A Newspaper Published an Obituary for ‘SNL’ 39 Years Ago
In case you couldn’t tell from the onslaught of merchandising and assorted marketing tie-ins Saturday Night Live has now been on TV for five whole decades. So go ahead and celebrate with… a cookie shaped like the cheeseburgers John Belushi yelled about in the ‘70s?
@chipcitycookies
The fact that SNL is now half a century old makes it all the more laughable that the show was pronounced dead nearly 40 years ago, in a salty mock obituary published in an honest-to-goodness newspaper.
The February 21, 1986 edition of The Buffalo News, featured an article with the provocative headline “Time to Bury the Late ‘Saturday Night Live.’” The article didn’t mince words, proclaiming that it’s time to “Kill Saturday Night Live. Kill it dead. Pull the plug, flush it, trash it, kiss it goodbye.”
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After pausing a moment for “reflection” before metaphorically cremating the remains of SNL, the article ends with a mock eulogy to the late sketch comedy show, reading: “Farewell, Saturday Night Live. It’s been real. We’ll mourn the loss of laughs. Mercifully, it was a slow death, but the tombstone is already inscribed: Saturday Night Live — 1975-1986 — rest in peace. “
Ouch. It’s one thing to critique a TV show, it’s quite another to declare it legally deceased and write its epitaph.
The Buffalo News
To be fair, the show was in pretty rough shape at that point. Season 11 saw the return of producer Lorne Michaels following his five-year respite from SNL, but the article wasn’t optimistic about Michaels’ homecoming, arguing that he was merely “riding shotgun over a dead horse.”
That year featured series low points, such as the episode hosted by Ronald Reagan’s son Ron Reagan, which the article notes was labeled a “tragic accumulation of filth” by comedian Henry Morgan. I guess he wasn’t a fan of the Risky Business and Back to the Future parodies.
In many ways, the premise of the piece seems downright laughable today. Imagine proclaiming SNL “dead” mere months before Phil Hartman joined the cast.
The article did make some good points, such as how it suggests that “as the show evolved from renegade outlaw series to comedy institution, something was lost.” The recent SNL biopic, Saturday Night, made a similar inference. That criticism is far more accurate today than in 1986, when Michaels inarguably represents the comedy establishment.
But the article also overly romanticizes the show’s early days. It seems to suggest that the first few seasons of SNL were unimpeachably great and irrepressibly cool. But it, too, had some stinkers.
@huggyattack
Happy 50th/R.I.P. SNL.
