Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary this week filled the culture’s airwaves, including Saturday nights, which included a rerun of the first episode of 1975. . I saw it when it was originally aired with my mother. We liked to get up late and watch anything. I was always an owl at night so I didn’t have bedtime for sets as a kid so I was able to see what happened at 10pm.
When I saw it this weekend, I had forgotten about most of the sketches of the show. They were almost forgotten so I introduced Andy Kaufman in a two-minute segment in about 20 minutes, which changed my life.
I mean it: it changed my life. Here was my first encounter with something strange and ridiculous, and I knew I wanted it more. I think what I got was a lip sink to a childish record. The next day I put out my kids’ records (Peter Pan’s players!) and started playing them, and started lip-syncing them.
One cool thing about record players is that they had different speeds at 16 2/3, 33, 45, and 78 rpm. I think at the time I only had a record player who played 33 and 45. This is the most common speed. 33 was LPS (a familiar large record) and 45 was for singles… I had to properly center it using an adapter.
At some point afterwards, I acquired an old stereo record player at the flea market. It had all four speeds, not just the stereo, the first HI-FI technology I’ve ever owned. I honestly don’t know how my family survived my wholesome experiment using this. I love playing records at the wrong speed and do it for hours. I remember one day starting to play Richard Wagner’s long five-hour opera Parsifal in 16 2/3 seconds, but at that point I realized I had gone too far.
Kaufman’s humor was based on what we now call “Cringe Comedy.” It was his awkwardness that encouraged the humor by looking back at the clip, and of course his entire career is based on questioning what is merely an act and reality. With the free access to social media arrays, it’s now easy to do (if everything is real, there’s nothing real), but Kaufmann has many boundaries like the others of his time. I pushed it out.
Several other segments of the first SNL were also memorable. I think me and my mother were the only people on the show who liked Muppets.
Another thing that made me a Canon was ads that took away the triple blade razor. This included animations that showed the razor was painful rather than cutting his hair. I thought it was hilarious.
The other was a sketch of a bee. I grew up in Somerville, New Jersey. This was known for two things. A scary traffic circle and the place for fried chicken called Mr. Bee hired a man wearing a bee suit and dancing in front of him. Secretly, I am sure that the person who made the show (I wasn’t he to the writer or director) must have been inspired to make sketches after a trip to Somerville. So we cheered whenever there were bees.
Before SNL, my mother introduced me to Monty Python, so I’ve seen absurd humor before…and I liked it. In one of the many articles about SNL 50 (I can’t find it now), Lorne Michaels was quoted as saying that whenever they were in high school, everyone liked it . I didn’t go to high school, but I was the age where the original cast deserved to be an ambitious role model for me. The cast clearly illustrated the rough downtown chic of the era. It was part of that aesthetic that the show had always had random New York scene photos. The photo of an old man eating watermelon is another thing burned by my brain. Most of the early days were rooted in the atmosphere of New York City and the character of the earth. It’s like this PSA for kids with a popular accent on Instagram the other day.
The outlook for the New York-centric show continued for a while. A clip of Philip Glass as a musical guest at the 1986 Music Retrospective Show reminded me that it is a very downtown New York type. Currently, we don’t have monoculture, but there are homogenized ones and there’s not much about New York about SNL. The exception is John Mullaney’s mini musical, which absolutely nails some of our local quirks. I’m only wondering why lobsters are on the menu at the diner.
As a child growing up in the Tri-State era, SNL’s opening credits show that the cast is coolly grown up. I might go home watching TV on a Saturday night, but one day I’ll do those cool things too!
Life has taken me to other states, but when I returned to New York in the 90s, fantasy became a reality. I’ll sometimes see members of the cast hanging out at some of my hangouts and I remember once left the bar as it was closed for an afterparty . Much later, I met Seth Myers and Bill Hader after they appeared on Comic Book Club Live. After watching all the clip shows, I realized that my memories of the 1995-2005 show were dim. I didn’t have DVR or YouTube to watch the show on Sunday mornings, as I do now.
Another thing that excited me, the youthful, was Marvel Team Up #74 in 1978. This featured Spider-Man, who teamed up with the SNL cast when Stanley was the host. The issue was written by Chris Claremont, painted in pencil by Bob Hall and colored in ink by Marie Severin. In 1978, the comics weren’t cool yet, but Marvel was also very New York. The story includes a sparkling ring and a silver sa garden, and Spidey helps the cast defeat the villain.
“Superhero Sketch” with host Margot Kidder in 1979 was another cartoon crossover of the time, and despite the success of the Superman film, he saw comics become “mainstream” It was still a surprise.
Of course, most of the movie stars who host SNL are appearing in comic book movies, and no one thinks twice when the author or cast member reveals that they have read the comic.
When Saturday Night Live debuted, it was still considered “destructive” and the comic was outsider art. Currently, SNL is an institution, and comics are educational and accepted. Because of the first episode and the personal nostalgia of its early days, it’s difficult to see the entire SNL. But somewhere, some kids have been watching YouTube videos or reading comics and I’m sure it’s changing their lives. That’s one thing that never changes.
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