November 22, 1975 Host and Musical Guest Lily Tomlin

Here's some stuff that happened in the past

Lily Tomlin was the second female host of Saturday Night Live and kicked off the show’s second season because she possessed the exact skill set necessary to host the show. That extends to working well with Lorne Michaels, who wrote on her 1973 special Lily and won an Emmy for 1975’s The Lily Tomlin Special.The connection goes even further: Michaels was a writer for Laugh-In, the zeitgeist-capturing comedy variety show that made Tomlin a star. 

She was a ringer who wasn’t just the most obvious host in the world; she’s the musical guest here as well. 

Tomlin does double duty appearing in a number of sketches, some by herself but she also confidently sings a jazz standard backed by Howard Shore and his All-Nurse Band. 

Though not as famous as Paul Schaffer, Shore would go on to extraordinary success as a film composer as well as a musician. Saturday Night Live’s first musical director would go on to win three Academy Awards and is a Tony Award away from EGOT status but in 1975 he was just a Jewish Canadian summer school friend of Lorne Michaels in his late twenties thankful for a steady gig on national television. 

Part of the skillset that Tomlin brought to Saturday Night Live was the ability to sing. That’s true of many young comic performers, particularly on Saturday Night Live. 

Tomlin sings several numbers here, most notably a wickedly satirical ditty sung from the perspective of a sorority girl imploring her very lost sister Patty Hearst to abandon all the Symbionese Liberation Army nonsense and return to a soft pink cashmere life of privilege and power.

Tomlin is at times too slick and confident. As part of her monologue Tomlin performs a half-rapped, half-spoken cheer for New York that not even she can pull off. Otherwise Tomlin could not be more in her element, laughing and joking and engaging with a younger generation of performers who understandably held her in the highest of regard. Except for John Belushi, of course, who famously thought that women are not funny.

The national treasure closes things out by scat-singing with the cast dressed in their bee costumes. It’s a new, sillier form of “Bee Bop’ involving fake bees beeping and bopping and enjoying being in the very center of the comedy universe at a very special time and place. 

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