Looking back at the wild beginning of “Saturday Night Live”

Saturday Night Live wasn’t Saturday Night Live, both in a literal and spiritual sense when it premiered on October 11, 1975. Weeks earlier, ABC had a primetime variety show called ” Saturday Night Live With Howard Cosell. So Lorne Michaels’ late-night creation just had to pass, Saturday evening – the same title as the Jason Reitman film (out now) about the sketch comedy institution’s first-ever television show. But this inaugural season was different than we imagine Saturday Night Live in a way that goes much further and deeper than the name. In that first year, Michaels, Chevy Chase and company were still figuring out exactly what the show should be, both in terms of structure and sensibility.

The first episode features four monologues from host George Carlin, a piece of comic performance art from Andy Kaufman, a short film from Albert Brooks, and a group of adult Muppets from “the land of Gorch.” Kaufman, Brooks’ films and the Muppets appeared regularly over the next few months before eventually being dropped because they didn’t fit. Aside from Chase hosting “Weekend Update,” the second episode only features a brief cameo from “Not Ready for Prime Time Players” and feels more like a musical variety showcase for host Paul Simon. It’s not until the fourth show, directed by Candice Bergen, that you get a full 90-minute episode that vaguely resembles what SNL would be at some point.

But the more important division between then and now lies in the spirit of exuberant anarchism that permeates Saturday evening. The first season was so aggressively irreverent — of politics, television, and even comedy itself — that SNL, Now in its 50th season, it still has an outlaw reputation, even as it has become more of an institutional behemoth over the decades. Consider the opening sketch of the Carlin episode: Author Michael O’Donoghue teaches an ESL class to a heavily accented John Belushi. O’Donoghue invites Belushi to repeat it after him, but all of his lines have to do with wolverines, such as: “I want to feed your fingertips to the wolverines.” Belushi dutifully imitates every line, and as O’Donoghue has a heart attack seems to suffer and falls to the ground, Belushi does the same. The sketch is clearly not parodying anything. That can hardly be said around anything. It’s just strange and you trust that the dialogue and Belushi’s commitment to the role will sell it.

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Much of the season was defiantly idiosyncratic in this way. The Killer Bees (played at various points by members of the entire cast) only became the series’ first recurring characters because Michaels did not appreciate an NBC executive requesting that they not appear again. Belushi’s audition for the show included an unexpected impression from Japanese film legend Toshiro Mifune; He soon found himself toiling through sketches as a samurai working in a hotel, a deli, and other mundane locations. Michaels began appearing on camera as himself, repeatedly asking The Beatles to reunite on the show for a whopping $3,000. (The total later increased to $3,200 plus hotel stays.) At this point, Saturday evening was already such a big deal that John Lennon and Paul McCartney later said they almost spontaneously traveled to Studio 8H to bring it to Michaels’ attention.

Even the series’ first famous political film, Chase’s Gerald Ford, bucked comedy tradition. Unlike the famous JFK impersonator Vaughn Meader – or anyone else SNL Actor who has since played a politician or celebrity – Chase made no attempt to look or sound like his subject. He just fell down a lot and otherwise acted like an idiot. That he barely tried made the Ford sketches even more cutting than if he had worn a bald head and said, “Our long national nightmare is over.”

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The impact that Chase’s performance had on Ford’s reputation was so strong that White House Press Secretary Ron Nessen hosted an episode near the end of the first season. Legend has it that Michaels and his writers assumed that Nessen would reject any material about the president that was too pointed, and so instead they demonstrated their anti-authority sentiments by including Nessen in an episode with so much disgusting, apolitical material as possible, including: memorable fake commercials for the Super Bass-O-Matic ’76 (a mixer for fish), Fluckers jam (as well as other jams with names like Dog Vomit, Monkey Pus and Painful Rectal Itch) and Autumn Fizz, “the carbonated shower.”

This first season also features what is probably the boldest season SNL Sketch of all, in which Chase interviews host Richard Pryor about a job as a janitor while playing a word association game that quickly leads to racist epithets. Michaels had fought to get the groundbreaking stand-up on the show, even threatening to quit over it (one of several times he did that year), and hired Pryor’s friend and author Paul Mooney as a collaborator for the week . It was important for Michaels to establish himself Saturday evening as the pinnacle of modern comedy, and the series has more than earned its reputation. Late in the second season when the name became official Saturday Night Live, The show was much less rough around the edges. But there’s a reason Reitman made a film about the beginning of the series instead of taking a look at some of the later golden ages. SNL There is still a great comedy show today. The beginning of Saturday evening, but felt like a revolution.