Here's some stuff that happened in the past
October 25th, 1975 Host,Rob Reiner, Musical guest: John Belushi as Joe Cocker
Everything is show-business in Saturday Night Live’s third episode. Host Rob Reiner kicks off the festivities with an opening monologue where he plays a smarmy, pathologically insincere lounge singer, not unlike the kind that would become Bill Murray’s signature character on the show.
In the type of segment the show would soon eschew, future cast-member Denny Dillon and her comedy partner Mark Hampton cheerfully embody a pair of nuns doling out the gospel with an excess of variety show schmaltz.
Albert Brooks, meanwhile, returns in a short film where he decides to pursue his dream of performing open heart surgery with the assistance of actual doctors whose experience and expertise he bitterly resents when they contradict his own wildly unearned confidence.
In Brooks' warped, fame-crazed world the famous get to do anything they please because they’re famous, even if it entails risking the lives of innocent people. It’s a deliciously deadpan satire that depicts our reverence for celebrity as a form of madness.
In lieu of a musical guest John Belushi impersonates Joe Cocker performing "With a Little Help From My Friends" as if he’s experiencing every intense emotion simultaneously, particularly the painful ones.
The exquisitely eccentric Andy Kaufman lip-syncs to an ancient recording of "Pop Goes the Weasel" as if he was a child-like space alien who understood nothing about Earthlings and their curious ways but felt a curious need to entertain all the same.
In the spirit of pioneering anti-comedy the cast once again dresses up like bees for a weird meta bit whose deeply conceptual humor comes from the characters and the bit just not working at all yet the show repeatedly subjecting audiences to it all the same.
Reiner complains bitterly about the bees and their surreal pointlessness, only to have John Belushi stand up for himself and his fellow performers with an utterly misplaced sense of outrage and dignity.
In its original incarnation Saturday Night Live even found time for break-dancing via a spirited performance by street dance legends The Lockers, whose members included future pop star Toni Basil, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo's Adolfo "Shabba Doo" Quiñon and Fred Berry. That’s right: a year before What’s Happening made him famous Rerun got live on Saturday Night when it was at its hippest and most happening.
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