Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary filled the cultural airwaves this week, including, on Saturday night at 11:30 a re-airing of the very first episode from 1975. I watched it but didn’t really need to because it was burned into my brain. I watched it when it originally aired with my mother. We liked to stay up late and watch whatever. I didn’t really have a set bedtime as a kid because I was always a night owl, so I got to watch whatever was on at 10 pm – Mission Impossible or the like.
As I watched this weekend, I had forgotten most of the sketches on the show because they were mostly forgettable, but at about 20 minutes in they introduced Andy Kaufman in a two-minute segment and it changed my life.
I mean that: it changed my life. Here was was of my first encounters with something weird and absurd and I knew I wanted more of it. I guess what got me was the lip-synching to a childish record. The next day I got out my kiddie records (Peter Pan Players!) and started playing them and lip-synching to them.
One of the cool things about record players was that they had different speeds: 16 2/3, 33, 45 and 78 rpm. I think at that time I only had a record player that played 33 and 45 – the most common speeds. 33 was for LPs (the familiar large records) and 45 was for singles…the little discs you had to use an adapter for to center properly.
At some point after that, I got an old stereo record player at a flea market. Not only was it stereo, the first hi-fi technology I had ever owned, but it had ALL FOUR speeds. I honestly don’t know how my family survived my sound experiments with this, as I loved to play records at the wrong speeds, and I’d do it for hours. I remember one day I started to play Richard Wagner’s five-hour long opera Parsifal at 16 2/3s, but at that point I realized that even I had gone too far.
Kaufman’s humor was based on what we would now call “cringe comedy” – looking back at the clip it’s his awkwardness that fueled the humor, and of course his entire career would be based on questioning what was just an act and what was reality. I think that’s easier to do now with an array of social media at our disposal (when everything is real, nothing is real) but Kaufman pushed many boundaries like no one else in his day.
Several other segments on the first SNL also stayed lodged in my memory. I guess me and my mom were the only humans who liked the Muppets on the show and “I can’t release my darts” became slang in my household for just what you might imagine.
Another thing that became canon for me was the ad hawking a triple blade razor, which included an animation that showed the razor was not cutting the hair but painfully pulling it out. I thought that was hilarious.
The other thing was the bee sketch. I grew up in Somerville, NJ, which was known for two things: a horrible traffic circle, and on that circle a fried chicken place called Mr. Bee that hired a guy to dress in a bee suit and dance in front. Secretly, I was sure that someone who made the show (I wasn’t hep to writers and directors then) must have been inspired to make the sketch after a trip to Somerville, so I cheered whenever the bees were on.
Prior to SNL, my mother had also introduced me to Monty Python, so I had seen absurdist humor before….and I liked it. In one of the many articles about SNL 50 (I can’t find it now because there were so many) Lorne Michaels was quoted as saying everyone’s favorite cast was whenever they were in high school. I didn’t go to high school but I was the right age for the original cast to become aspirational role models for me. That cast obviously exemplified the gritty, downtown chic of the era….an era that still seems cool, at least based on the return of flared pants. That the show always had photos of random New York scenes was part of its esthetic – that photo of the old guy eating the watermelon is another thing burned into my brain. So much of the early years was rooted in the vibe and down to earth character of New York City. Kind of like this PSA of kids with accents that was popular on Instagram the other day.
The New York-centric outlook of the show lasted for a while – a clip of Philip Glass as the musical guest in 1986 on the music retrospective show was a reminder of how that was a very downtown NYC type thing to book. Now while we don’t have a monoculture, we have a homogenized one, and there are less specifically New York things about SNL. The exception is John Mullaney’s mini-musicals which absolutely nail some of our local quirks. I have myself often wondered just why lobster is on the menu at a diner at all.
As a kid growing up in the tri-state era, SNL’s opening credits showing the cast doing cool grown-up New York things was insanely alluring. I might be stuck home on Saturday night watching TV but some day I would be doing those cool things, too!
Life took me to other states, but when I moved back to New York in the 90s, the fantasy sort of became the reality. I would occasionally see cast members hanging out at some of my hangouts, and I recall once being turned away from a bar because it was closed for the afterparty. Much later, I met Seth Meyers and Bill Hader after they were on Comic Book Club Live, and they were both super nice! Watching all the clip shows, I realized that my memory of the shows from about 1995-2005 is dim because…I was always out on a Saturday night, doing cool downtown things like a real New Yorker! We didn’t have DVRs or YouTube to watch the show on Sunday morning, like I do now.
Another thing that excited youthful me was Marvel Team-up #74 from 1978 which featured Spider-Man teaming up with the SNL cast when Stan Lee is the host. The issue was written by Chris Claremont, penciled by Bob Hall, and inked and colored by Marie Severin. In 1978 comics were not yet cool, but Marvel was also a very New York thing – along with most of the comics industry of the time. The story involves glowing rings and the Silver Samurai, and Spidey helping the cast defeat the villain, with some sword work by John Belushi – now it’s easy to see Marvel was trying to be hip, but maybe they were already hipper than they knew.
The “Superhero Sketch” from 1979, with host Margot Kidder, was another comics cross-over of the time, and despite the success of the Superman movie, it was still a surprise to see comics going “mainstream.”
Now of course, most of the movie stars who host SNL have starred in comic book movies, and nobody thinks twice when a writer or cast member reveals they read comics.
When Saturday Night Live debuted it was still considered “subversive” and comics were outsider art. Now SNL is an institution, and comics are educational and accepted. It’s hard for me to look at SNL as a whole because of my personal nostalgia for the first episode and those early days. But I’m sure some kid somewhere is watching a YouTube video or reading a comic and it’s changing their life. That’s one thing that never changes.
English (US) · 