50 Years Later, Does the First Episode of ‘SNL’ Hold Up?
With Saturday Night opening nationwide, you might be tempted to jump on Peacock and watch the first-ever episode of Saturday Night (not yet with Live in its title). Of course it’s interesting from a historical perspective, but I rewatched the uncut DVD version to see if the actual comedy still held up. With 50 years in the show’s rear-view mirror, here’s the good and bad of that first episode from a 2024 perspective…
Good: George Carlin Stand-Up
Carlin admitted that he refused to appear in sketches, making him the only host in the show’s history to do so. Instead, he did what he did best — four separate stand-up sets interspersed throughout the show. Even though Carlin was jacked up during those monologues — “There’s one place where I can see myself grinding my jaw from the cocaine,” he said years later — you’re still catching an all-time great in his prime.
Bad: The Flubs
Even the great Don Pardo was subject to opening-night jitters, introducing “The Not for Ready Primetime Players” instead of “The Not Ready for Primetime Players.” But the biggest nervous nelly was Chevy Chase, stumbling and shouting through his first Weekend Update and literally winking after delivering punchlines. Chase keeps looking into the wrong camera, and the technical crew brought up graphic punchlines a joke too early. He finally landed Alan Zweibel’s great prostitution stamp joke after admitting he lost his place and starting the joke a second time. This Tiktok video only shows the best part.
@cursed_snl
Good: An Albert Brooks Film
The jokes that held up the best? A fake newsreel from Brooks featuring blind cab drivers, creepy changes to age-of-consent laws and an announcement that Israel and the state of Georgia had agreed to trade places. It could run this weekend and the bits still work.
Bad: Too Much George Coe, Not Enough Laraine Newman
Coe, a Broadway actor hired to play older parts before Lorne Michaels decided his younger cast could handle the job, shows up in a surprising number of sketches, making little impression in any of them.
Newman, on the other hand, gets only one shot — a funny bit as a reporter outside a murder scene at the Blaine Hotel. She’d get her chance but not on opening night.
Good: The Proto 10-to-1 Sketch
The “10-to-1” sketch is the weirdo bit that’s too out there to lead the show, but worth trying late when most viewers have signed off. On the show’s first episode, the presence of Dan Aykroyd is strangely missing for most of the night before blowing the doors off as a security expert who breaks into people’s homes to show them how vulnerable they are. It’s classic Aykroyd, spouting the technical specifications for a home security system like he wrote the manual himself.
Bad: The Muppets
So. Damn. Long. No wonder the cast wanted to strangle Big Bird.
Good: The Stand-Ups
Valri Bromfield got big laughs with her late-in-the-show monologue, but the comic who really killed was Andy Kaufman.
Bad: Too Much Music
Billy Preston was electric, with Janis Ian lending her own quiet charm. But there’s a reason Michaels no longer packs four different song performances into each show. We’re here for the comedy, man!
