by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a show I’d recorded off NBC the night before: a
rebroadcast of the very first episode of Saturday Night Live, aired on NBC October 11, 1975. There’s been a big
to-do about the 40th anniversary of this long-running program — it’s
become a weird sort of national institution even though I’ve believed it should
long since have been put out of its misery — and before re-running the first
episode NBC did a 2 ½-hour commemorative special that I turned on briefly, saw
a bit of a lame parody of record ads on late-night TV (a homely singing duo
hawking their “romantic” album and singing excerpts of the songs, all of which
had incredibly lame sexual references — one of the annoying things about the
current Saturday Night Live is
how many sketches they do in which they take a dirty joke that isn’t
particularly funny to begin with and run it into the ground until it becomes really offensive), then turned it off in disgust. I was
curious about the first episode because I didn’t watch it when it was new — I
watched a bit of it, but for some reason I’d been under the impression that it
was going to be a music show with a few comedy sketches in between the musical
acts, when in fact it was the other way around. I was interested because one of
the musical guests was Janis Ian, then riding high on her big hit “At 17,” and
the same night PBS had shown a special pairing Ian with the pioneering
jazz-rock band Blood, Sweat and Tears. I liked the idea of being able to see
Janis Ian twice on different networks on the same night, but that’s not how
things turned out; when I switched from PBS to NBC all I saw were a bunch of
people I’d never heard of doing comedy, and whether it was any good or not I
didn’t care because I wanted to hear more Janis Ian!
As things turned out, the
host of the first Saturday Night Live was George Carlin — then the show was simply called Saturday
Night to avoid confusion with the
much-ballyhooed ABC series Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell, which featured a troupe of sketch comedians called
the “Prime Time Players” — a name the Saturday Night people, mainly producer Lorne Michaels, decided to
parody by calling his comedians
the “Not Ready for Prime Time Players.” That’s the name that’s stuck, though in
the opening of the first episode announcer Don Pardo garbled it as “The Not For
Ready Prime Time Players” and at the end they were called the “Not Really Ready for Prime Time Players.” This first Saturday
Night Live was aired just under a decade
after the death of Lenny Bruce, and it was clear from the choice of George
Carlin as the first host that initially Lorne Michaels and his writers (many of
them veterans of the Harvard Lampoon
and others who also acted on the show) were going for the quirky mix of
situational humor, raunchy but still tasteful farce, and both political and
cultural comment that Bruce had pioneered in the stand-up world and of which
Carlin had been his principal heir. The differences in format between this and
later Saturday Night Live shows
include the heavy featuring of the MC — Carlin has virtually half the screen
time and his routines include some of his greatest hits (baseball vs. football,
the oxymoronic nature of “jumbo
shrimp,” his reflections on the non-perfect nature of God — “Just look at his
creation” — and some stream-of-consciousness ramblings ending with the
rhetorical question, “Have I told these jokes already?”) — as well as the
appearance of two musical acts,
Janis Ian and Billy Preston, doing two songs each.
Ian does “At 17” midway
through the program and an even more reflective song, “In the Winter” (playing
piano instead of guitar), at the end. At the time Ian was in the middle of a
comeback after a flash-in-the-pan success, “Society’s Child” (in which she
portrayed a woman being dumped on for dating a Black guy), in 1966; she’d been
signed by Columbia and “At 17” became an enormous hit despite — or maybe
because of — its sometimes cryptic lyrics. She’d make a few more albums for
Columbia but never again reach that kind of chart success, and eventually
they’d drop her, she’d continue making occasional records on her own and
playing whatever gigs she could get, and finally in 1993 she came out as a
Lesbian on the release of her first independent album, Breaking
Silence, and married her longtime partner
Pearl Snyder in 2003 in Canada. (That certainly put a new spin on the tag line
of her famous song, “At 17 I learned the truth.”) Billy Preston was at, or
possibly slightly on the downgrade from, the career peak that had begun with
his signing to Apple Records in 1969, his guest appearance on keyboards on the
Beatles’ “Get Back”/“Don’t Let Me Down” single, and his own mega-hit “That’s
the Way God Planned It.” On this show he did what was probably his second most
famous song, “Nothing from Nothing” — which, as Charles noted, was also
basically a gospel song presented in a secular context (as Ray Charles had done
before Preston and Sister Rosetta Tharpe had done before either of them!) — and
a new song called “Fancy Pants” that also sneaked in a God reference or two.
