"Live From New York, it's SATURDAY NIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Steve Martin's "Wild and Crazy Guys" sketches with Dan Ackroyd were probably my favorite and the thing that drew me in as well as the "Jane, you ignorant slut" retort popular in my high school until I realized how sexist and hateful that was and stopped joking about it.
Around 1995, my viewing of the show became more sporadic and I missed a lot of the Will Ferrell era as well as Norm Macdonald, Molly Shannon, Tim Meadows, and Ana Gasteyer.
I adore Tina Fey, who is also probably in my top-top favorites list.
I adored the 50th anniversary show.
If anything, since viewing of this season and last season has been sporadic, this anniversary special spurred me on to not miss the rest and catch up on the best.
Thanks for tuning in.
https://ew.com/jane-curtin-laraine-newman-honor-gilda-radner-snl-50th-anniversary-11680811
Original SNL cast members Jane Curtin and Laraine Newman honor late costar Gilda Radner at 50th anniversary special
The actresses were the first three women on the "Saturday Night Live" cast.
Women of Saturday Night Live stick together forever.
SNL season 1 stars Jane Curtin and Laraine Newman paid tribute to their late costar Gilda Radner by holding up a photograph of the beloved comedian during the goodnights of the show's 50th anniversary special on Sunday.
The actresses were the first three women to star on the iconic sketch show, which launched on Oct. 11, 1975. Then known as NBC's Saturday Night, the original stars were known as the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. Along with Curtin, Newman, and Radner, the first cast also included Chevy Chase, Garrett Morris, Dan Aykroyd, and the late John Belushi, who died in 1982. Michael O'Donoghue, who died in 1994, and George Coe, who died in 2015, also briefly appeared as cast members that season.
Radner spent five seasons captivating SNL fans as Roseanne Roseannadanna, Lisa Loopner of "The Nerds," rambling elderly Weekend Update character Emily Litella, Barbara Walters parody Baba Wawa, and more. She won an Emmy for her work on the cast.
After leaving the show in 1980, Radner made several movies with Gene Wilder, including Hanky Panky, The Woman in Red, and Haunted Honeymoon. The pair married in 1984. Two years later, the actress was diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer and underwent chemotherapy and radiation therapy treatment. She was briefly in remission, but her cancer returned and she died on May 20, 1989. She received a posthumous star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2003.
NBCUniversal via Getty
In addition to Curtin and Newman, Chase and Morris were both in attendance at Sunday's celebration, with the latter introducing a 1978 short film by former staffer Tom Schiller that featured the entire original cast.
"Way back there when I joined the cast of Saturday Night Live, I had no idea y'all that I would be required to do so many reunion shows," the show's first Black cast member joked.
50th goodnightWatch Curtin, Newman, Morris, Chase, and dozens more SNL stars in the full 50th anniversary goodnights above.
Eddie Murphy returned to “Saturday Night Live” to host in 1984, resurrecting characters like Gumby, with, from left, Christopher Guest, Martin Short and Billy Crystal (and in the background, Larry David).RM Lewis Jr./NBC Universal, via Getty Images
The Greatest ‘Saturday Night Live’ Episode Ever*
*Well, maybe only to me. “S.N.L.” fans all have their own idea of the show’s peak, and this is mine.
James Poniewozik - Feb 8, 2025As measured by the calendar, “Saturday Night Live” is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. But you could also say that 50 “Saturday Night Lives” are each celebrating an anniversary.
There are, of course, those who watch the show every week, every year, and have followed its evolution for decades. But many of us have a singular personal “Saturday Night Live”: a particular season or group of performers that defines the show for us.
Don’t take this from me. Take it from Lorne Michaels. “Generally, when people talk about the best cast,” he once said, “I think, ‘Well, that’s when they were in high school.’”
I was in high school in 1984. Even back then — those freaks-and-geeks years when you define yourself by your pop-culture obsessions and nerds are most vulnerable to the wiles of sketch comedy — I was only a modest “S.N.L.” fan. I loved “S.C.T.V.” and David Letterman and Monty Python.
In college and later, I would move on to “The Simpsons” and other comedy enthusiasms. Sometimes I’d enjoy “S.N.L.”; sometimes I’d hate it; sometimes I’d enjoy hating it. But honestly, for most of my life I’ve thought of it like a public utility — always there, but not something I’d be a “fan” of any more than I’d be a fan of the gas company.
But there was a while when “S.N.L.” vibrated on my wavelength, when I was the right age to stay up, when my friends spent every Monday quoting lines to one another in the school cafeteria. I can narrow my “S.N.L.” of choice down to a specific season — in fact, to a specific episode: Season 10, Episode 9, airdate Dec. 15, 1984.
