Louise Lasser Turned Saturday Night Live Into a Queasy Psychodrama for One Unforgettably Awkward Episode
Like so many of the legendarily bad Saturday Night Live hosts that I have written about for My World of Flops, Louise Lasser professes to be a big fan of the show in her opening monologue. More specifically, Lasser says that Saturday Night Live “deals with stuff I like” and that it “makes new entrees into comedy that I approve of.”
Also like the folks I’ve written about so far, she then delivers a performance that suggests that she’s not at all familiar with Saturday Night Live, and if she were to ever watch it, she’d probably hate it.
Saturday Night Live might deal with stuff Lasser liked, and made new entrees into comedy that she approved of but she did not like the script for her episode at all. She found it salacious and smutty, singling out a scene where two teenage girls talk about sex that actually comes off as sensitive and even tender when performed by Gilda Radner and Jane Curtin.
Lasser did not want to be part of an ensemble. She did not want to appear in sketches opposite some of the greatest comic performers of all time. She wanted to do her own thing and do her style of comedy. She did not realize that when you host Saturday Night Live you do their style of comedy or you come across as both unprofessional and mentally ill.
When she hosted Saturday Night Live Lasser was strongly associated with a very specific style of comedy that was just plain wrong for Lorne Michaels deathless comedy institution.
Lasser was then red-hot due to her central role in the Norman Lear-produced soap opera parody Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman is fascinating to me because for a year and a half it was HUGE. It wasn’t just a hit show; it was a bona fide pop culture phenomenon that made Lasser a household name.
Lasser was on the cover of Rolling Stone. Every night Americans would gather around the television to see what kind of madness Mary had gotten herself into. I can’t imagine how exhausting it must be to tape a new half hour comedy show every day for months and months and months. Of course the pressure got to Lasser. How could it not?
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was ubiquitous, buzzed about and controversial during its eighteen month run, But when its run ended Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman seemingly disappeared. The show’s cultural footprint pretty much vanished mere years after it left the air.
I like to think of myself as a dedicated student of comedy and I’ve never seen an episode of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman in part because it was hard to track down before the good folks over at Shout Factory put together a thirty-eight disc box set.
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman burned bright and then burnt out, to the point that one of its primary legacies is its star’s ill-fated hosting stint on Saturday Night Live.
As a comic performer, Lasser was seemingly most comfortable in the deeply uncomfortable comedy of awkwardness and tension. She brought that sad, weird, exhausted energy to a brash new hit that seemingly knew how to handle anything except for having someone like Lasser as a host.
The appeal of hosting Saturday Night Live in its prime was presumably the once in a lifetime opportunity to work with some of the funniest men and women on the planet on a high-profile live broadcast.
Lasser seemingly agreed to host Saturday Night Live without having any idea what that entailed. For seemingly every other host in the show’s history that means performing alongside the Not Ready for Prime Time Players in sketches.
That’s not how Lasser saw her role on the show, however. Lasser seemed more interested in acting opposite an actual dog or performing long, rambling monologues with no discernible point than she was in doing sketch comedy with people like John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman and Jane Curtin.
I have read a LOT of books about Saturday Night Live. I’ve also smoked a lot of marijuana so I don’t always remember the contents of all of those books. But my hunch is that the gang realized early on that Lasser had a lot of overlapping problems with drugs and mental illness and was deeply ambivalent about doing the show in the first place.
They were clearly concerned that Lasser would be too high to read the cue cards and too nervous to fit the requirements of hosting as they are generally understood.
So they wrote an exceedingly loose script in which Lasser regularly forgets her lines, looks visibly uncomfortable and seems to be having a low-level nervous breakdown/panic attack from the beginning of her monologue to the show-ending handshakes.
That way, if Lasser did, in fact, forget her lines or have a low-level nervous breakdown it would look like she was following the script and they planned it that way.
The problem with Lasser’s comedy of awkwardness and discomfort, however, is that it’s all awkwardness and discomfort and no actual comedy.
