5 Shows That Created the Blueprint for ‘SNL’
Even the most original shows aren’t created from nothing. Saturday Night Live, like every comedy show before or since, can point to funny ancestors that helped draw up the blueprint for its success. Here are five comedy classics that formed the template for the show that became SNL…
Your Show of Shows
“Saturday Night Live always had its roots showing,” wrote Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller in their oral history Live From New York. Those roots began in the golden era of live TV in New York, especially Your Show of Shows featuring Sid Caesar and his troupe. The comedy was enhanced by the thrill of the live broadcast, a “this is happening now!” quality that had disappeared from television before SNL brought it back in 1975.
When Dick Ebersol made his initial Saturday Night pitch to NBC, Your Show of Shows was one of his examples of what SNL would try to emulate, according to Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live. His other example was…
Laugh-In
Laugh-In was one of the first comedy shows to appeal to the counterculture, making it easy to identify as an SNL ancestor. The fact that Lorne Michaels wrote for the show simply cements it, not that Michaels had a good experience. More senior writers would rework Michaels’ punchlines, and he barely recognized his jokes when he finally heard them in a completed show.
But Laugh-In was where Michaels learned how to handle talent, the show’s creator, George Schlatter, told Hollywood Reporter. “Lorne learned a lot from Digby, who ran the writers’ room,” he explained. “He became the greatest politician in show business. He can really schmooze.”
The Ernie Kovacs Show
When Chevy Chase won an Emmy for his first-year performance, he thanked all the usual suspects — Michaels and his Not Ready for Primetime castmates. But he also singled out one of the show’s inspirations: “I also would like to thank Ernie Kovacs — I swear.”
It’s no surprise that the man who made everyone laugh by falling down every week worshipped at the altar of the show with monkeys hitting each other on the head.
Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
Even more than Laugh-In, Michaels was influenced by the dangerous comedy of the Smothers Brothers. In the late 1960s, their show took on the Vietnam War and Lyndon B. Johnson when it wasn’t joking about sex, religion and drugs. Their comedic take inspired several battles with CBS censors, a fight that SNL and NBC would continue in the 1970s. There’s a reason Ebersol didn’t use the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour as an example during his pitch — what network wanted that trouble?
Michaels admired the guys so much that Tom Smothers was his original choice for the show’s first-ever host. Smothers said no, opening the door for George Carlin.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
On the press release announcing Saturday Night, Michaels’ credits were listed as a producer of a Flip Wilson special, a writer for Laugh-In, co-host and producer of The Hart and Lorne Show on Canadian television and a writer for Monty Python. The last one wasn’t true.
Whether or not the lie was intentional, NBC wanted to convey the sensibilities of Monty Python’s Flying Circus as a model for its new show. That show’s influence was apparent in Michaels’ Canadian specials with partner Hart Pomerantz, and Michaels used clips from Monty Python as part of his pitch to get a hip new comedy show on the air in America.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus “was miraculous to me, a revelation,” Michaels said. “It seemed that once again the winds of change were blowing from England.”