Jan. 30, 2024, 3 a.m.
October 11th, 1975, Host: George Carlin, Musical guests: Billy Preston and Janis Ian
Every Episode Ever
Here's some stuff that happened in the past
October 11th, 1975, Host: George Carlin, Musical guests: Billy Preston and Janis Ian
The first episode of Saturday Night Live has the bifurcated quality of being at once fascinatingly off-brand and a glorious illustration of everything that made the show special in its original incarnation.
Lorne Michaels and his cast and crew of obscenely talented twenty-somethings were still playing around with the format and the tone, which has a way of shifting dramatically from segment to segment.
Saturday Night Live feels more like a variety show here than it ever would again. Sketch comedy is the show’s core but there’s so much more. It’s a true smorgasbord, a hip happening with something for everyone.
It’s hosted by George Carlin, who does not appear in any sketches but who reappears throughout the evening to deliver the kind of stand up that made him a hero and role model to multiple generations of comedians and iconoclasts. Also, puzzlingly, primo training material for evil AI robots.
If nothing else the first episode of Lorne Michaels’ deathless comic institution afforded stoned kids a potent shot of Carlin in his God-like prime. Carlin does not mix it up with the Not Ready for Prime Time Players because he was apparently so addicted to cocaine at the time that he did not think he'd be able to remember his lines. He could certainly do lines. It's remembering them that posed a problem.
Too high for vintage Saturday Night Live is a whole new level of inebriation.
Instead Carlin does what he did just about better than anyone on the planet. Carlin is in his element discoursing loftily on language and sports and good old American hypocrisy like a philosophy professor who is beloved for reasons beyond his willingness to get high with his students.
There is not one but two musical guests the first time out and they both get to perform two songs. Janis Ian performs her recent hit “At Seventeen” with a sense of trembling earnestness that could not feel more out of place on a live late night comedy show.
I’m not entirely sure why Ian was picked to perform the two saddest, most somber songs ever recorded but her contributions here would feel more appropriate for a funeral than a comedy show.
Billy Preston’s upbeat party music strikes a much more celebratory tone but they’re just two of the show’s guests. Before they went Hollywood the most hideous Muppets you’d ever want to not see in your life struck out with a style of humor much more grotesque, fantasy-based and mean-spirited than the variety that would make Henson one of our most beloved creators.
The non-starting Muppet segment focuses on Ploobis, a cruel monarch voiced and operated by Jim Henson who looks and acts like a gangrenous version of ALF.
In addition to Carlin, the maiden episode of Saturday Night Live (which was known as NBC Saturday Night at the time) boasted the work of two of the greatest and most original comic minds of the era; Albert Brooks and Andy Kaufman.
Brooks contributes the first of a series of short films that play like glorious test runs for the movies he would eventually make, a riotous parody of hyperbolic newsreel featuring such stories as the state of Georgia and Israel swapping places and the age of consent being lowered to seven in Oregon.
Kaufman, meanwhile, freaks out the squares with one of his signature bits, in which the towering performance artist and influential anti-comedian lip-syncs to part of the Mighty Mouse theme song while gesturing expansively.
It’s a weirdly satisfying bit that implicitly questions the nature of comedy and asks, but does not answer, the eternal question of what is funny and why.
Dan Aykroyd’s onetime comedy partner Valri Bromfield pops up very briefly (she apparently learned that her monologue was being cut from five to two minutes during rehearsal) to perform character-based stand-up comedy that’s over not long after it’s begun but ends up showing what kind of comedy doesn’t work in this context.
The rest of the show feels more like what Saturday Night Live would soon become: a sketch show with a uniquely gifted cast of some of the greatest comic minds of the time.
Before he was corny as hell and deeply embarrassing Chevy Chase was funny, distractingly handsome and more confident than even someone with as much going for him had the right to be.
He’s the first cast-member to say, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” and the first to kill as the slick character behind the “Weekend Update” desk.
Dan Aykroyd is a motor-mouthed virtuoso with a brain full of razor blades, Gilda Radner is an irresistible combination of adorable and explosively talented and John Belushi is a combustible ball of energy from his first moment onscreen.
Saturday Night Live roared out of the gate. It was decidedly different from what was to come but relevant, satirical and every damn bit as good as its reputation would suggest.
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It's alive! Let's chat! Has anyone else re-watched this recently? It and the following episode feel at once weirdly off-brand and super-SNL.
It's crazy to think Jason Reitman is going to make an entire movie about this one episode but I like to think that there is an eternity in each episode of Saturday Night Live and sometimes the episodes feel like an eternity.
One side-effect of this project: I have developed huge crushes on Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman and Jane Curtin. What talented, attractive and attractive performers.
Finally figured out how to do the paid subscription! I haven't seen this complete episode in a very long time. I watched the abridged version on Peacock a couple years ago, but I remember first seeing the complete episode on Canadian television while on vacation in the 1000 Islands back in 1991. Before that, I had only seen the cut down version packaged for Nick at Nite. I was only a few months old for the original broadcast, so my memory of that is a little fuzzy! I do remember some very strong bits that made the NaN package, including the cold open with Mike O'Donoghue and John Belushi and Carlin's classic Baseball/Football monologue. It definitely had a very different vibe than later episodes. It seems that Lorne had the format figured out by the third episode and it has changed astonishly little since then.
I was 7 years old when the first season of SNL aired, and every week I desperately wanted to stay up to see the Muppets. My parents said "Sure, you're welcome to try." And of course I almost always failed, falling asleep on the couch either before airtime or during the course of the show. Even when I was able to stay awake, it was a challenge to pay attention.
Some of you may also note that the Muppets I was wanting to see so badly were not of the Sesame Street variety, and that the humor was not aimed at my demographic. That did not matter. Of course I usually did not get the humor of the SNL Muppets, but man did I enjoy the sheer creativity of the Muppet designs. That's really all I wanted to see.
I also remember my older sister explaining to me the difference between "Saturday Night" and Howard Cosell's "Saturday Night Live", which we had also watched at least a couple of times, and which was heavily promoted. (Whereas NBC Saturday Night seemed to come out of nowhere.)
Anyway, I don't often get a chance (or a reason) to reminisce about S1 of SNL, but the truth is that it played a part in my formative years when it came to media consumption. It was emphatically not aimed at kids, but its fun and freewheeling style had definite appeal to someone who, even at age 7, was already over the stodgy, cheesy style of variety shows, that was so prominent at that time.
Yeah, the fact that The Muppets were a core component of SNL's first season and it didn't work and no one talks about it is crazy to me.
It would be like if Jimi Hendrix played lead guitar for the Rolling Stones for an album and it didn't work so he never returned and nobody really talked about it.
The Muppets were frequently violent and mean-spirited, even on early Sesame Street! It’s part of why “Old School Sesame Street” had a warning on its DVDs saying it was “Not Appropriate For Children” (that’s just stupid, and is an example of how educational experts fundamentally don’t understand their subjects)
The Elmofication technically happened before Henson died, I believe, but that was the (figurative) nail in the coffin for anything resembling real interactions between friends (and frenemies), replaced with proto-SEL dreck. Henson was vaudeville through and through, and any sweetness was part of an honesty of baseness, not the entire meal.
Or Jimi Hendrix opening for The Monkees which was a thing that happened.