It feels like Louise Lasser and the Not Ready For Primetime Players were taping two entirely different shows. The Saturday Night Live cast was doing what they always do but Lasser was making a weird, arty psychodrama about a neurotic actress with mental problems falling apart and losing the plot as she struggles to host a live late night sketch comedy show.
It’s hard to know where Louise Lasser the deeply troubled human being ends and her persona begins. Alternately, Lasser seems to be having trouble separating herself from Mary Hartman, who was also prone to nervous breakdowns.
Things get off to a literally punchy start with a cold open of the cast getting together after the break. John Belushi shows up looking every bit the Hollywood sellout, much to the annoyance of Chevy Chase.
It’s an inversion of the actual dynamic. Chase would soon leave the show in order to become a Hollywood big shot. The twenty-somethings feud and fight and then make up through an elaborate series of handshakes that ends with Belushi kicking Chase so hard that he tumbles to the floor gracefully and shouts “Live from New York! It’s Saturday Night!”
Then comes the monologue. From the start something feels ineffably off. Instead of assuring the audience that they’ve got a great show in store and rattling off the name of the musical guest Lasser instead admits, “I wish I could tell you we’ve got a great show in store for you but I can’t. It’s not because of the show. The staff, everything is great. It’s just that I’m real tired. You might wonder why, and I’m a little scared and you’re a live audience.”
Lasser speaks haltingly. She’s visibly nervous and seems to be forgetting her lines. Also she keeps talking about being tired and being scared in a way that makes sense for somebody who is on a lot of drugs but makes considerably less sense for a professional comedic actress hosting a comedy show.
The audience doesn’t know how to react. Is this part of the show? Are they supposed to be laughing or is Lasser genuinely freaking out? They laugh but it’s nervous laughter.
Then, after many more awkward silences Lasser leaves the stage and races to her dressing room and refuses to come out, convinced that she has ruined the show.
Gilda Radner tries to get her out, then Dan Aykroyd tries to bribe her with auto parts before she’s finally coaxed out with the promise of the cover of Time magazine.
It seems to me at least that this was planned but the very real possibility that it was not lends the proceedings an element of danger and uncertainty. It’s rare and weirdly exciting when things seem like they might genuinely go to shit on Saturday Night Live.
Lasser appears opposite Chase in a parody of Ingmar Bergman movies, The Seventh Seal in particular. In it Chase and Lasser gaze at one another while a man revealed to be death prattles on pretentiously behind them.
It’s one of the only times in the show that Lasser actually interacts with the cast. In Lasser’s next sketch her costar is a real dog, as in an actual canine, who she speaks to as if she is talking to an old lover or a friend she has a complicated relationship with.
The difficulty level for something like that has to be off the charts because your scene partner is literally sub-human and incapable of things like speech or complicated thought.
Also it’s impossible to focus on the comic aspects of a scene when a cute dog is involved. And I’ve got to say that Lasser’s costar is a VERY good boy. Oh yes he is! Yes he is! What a good boy! He doesn’t bark or whine or try to bite Lasser. He just sits there being cute.
This sketch isn’t particularly funny. I’m not sure it’s even a sketch but it is, if nothing else, novel. It made me think of a later recurring bit involving Tim Kazurinsky acting opposite a real monkey.
Monkeys and dogs can both act up to a certain point but at the end of the day they are animals, and I think we all remember the most unforgettable scene in Nope.
There are two wild variables in the scene: a literal animal and Louise Lasser. It’s a minor miracle it went as well as it did.
The thing you need to remember about the worst episodes in Saturday Night Live is that even when things go historically, flamboyantly wrong the show is still populated by extraordinarily gifted comic performers.
This was particularly true of the original and late 1980s casts. So even though Lasser’s contributions to the show are so artsy and odd that I’m not sure they qualify as either sketches or comedy the sketches without her soar.
One of the things that I find fascinating about Dan Aykroyd is how his comedy reflects his Autism. That’s particularly true of a standout number here in which Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin and Laraine Newman sing a Phil Spector-style girls group anthem about the least likely of subjects: the evolution of early television technology.