What was really amazing from the Zeitgeist point of view was that in a line from “Nothing from Nothing” Preston
proudly proclaims, “I’m a soldier in the War on Poverty” — the very idea of a war on poverty is so dated these days, when all
Republicans care about is the rich and all Democrats care about, even
rhetorically, is preserving what’s left of “the middle class”; neither big
party gives a damn about the people below that! Afterwards Preston had some of
the usual music-star troubles — alcohol, drugs, health problems therefrom and
legal charges, including one that he sexually assaulted a teenage Mexican boy
(so both the musical guests on
the first Saturday Night Live had
same-sex attractions!) — and he was in and out of rehab, had a kidney
transplant and finally died in 2006. As heard here, Preston’s music is
essentially the last gasp of funky soul before, as I put it in connection with
Willie Hutch’s soundtrack to the 1974 Blaxploitation film Foxy Brown, Black music “sank first into the swamp of disco and
then into the cesspool of rap.”
The sketches on this first Saturday
Night Live also raise Zeitgeist issues; one in which Chevy Chase introduces an
obviously male cast member (complete with neatly trimmed beard) as his “wife”
and tells us how committed he is to “her” is still funny but plays very differently in the age of marriage equality! (In
1975 I still hadn’t come to grips with being Gay — that would come two years
later when a man made a pass at me in the hallway to the San Francisco State
student bookstore and I took his number, spent a sleepless night and realized
at about 1 a.m. that I was going to call him — and had I watched this show when
it was new I would have been astounded at the idea that it would ever be legal
in the U.S. for a man to marry another man, and even more astounded that I
would end up marrying a man myself.) So does George Carlin’s rant about the
intrusiveness of airport security; you want to take him aside in this post-9/11
age and say, “You think it’s bad now?
You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” Some
of the sketches and routines (two guest comedians, the legendary Andy Kaufman
and the virtually forgotten Valri Bromfield — that’s a woman, and “Valri” is
obviously short for “Valerie” — appear, Kaufman lip-synching to the Mighty
Mouse theme song and Bromfield doing a not
particularly funny domestic routine hundreds of other more recent female
comedians, from Elayne Boozler to Tammy Pescatelli, have done better since)
seem badly dated and groan-inducing, but there are also some surprisingly
subtle bits (like a courtroom scene — featuring later Law and Order:
Special Victims Unit star Richard Belzer as
one of the jurors — in which a woman testifying against her alleged rapist is
so embarrassed at what he said to her that she gets permission to write it down
instead of having to repeat it verbally in open court; one would welcome a bit
more of that reticence from the SNL
writers today!) and pieces that hold up today as well as pieces that don’t.
One
of the latter is a really unfunny barbarian bit by Jim Henson’s Muppets
(there’s such a legend around Henson these days it’s hard to believe he ever
did anything as lame as this!); one of the former is a short film called The
Impossible Truth, written and directed by
Albert Brooks (yet another SNL vet
who went far in mainstream showbiz!) and screamingly funny in a deliberately
retro (even then!) way, particularly when a spinning newspaper headline
announces that Oregon has just lowered the age of sexual consent to seven and
the next thing we see is Chevy Chase chatting up a little girl in a bar. (That,
too, is one routine that because of Zeitgeist changes plays a lot differently now than it did
then.) The first night Saturday Night Live wasn’t quite yet the well-oiled laugh machine it became at its height
in the late 1970’s, before it became so dull (when it wasn’t going out of its way to be offensive) that I
remember joking for years, “Nostalgia is being able to remember when Saturday
Night Live was still funny and when Michael
Jackson was still Black.”
