You Might Have Missed This Sweet Gilda Radner Tribute on ‘SNL50’

For a show celebrating 50 years of comedy, SNL50 paid surprisingly little tribute to the cast that started it all. Of the original Not Ready for Primetime Players — John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris and Laraine Newman — only Morris and Newman got to speak live during the show. Ironically, Newman and Morris were probably the least featured members of that original cast. 

But Curtin and Newman made sure that Gilda got a belated shout-out. During the show’s final goodbye, the segment in which Martin Short couldn’t find Lorne Michaels despite the fact that he was standing right next to him, the two surviving female cast members from that original cast held up a framed picture of Radner, who tragically died of ovarian cancer in 1989.  

The show’s main thank you to the comedians who created it was introduced by Garrett Morris, who joked, “Way back there when I joined the cast of Saturday Night Live, I had no idea y’all that I would be required to do so many reunion shows.” Morris set the table for Tom Schiller’s “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” a 1978 short film featuring John Belushi as the only Not Ready for Primetime Player to live to an old age despite his live-fast-die-young habits. The bit was immediately soaked in irony when Belushi was the first to die just four years later.

Nearly 50 years later, Radner and Belushi are the only deceased members of the original cast, despite that group’s advancing age. In “Don’t Look Back In Anger,” Radner’s is the first tombstone Belushi finds in the Not Ready for Primetime Cemetery. “Here’s Gilda Radner,” Old Man Belushi says. “Yeah, she had her own show on Canadian television for years and years, The Gilda Radner Show. Well, at least now I can see her on reruns. Cute as a button. God bless her.”

SNL50 missed a couple of opportunities last night, despite running for three-and-a-half hours. First, why not a tribute to cast members the show has lost? Adam Sandler kinda sorta covered it with his poignant love ballad to the show, but three minutes to honor Radner, Belushi, Chris Farley, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Michael O’Donoghue and Norm Macdonald would have been more welcome than the montage celebrating the show’s racist, sexist and homophobic humor.

And here was an easy lay-up you missed, Lorne — you could have invited Chevy Chase and Jane Curtin out on stage with Morris to introduce Schiller’s film. Both have badmouthed the show over the years, but they deserved more than “heads in the crowd” during the good nights. Curtin and Newman took that brief opportunity to honor one of their own, even though Michaels couldn’t be bothered to do it himself.