FTV: SNL at 50
Having done a couple of quizzes about songs and lyrics, I will take a different tact on this outing about Saturday Night Live. AARP – The Magazine ran a ‘test your knowledge of five decades of Saturday Night Live’ feature recently. Using their quiz, I am going to do a Johnny Carson ‘Carnac the Magnificent’ bit and give you the answers before revealing the questions. Here we go:
Answer 1: Wayne’s World – Question: Which was the highest grossing movie based on a sketch? A2: Howard Johnson – Q: Who was the first band leader on SNL? A3: Papyrus – Q: In a skit gone viral, Ryan Gosling plays a man obsessed with the Avatar film’s use of what font? A4: “We come from France” – Q: What excuse do the Coneheads use to justify their strange behavior? A5: Schweddy Holiday balls – Q: This pitch-perfect NPR holiday spoof centered on Alec Baldwin’s – what? How are you doing? Have we stirred up any SNL memories yet? How about the fact that the show wasn’t even called Saturday Night Live in the first season? The show began its run simply known as Saturday Night (see A19 below).
Back to the AARP quiz. A6: 11:30 – Q: [Producer] Lorne Michaels says that “the show doesn’t go on because it’s ready. It goes on because it’s . . .” A7: Bill Swerski’s Superfans – Q. Name the skit with Chris Farley and his pals ARE all made up like Mike Ditka. A8: Drive a car – Q: Toonces was a cat that could . . . A9: Sushi – Q: In the fake ad for Taco Town, what is not included in the new menu item? A10: “Volume” – Q: How does First Citi-wide Change Bank, which does nothing but make change, do it, according to the 1988 fake commercial? I remember watching the A9 segment on Taco Town and while it made a very good point about how silly some of the fast foot joints got with ‘specials’ – it also made me a little nauseous watching them back layer upon layer of gloppy items into a take out shoulder bag.
A11: Mr. Bill – Q: Which bit was sent to SNL on videotape by a recent high school grad? A12 – A17: Katie Lee Gifford, Beyonce, Alex Trebek, Ed McMahon, Mister Rogers, Julie Child – Q: Which cast members parodied these celebrities? – Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Will Ferrell, Phil Hartman, Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd A18: True – Q: Tina Fey made up this quote for her impression of Sarah Palin: “I can see Russia from my house.” A:19: TRUE – Q: For the first season, the show was called NBC’s Saturday Night because ABC had a comedy/variety show called Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell, featuring Bill Murray and Christopher Guest.
We all know that Bill Murray went on to join SNL when Chevy Chase bolted for Hollywood and the lure of making big bucks in the movies. Come to think of it, Murray has also done pretty well in the movie department. Christopher Guest would go on to be part of the ‘Lenny and Squiggy’ duo on Laverne and Shirley before his movie making star turn as guitarist/vocalist Nigel Tufnel in the 1984 comedy/musical This is Spinal Tap. While the whole movie runs like a series of SNL skits, the gag where he explains why their amp dials go to ‘11’ and not just the typical ‘10’. The exploding drummer schtick was also pretty funny, if you weren’t the drummer.
A20: FALSE – Q: The Smithsonian museum displays Eddie Murphy’s Gumby costume. A21: TRUE – Q: Is the Seinfeld episode “The Revenge” based on Larry David angrily quitting SNL right before taping and then returning to the office on Monday, pretending he never quit? A22: TRUE – Q: George W. Bush never said, “Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent.” Dana Carvey made it up for his impression.
Okay, the ‘True / False’ answers didn’t give you much to go on, but the matching section labeled ‘Hair Flair’ would have been really hard to translate into article form without pictures. You will just have to get a mental picture of the hair style each of the following characters (actors) sported in skits: Ed Grimley’s gelled up pointy do (Martin Short), Church Lady’s prim bob (Dana Carvey), Buckwheat’s iconic friz (Eddie Murphy), Stuart Smalley’s blond manicured wig (Al Franken), Rosanne Roseannadanna’s wild bird’s nest (Gilda Radner), and (okay, head shape and not actually a hairstyle), Coneheads (Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtain, Laraine Newman).
