November 15th, 1975 Robert Klein, Loudon Wainwright III, ABBA

Here's some stuff that happened in the past

We have come to the point in this insane journey where I must make a weary confession: it ain’t all great! I would not have committed to watching over a thousand episodes of Saturday Night Live, a comic institution that, it should be noted, is MUCH longer than just about ANY OTHER PROGRAM ON TELEVISION if I were not a big fan of the show. 

But you would have to be off your rocker to think that everything that the show has done over the course of its FIFTY YEARS ON THE AIR has been stellar. The definition of insanity is famously doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome and also nursing a strong, unshakeable conviction that all of Saturday Night Live’s sketches are funny, because there have been several stinkers over the yearsI'm Robert Klein and, strangely enough, so are you

Don’t get me wrong. I hold Saturday Night Live in high regard. To me, the studio where it is filmed is nothing less than the Paris Opera House of comedy, a place where some of the best minds in comedy come together and put on a national television show that’s watched and talked about by millions of people. 

Compared to Saturday Night Live’s important, even essential satire, other sketch comedy shows are nothing more than glorified versions of high school skits where football players dress up as the cheerleaders and think it’s wit. Yet even I will concede that they haven’t all been winners and that by vowing to watch every minute of every episode of Saturday Night Live I am agreeing to suffer through hundreds upon hundreds of hours of sketches that don’t work, gags that aren’t funny, recurring characters that barely deserve to be one-offs and catchphrases that inspire groans rather than explosive laughter. 

That’s because Saturday Night Live has been on the air for so long, and means so many different things to so many different people, that it does not seem hyperbolic to say that the show is everything.

It’s ferociously alive but also Saturday Night Dead. It’s very, very funny and brutally unfunny as well. With Saturday Night Live it’s never “either/or", it’s eternally “and” 

The show was still bracingly new when Robert Klein became its fifth host but a certain exhaustion had set in nonetheless. 

Why? Because, and this is a point that has been made millions of times, sometimes by me, because it’s true: it’s damn near impossible for even explosively talented writers and performers to create ninety new minutes of quality entertainment EVERY WEEK. 

It’s hard to create ninety minutes of quality entertainment, total. It’s damn near impossible to do so live, every week, with crazy variables like Steve Forbes as host added to the mix. 

The Robert Klein episode offers the exhausting, ubiquitous  spectacle of sketches that whiff right off the bat, but linger on until the commercial break. Sometimes that can feel like a single heartbeat. Sometimes it feels like an eternity. A sketch with Belushi and Klein as exterminators with decidedly different attitude towards cockroaches, for example, seems to last several lifetimes.

Like George Carlin, the show’s first host, Klein ends up doing multiple stand-up segments AND performs a novelty song but nothing in the comedy makes as strong an impression as the yin/yang pairing of Loudon Wainwright III and ABBA as the musical guests. 

ABBA can’t be bothered to play their instruments or sing; they lip-sync and mime instead while Wainwright III doesn’t play the acoustic guitar so much as he violently pummels it. He beats that poor instrument up as if it were single-handedly responsible for all of the lies and hypocrisy of the American people. Wainwright III doesn’t sing; he shouts his lyrics in a sarcastic rage.

ABBA barely seems awake. Wainwright III seems like he’s in the throes of a violent nervous breakdown. 

Saturday Night Live’s built in weaknesses were there from the very beginning, most notably in the insane amount of airtime the show had to fill every seven days, but its even more formidable strengths made them easy to ignore or overlook. 

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