richard Nixon, and John Belushi as a cooly pragmatic Henry Kissinger. 

Aykroyd would go on to play Jimmy Carter as a good man and a smart man but he plays Nixon as an inhuman ghoul, a paranoid, jabbering madman. It’s an impression so good that it almost makes you wish Nixon was still in office at the time so Aykroyd could trot it out more often. 

This was the show’s Mother’s Day show and, like the Christmas show, it feels like a gift from the show to its adoring audience. 

neat, eh? Man, I LOVE this silly newsletter.