When NBC’s Saturday Night came on the air in 1975, I was in my first year teaching in Ontonagon. I remember catching the first three episodes in October (11, 18, 25). The Friday after the third episode I went to Duluth to visit my only Marquette buddy Wayne Nevala who was attending the University of Minnesota Duluth Medical School. Another mutual acquaintance from Marquette, Randy Vonk, and Wayne’s girlfriend Joan said they would pick me up in the afternoon and we would have dinner when we got to Duluth. It was Halloween and knowing I would be gone, I didn’t bother to pick up any candy for the trick or treaters. I watched them going up and down the street and ignored knocks on my door as I waited to be picked up. Afternoon turned into early evening and they finally pulled up about 7 pm – apparently Joan had failed to mention she had to work until 5 and couldn’t leave until then. To make it a perfect weekend, I started coming down with a head cold on the three hour drive to Duluth.
The weekend is kind of a blur because with a fresh cold, I didn’t feel much like hitting the town. I did rave about the first three episodes of Saturday Night I had seen and had everybody set to watch the November 1, 1975 show. We were really disappointed. Without the luxury of social media to warn us about the change, a documentary (actually, more of a ‘mockumentary’) came on with no explanation. I have searched the NBC archives high and low and so far have not been able to recover the name of this fill-in show. We first wondered if SNL had already been canceled (not likely with the ratings it had drawn). Then we speculated that it was so new they were working on the timeline needed to put on a 90 minutes live show every week. The only part of this other show I remember was a segment about astronaut Neil Armstrong’s hometown of Wapakenta, Ohio. Much to my relief, the Ready for Prime Time Players were back in place the next weekend.
The format for the show changed as SNL more or less invented this new late night live format. The producers (Michaels and Dick Ebersol) decided to forego having a regular host and to bring in a guest host each week. Chevy Chase became the first to do a cold opening sketch with the now familiar, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night” tag line. In fact, Chase would do all but two of the cold openings during the first season. With George Carlin hosting the premier, they made good use of his standup talents and had him do four segments. The musical guests on that show were Billy Preston and Janis Ian with Preston’s hit Nothing From Nothing coming on right after the first skit.
Rapid set changes were needed to segue from one skit to the next. There were many times in those early years when the broadcast would come back from a commercial break showing a screen saver shot with the band playing music in the background. I found out later that the set designers for the first seasons were Eugene and Fran Lee who have a local connection. Eugene is the twin brother of former Ontonagon Area School’s librarian (and founder of WOAS-FM radio), Tom Lee.
The house band went through many different musicians and musical directors over the years. In the first five seasons when Howard Johnson was directing (composer Howard Shore was the musical director and he turned over the directing to Johnson), Paul Shaffer played the piano and it only appeared he was the one in charge. Shaffer, who was raised in Thunder Bay, Ontario, had worked with Gilda Radner in the Toronto, Ontario production of Godspell and had most recently been working on Broadway. He was in NYC at just the right time to get on the show.
Shaffer regularly appeared in sketches and worked on projects outside of SNL with some of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. Most famously, he was the musical director for the John Belushi / Dan Aykroyd Blues Brothers skits and records. It is no surprise that other than Steve Cropper, Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn, and Matt ‘Guitar’ Murphy, the rest of the Blues Brothers Band were all former members of the SNL band. Shaffer is also the holder of another title but probably not one he brags about. During a live sketch broadcast in the Eastern Time Zone, Paul got a little over excited and inserted an ‘F-bomb’ where a less forbidden term appeared on the cue cards. To make it just a little worse, the censors didn’t catch up with the mistake before the delayed west coast version had already aired. Perhaps there are worse things one could be known for, but this could have cost a lesser cast member a job. Paul Schaffer, however, escaped unscathed in this case.
Shaffer would have appeared in the first Blues Brothers movie as well but Belushi dropped him from the project. John was rankled because Paul was working on an album with Gilda Radner (whom he adored) and Belushi felt he should have been giving 100 percent of his time to the Blues Brothers. When Paul left SNL in 1980, he was kept busy in various musical projects until he hooked up with David Letterman as his musical director for many years on NBC and later CBS. Shaffer has also acted as the musical director for the Rock and Roll Museum Induction Ceremony since they began in 1986 and conducted the orchestra when a reunited Grand Funk Railroad recorded a two CD live set to raise funds for war torn Bosnia.
In season six, singer Kenny Vance picked up the baton and then band member / trombonist Tom Malone took over (when Dick Ebersol was running the show in 1981-85). When Lorne Michales returned to the show, he brought in former Hall and Oates guitarist G.E. Smith who held that position until 1995 (he was fired during the mass exodus of cast members that year). Since that time, saxophonist and long time band member Lenny Pickett has been in charge. Since 1985, Pickett has been ever present in the front row of the bandstand. He was also a former member of the sought after horn band, Tower of Power, (from 1973 to 1981) who did extensive session work as well as recording some very successful albums under their own name.
