Actors and actresses often make for good Saturday Night Live hosts because the gig is fundamentally about comedy and making people laugh but it also involves acting, dialogue and playing not just one character but a series of characters, live, over the course of 90 magical minutes.
Good acting makes everything funnier and Jill Clayburgh is a fine actress as well as an engaged and amusing sketch performer.
A good rule of thumb for Saturday Night Live is that if a host comes to play and have fun, the ensuing show will reflect that. If a host treats their time at 30 Rock as a chore or a professional obligation, however, it will be just as obvious and the show will suffer as a result.
As we will re-learn repeatedly over the course of the remaining 983 entries in Every Episode Ever putting on a new ninety minute live comedy program every week is difficult to the point of being impossible.
The exciting and daunting thing about sketch comedy is that you constantly have to start over with new characters, new settings and new dialogue. That’s why recurring characters and catchphrases are so useful. They allow the show to build upon past successes while establishing an element of continuity and consistency that audiences find soothing.
Saturday Night Live’s first season was filled with firsts. The eleventh episode featured, in the comedy team of Peter Cook & Dudley Moore, the first duo to host the show as well as the first foreigners.
As hosts, Peter Cook & Dudley Moore were almost too good. They were so skilled at sketch comedy that they didn’t particularly need the Not Ready For Prime Time Players.
Buck Henry begins the monologue from his very first appearance on Saturday Night Live by conceding that he is an unlikely and unusual host because he is not a movie star, stand-up comedian or a famous musician.
The relatively modest nature of Henry’s fame ended up working in the show’s favor. At forty-five, Henry was ancient by Saturday Night Live standards as well as egoless.
If you had asked me who the first person to host Saturday Night Live twice was I probably would have guessed Buck Henry or Steve Martin or another professional funnyman synonymous with the show’s early years.
I would have been wrong. The first person to host Saturday Night Live twice was Candice Bergen. According to Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s essential Saturday Night Live history Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live when Bergen first hosted the show pretty much every man on staff fell in love with her. She, in turn, fell in love with Saturday Night Live. It would prove to be an enduring romance.
Bergen with a puppet, not Charlie McCarthy
Bergen was gorgeous. She was famous. She was a movie star. She was utterly enraptured with Saturday Night Live and its cast and crew and was up for anything, including a sketch where John Belushi, as Sam Peckinpah, beats the crap out of her.
December 13th, 1975: Host Richard Pryor with Musical Guest Gil-Scot Heron
Dunno if this is bootleg or not.
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.
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.
November 8th, 1975 Host: Candice Bergen, Musical Guest, Esther Phillips
It may be hard to imagine now but in the mid 1970s there were only about three or four entertainment options. The most appealing was watching Chevy Chase fall down and get all mixed up playing President Gerald Ford.
Chase revolutionarily played Ford as an affable bungler who was always tripping over himself linguistically and physically. It’s an almost perversely gentle depiction of the most powerful man on earth as a bit of a well-meaning goober.
October 11th, 1975, Host: George Carlin, Musical guests: Billy Preston and Janis Ian
George Carlin wants to fight you-with satirical truth!
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.
In the mid 1970s television lagged far behind film, music and stand-up comedy in hipness, transgression and social commentary. That’s a big part of the reason Saturday Night Live was initially seen as so audacious and revolutionary.
Future Saturday Night Live host Norman Lear had single-handedly dragged television into the 1970s with his pioneering comedies. Otherwise the boob tube was largely the domain of cheesy variety shows, sitcoms with canned laughter and an endless series of interchangeable cop, doctor and lawyer shows.
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.
Robert Klein was at one point one of the hottest comedians alive. The 1970s were a weird place.
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
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.
October 18th, 1975, Paul Simon with guests Art Garfunkel, Phoebe Snow and Randy Newman
In a possibly related development, Paul Simon is Lorne Michaels' best friend.
Saturday Night Live is a sketch comedy show with music. When Paul Simon hosted its second show, however, the dynamic was reversed. A sketch comedy show with music became a music show with sketch comedy.
December 13th, 1975: Host Richard Pryor with Musical Guest Gil-Scot Heron
Dunno if this is bootleg or not.
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.
