Here's some stuff that happened in the past
December 13th, 1975: Host Richard Pryor with Musical Guest Gil-Scot Heron
When what was originally named NBC’s Saturday Night Live was being conceptualized Lorne Michaels and the execs at NBC had decidedly different ideas about ideal hosts. The squares in suits thought Rich Little and Bob Hope should stop by 30 Rock as often as possible.
Lorne Michaels, in sharp contrast, saw his recent collaborator Lily Tomlin and Richard Pryor as perfect hosts. Michaels was so committed to Pryor as a host, in fact, that he threatened to leave the show if he couldn’t have Pryor.
Michaels went to other extremes to make the show as appealing as possible to the hottest, hippest and most important stand-up comedian in the world.
The ambitious producer acquiesced to Pryor’s demands to bring his people to the show. He insisted that his friend and creative partner Paul Mooney contribute as a writer and that Gil Scot Heron be the musical guest.
Pryor even secured a spot on the broadcast for his ex-wife Shelley. With a look of unearned self-satisfaction she delivers a cringe-inducing rhyming routine about racism and interracial relationships. It’s the kind of poignantly amateur material you can only get on air if you have an in with the star and the only rough spot in what is otherwise possibly the single best show Saturday Night had done up to that point.
Pryor’s opening monologue is a masterpiece of physical and verbal humor as he recreates the mind-blowing and mind-enhancing effects of his first acid trip. Pryor doesn’t tell jokes; he performs elaborate routines with his whole body, face and soul, wringing pathos and hilarity out of every line.
Pryor talks poignantly about how alcohol is supposed to make you happy but that all the drunks he knows are sad and get beaten up a lot. The same was true of Pryor, unfortunately. Life was both kind and unkind to Pryor. During the course of his famously tumultuous existence he took all kinds of punches. Being notoriously self-destructive, Pryor had a way of leaning into life’s hardest punches.
Though Michaels showed an admirable willingness to showcase black musicians from the very beginning, the show was nevertheless very white. Garret Morris was the sole black cast-member. Morris began the unfortunate tradition of the talented black cast-member that the show under-serves because it does not understand blackness, black culture or black humor.
The comedy here is rooted inextricably in race but more specifically in the pain and anguish of American-style racism.
The episode’s most famous sketch, indeed one of the most controversial and talked about sketches in television history, takes the form of a word association game being played by a white employer played by Chevy Chase, the very embodiment of upper class WASP chicness, and a job interviewee played by Richard Pryor.
Things start off benignly but quickly take a turn when the interviewer starts tossing out a series of racial slurs, many of the antiquated variety.
Chase’s expression is placid and unconcerned but Pryor gets angrier and angrier with each unforgivable insult until, overcome with rage, he responds to Chase saying the N Word with an apoplectic, unmistakably threatening “DEAD Honky.”
The sketch grows safer and more conventional at the end, with Chase making the interview subject the top paid janitor in the world, largely so that he will not strangle him to death in a fit of righteous rage.
Pryor and his talented collaborators pushed Saturday Night Live out of its comfort zone. It proved that the show did not need Andy Kaufman to feel wild and dangerous and on the knife’s edge of chaos and anarchy.
It just needed a host who was one of the greatest performers in American history and a uniquely gifted ensemble operating at the apex of their extraordinary abilities only seven episodes in.
neat, eh? Man, I LOVE this silly newsletter.