October 11th, 1975, Host: George Carlin, Musical Guests Janis Ian and Billy Preston
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 the extremely dead yet disconcertingly active George Carlin—who, in a truly Black Mirror development, was recently "resurrected" via AI for a "comedy" "special" that marks a grim nadir for western civilization as a whole and the entertainment industry specifically—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.
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. Instead he does what he did just about better than anyone else on the planet, with the possible exception of his AI replacement. 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 and sincerity 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 who looks and acts like a gangrenous version of ALF.
In addition to Carlin, the maiden episode of Saturday Night Live 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.
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.
Jason Reitman, whose dad worked fairly extensively with some Saturday Night Live cast members if I remember correctly, is apparently making a movie on the making of this episode.
Reitman is sure to treat the material with reverence, which certainly turned out well for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip but if it means that more people are thinking about talking about Saturday Night Live and its extraordinary legacy I am all for it.
If it helps me sell books and win subscribers then it's just swell.
Up next: Paul Simon & Friends (including Art Garkfunkel!)