(You can stream an abbreviated version of this episode on Peacock; as is frustratingly true of many classic episodes, you’ll need to search for omitted clips online. My wife, an archivist, worked her contacts years ago to find us a samizdat recording of the full episode, which I treasure as an heirloom.)
My sense is that many “S.N.L.” fans consider Season 10 to be something of an asterisk, an aberration. Michaels wasn’t even with the show at the time — this was the Dick Ebersol interregnum, and there had just been a major shake-up in the cast.
Ebersol, like a baseball owner opening his wallet to free agents, brought in established comedy performers, including Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest, Rich Hall, Martin Short and Pamela Stephenson. The series did not have Eddie Murphy, who had continued the tradition of breakout stars’ leaving the series and its long, late hours for the movie business.
The episode built him a monumental pedestal. He reprised several famous characters, including the inner-city children’s host Mr. Robinson and an adult version of the “Our Gang” urchin Buckwheat, opposite Mary Gross as the squeaky-haired and deranged Alfalfa.
But the enduring classic of the episode is a pretaped mockumentary, “White Like Me,” in which Murphy goes undercover in whiteface and a Ned Flanders mustache to reveal the secret ways of white Americans. (The premise is a takeoff on “Black Like Me,” the 1961 book, later adapted into a film, for which John Howard Griffin darkened his skin to pass as Black.)
“When white people are alone,” Murphy discovers, “they give each other things for free,” from newspapers to bank loans. When the only other Black man on a New York City bus gets off at his stop, the white passengers serve cocktails and start dancing to oldies music. It’s a picture of racism less as weapon than as invisible gate, the kind of brutal, full-bore satire that “S.N.L.” only occasionally manages.
The episode shows off Murphy’s versatility — he plays piano to fill 30 seconds of dead air when a commercial break is mistimed — and his ability to be both explosive and deadpan. Playing a militant Afrocentric scholar in the Black History Minute sketch, he stumbles for a moment, then turns the break into an expression of the character: “Stop clapping before y’all make me smile!”
It also, excruciatingly, memorializes the homophobia of Murphy’s early comedy, which he repudiated decades later. In a Saturday Night News monologue on children’s toys, he holds up a pink-shirted Ken doll and warns parents, “unless you want your sons to live in the Village and skip to work, keep them as far away from Ken as possible.” This is another legacy of the ’80s comedy that percolated into our Gen X school lunchrooms, one that’s a lot less fun to remember.
But many of the moments I love in the episode come from the odd, mostly forgotten bits that draw on this ensemble’s specific talents and hit my forming comic sensibility at just the right oblique angle.
Take the Lishman’s Deli sketch, in which Murphy’s Gumby character — the green clay stop-motion figure reimagined as a crabby Borscht Belt has-been — trades insults with a gang of alter kockers played by Crystal, Guest and Short, who reminisce and argue about sandwiches named for celebrities. (“A Morey Amsterdam is what we used to call a herring melt,” Crystal declares.) Larry David — who would bring a grouchy Jewish sensibility to TV in “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” — was a writer on the show that season and does a newspaper crossword in the background of the sketch.
The episode has plenty of filler too, like a sketch pairing the South African bishop Desmond Tutu (Murphy) and the Heisman Trophy winner Doug Flutie (Hall), as well as Short playing the great-niece of Jerry Lewis, a plastic surgeon’s receptionist. But one viewer’s filler is another’s genius, and for me that sketch is “Climbing the Stairs.”
The premise is ridiculous: Short plays Lawrence Orbach, a World War II soldier, trapped in a farmhouse, who needs to save his unit by calling for help from a phone on the second floor. Orbach, who grew up in the Midwest, doesn’t know how to climb stairs. (“It never came up!”)
It’s barely an idea, the kind of late-in-the-episode sketch that many viewers will wish had been cut for time. Yet Short puts it over with his trademark terrified awkwardness and self-sacrificing physical comedy, hurling himself at the steps as if they were the face of Everest. The sketch is dumb; it lasts too long and fizzles out; I cannot rationally defend it. And God help me, I cannot think of it four decades later without giggling.
Was this broadcast the greatest 90 minutes of “Saturday Night Live” ever? Probably not! If you live long enough, you become the old man in the deli nattering on about your obscure and personal affections. This episode is my Morey Amsterdam sandwich.
But it hit the spot for me. This, in the end, is all that “Saturday Night Live” promises: not perfection or even excellence, but simply that it will give you the silly and the excruciating and leave you, years later, laughing yourself stupid at a memory that comes out of nowhere.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2502.22 - 10:10
- Days ago: MOM = 3523 days ago & DAD = 178 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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