Michael Arlen summed up the appeal of SNL’s first shows in his 1975 review for The New Yorker: “What is attractive and unusual about the program is that is an attempt, finally, to provide entertainment on television in a recognizable human, non-celebrity voice, and in a voice, too, that tries to deal with the morass of media-induced show business culture that increasingly pervades American life.”
The other thing that put the show in everybody’s brains were the ‘water cooler catch phrases’ that every show seemed to produce. I thought of John Belushi the last time I flew through Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and had a hamburger at a hole in the wall (literally) joint called Billy Goat Tavern (named after the real deal located in Chicago). When the Republican Convention was held in Chicago in 1944, the tavern posted a sign stating, “No Republicans allowed,” which of course caused it to overflow with patrons. Belushi and Bill Murray were familiar with the place from their days with the Second City troup and gave it another dose of publicity with the skit about a place they called ‘The Olympia’. The Billy Goat website gives this description of how their actual history inspired the skit: “Ordering at the Billy Goat may go something like this: ‘Cheezborger! Cheezborger! You want doublecheez? Who’s next? WHO’S NEXT!? Don’t look at the menu, look at ME! I order for you – DOUBLECHEEZ! You want fries with that? No fries, CHEEPS! Thirsty? No Pepsi – COKE. Coke or Diet?” I wasn’t expecting this kind of chaotic scene at O’Hare and just as well, it would have slowed service down with people gawking (like they do at the famous Seattle Fish Market when the fish tossing starts).
Watching a clip of the SNL skit, I noticed there was one subtle difference than the ‘real life’ tale in the ‘Legend’ part of the Billy Goat Tavern webpage where the above dialog was taken from. In the skit, they don’t have Coke, only Pepsi. The Greek accents are true enough (as the founder and his family are of Greek descent) but maybe just a little exaggerated. Belushi, Aykroyd, and Bill Murray are the featured players but the whole cast is needed to show the hustle and bustle of a literal ‘cheezeborger factory’. Okay, the Olympia Restaurant skit didn’t come out until the third season, but by then, SNL was a fine tuned machine firing on all cylinders. And yes, the Billy Goat Tavern does have a real billy goat mascot (a descendant of the original) and the original owner’s family still operates the establishment.
Just like a big happy (or perhaps dysfunctional) family, SNL has had great years and some so-so years. Cast members changed and new favorite characters and skits emerged. After season 11, the entire cast were all fired….literally….in skit form. Apparently there were not enough memorable characters created that season so in the last episode, Lorne called Jon Lovitz out of a meeting. While they talk, there appears to be a blast of fire in the room behind them where the rest of the cast was ‘fired’. In truth A. Whitney Brown, Nora Dunn, and Dennis Miller were also back for season 12 as was writer Al Franken (though he wasn’t credited as a cast member that year).
Who were your favorite characters? Some were great (like the ‘Killer Bees’) until they used them one too many times and they got a bit stale. Eddie Murphy did so many memorable skits it is hard to pick one, but his ‘James Brown singing about the hot tub’ still makes me laugh. There have been many books written about the show and I highly recommend Live From New York – An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as told by its stars, writers and guests (by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller). The book was published in 2002 so it obviously covers the first twenty some years but I am sure there will be other volumes written to cover the next twenty five.
Current cast member Keenan Thompson is the current record holder for longevity, but Alec Baldwin has hosted a remarkable 17 times and with guest appearances, he has been on the air 50 times. Tom Hanks, Steve Martin, and John Goodman are also frequent fliers on the multiple-hosting and guest appearance roster. The down years have been few and the jury is still out on where this year’s cast and writers will fall on the ‘favorites’ list. The only way to determine if SNL50 is funny enough to continue on to season 51 is to watch. Lorne Michaels has hinted he may bow out but if SNL is still a hot property, look for it to continue.
There are no guarantees in TV programming. Remember Fridays? ABC trotted out a look-alike show that lasted one season (if that). The only memorable part of that pale attempt to copy SNL was Michael Richards who would go on to greater fame as Cosmo in Seinfeld. The fact that SNL at 50 is still with us is pretty remarkable with today’s ‘sound byte addicted’ TV viewers glued to their social media devices and streaming services.
Top Piece Video: The Blues Brothers weren’t the only ones who farmed SNL as proving ground for hit records!