Saturday Night Live is EXTREMELY OLD (And So Am I)
When I first started re-watching the first season of Saturday Night Live in preparation for the Every Episode Ever project, and the We’ve Got a Terrible Show For You Tonight book, my wife had three questions/statements on it.
The first was, “Do you really think this is funny?” The second was, “Wow, this is really dated,” and finally, “Can you watch this downstairs?”
It did not take long for those Wisenheimers in the Not Ready For Prime Time Players to get kicked out of my bedroom and demoted to the downstairs television. My wife has enormous affection for the late 1980s/early 1990s era of Saturday Night Live and movies like Wayne’s World, but the original iteration leaves her cold.
Her response wasn’t terribly surprising. She’s brilliant and very funny, but she understandably considers the history of comedy a boring subject, whereas I have devoted much of my life and career to being a comedy connoisseur and then a comedy historian. I’ve spent a lot of time writing about a guy named “Weird Al” Yankovic. Now, I’m going to spend an insane amount of time writing about Saturday Night Live.
My wife has a habit of gallivanting into a room where I’ll be watching a movie and say, within thirty seconds or so, “This looks dumb and bad. Why are you watching it?”
The answer is generally, “I’m watching it specifically because it is dumb and bad, and consequently, I will be writing about it,” or “I don’t think it’s dumb or bad. In fact, I quite like it.”
That was my wife’s response to Duck Soup. She thinks The Three Stooges and The Marx Brothers are pretty much the same and equally unfunny.
My wife suffering through a forty nine year old television episode in 2024 would be like someone in 1975, the year Saturday Night Live debuted, looking back at a comedy from 1926.
To someone in 1975, the comedy of 1926 wouldn’t just look or feel different or dated: it would feel like the product of an entirely different universe, not just an earlier time period.
In 1926, comedy had yet to learn to talk. It wouldn’t be until the following year when a vaudeville-seasoned Kosher ham named Al Jolson kicked off the sound era with The Jazz Singer. You can read about that development extensively in my upcoming book, The Fractured Mirror. There are literally dozens and dozens of movies about it, some of them great!
To someone in the mid-1970s who had little to no interest in film or comedy history, silent films would probably seem bizarre, foreign, mannered, and, most likely, brutally unfunny.
Silent films were products of a decidedly different era. They were inherently dissimilar from the comedy that would follow and the comedy of the mid-1970s in two massive, essential ways: they were in black and white and silent.
So I was not surprised that my wife looked at a nearly fifty-year-old comedy and thought it was dated, not terribly funny, and of interest primarily to people like myself, for whom old comedies have a historical value and significance beyond their ability to make people laugh.
Saturday Night Live is old—very old. With the exception of 60 Minutes, Sesame Street, and a number of soap operas, it has been on the air longer than any other show on television.
The fresh-faced kids in their twenties and early thirties, when the show started, are now old men and women in their seventies or eighties.
The current hits that musical guests on Saturday Night Live performed didn’t just become staples of oldies radio: they’ve been staples of oldies radio for decades.
Saturday Night Live now stands as a crucial link between variety shows, vaudeville, the golden age of live television, and the comedy that would follow, like 30 Rock and Late Night With Conan O’Brien.
The show has been on the air for so long that it has dabbled with blackface repeatedly and for no damn reason at all.
I’m writing about Saturday Night Live specifically because it is so old and has a history that is vast, fascinating, incredible, and also, at times, deeply embarrassing.
But I’m also writing about Saturday Night Live because it’s been on for as long as I have been alive. The show isn’t that much older than I am. It began life on October 11th, 1975, and I was born on April 24th, 1976.
Saturday Night is consequently very old. Unfortunately, that means that I am as well, but with age comes wisdom as well as a skillset perfect for this particular project.
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