Conceptual doesn’t begin to do justice to its wonderful weirdness. It’s a gloriously inaccessible gander into Aykroyd’s big, beautiful and exceedingly strange brain that also works musically.
The other standout sketch is a two-hander with Gilda Radner and Jane Curtin as high school students discussing the fascinating, terrifying mystery of sex.
It’s the kind of rich, character-based comedy of writer Marilyn Suzanne Miller was known for. Miller had written for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Roda and Maude and specialized in writing gloriously human, relatable sketches for Curtin, Newman and Radner.
This show was the worst thing that’s happened to Lasser since she was married to Woody Allen.
It’s a sketch about the human condition and the fragile emotions of adolescence less interested in scoring laughs than in saying something insightful about the inhuman crucible of adolescence. Radner and Curtin are, of course, magnificent in it. It’s a sketch that calls for acting rather than shtick and Radner and Curtin find the exact right tone for it. A sketch that Lasser thought would be sleazy and gross instead feels poignant and real.
Unfortunately for the cast and crew they had to find a way to work Lasser into the show in a way that somehow did not involve her interacting with the cast in sketches with jokes.
Chevy Chase introduces a short film ostensibly directed by Lasser with a measured, “Now here’s something that you’ll find interesting.” Chase does not say that it’s something that audiences will find funny or entertaining, only interesting. He is wisely inviting audiences to lower their expectations and curb their enthusiasm because he knows what’s in store.
The short film is set at a diner where Lasser and staff writer Alan Zweibel are having a halting, uncomfortable conversation about their relationship. The sound design is aggressively Altmanesque, to the point where it can be hard to even make out what the characters are saying.
It’s mumbly and uncomfortable and more or less completely devoid of jokes or humor, beyond its characters occasionally getting confused and calling out for someone to give them their next line.
For one night and one night only the purpose of Saturday Night Live seemed to be to express the exhaustion, confusion and despair of a woman who was deeply troubled even by the standards of the day rather make audiences laugh.
Saturday Night Live became the Louise Lasser Tragicomedy Show minus the comedy.
Lasser’s final segment is even more achingly personal than everything that came before. She comes out onstage barefoot, sits down and puts on her shoes while sharing a lengthy monologue about the crazy year she has had.
Lasser was incredibly successful and famous at the time so both the live audience and the audience at home would know what she was talking about when she discusses getting into trouble for refusing to leave a boutique without a one hundred and fifty dollar dollhouse she had unsuccessfully attempted to purchase with her American Express card.
Matters went from bad to worse when the police were called and cocaine was found in the actress’ purse. It was a scandal so on-brand for Lasser and Mary Hartman that it was actually written into Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.
Louise Lasser was no ordinary host and Preservation Hall Jazz Band were no ordinary musical guests. For starters, their average age seemed to hover somewhere around 70 and they did not always seem to know where they were or what they were doing. Lasser apparently hand-picked the group, which is further proof that she failed to understand the show or her role on it.
This episode takes place inside its host’s tormented psyche rather than 30 Rock. There’s a queasy intimacy to it that’s both compelling and off-putting.
Lasser keeps talking about being tired and scared to the point that I was starting to wonder if she was trying to make that her catchphrase. The Church Lady had “Well isn’t that special?” The Makin’ Copies guy had his deal and Louise Lasser’s beloved catch-phrases include “I’m tired” and “I’m scared.”
I also am tired and scared on both a literal and metaphorical level and have my own struggles with mental illness but I am not hosting a live comedy broadcast.
I have complicated feelings about this episode because it is that rarest of anomalies: a Saturday Night Live episode unlike any other. They really broke the mold when they made this episode, primarily so that nothing like it could ever happen again.
Lasser didn’t just host the show; she took us on an exhausting journey inside her fractured psyche. By the end of the episode I also was exhausted and drained and ready to never think about this episode ever again.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
Read Monday’s entry, Milton Berle here
Alternately, you can read my write-up of Frank Zappa here
Andrew “Dice” Clay’s piece can be found here
Here’s the Steven Seagal article
My Martin Lawrence piece can be read here
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
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