This Host Is to Thank/Blame for ‘SNL’ Bringing Back Characters Ad Nauseam
In addition to guest hosts, musical acts and forcing cast members to endure anxiety-inducing mind games, one of the longtime hallmarks of Saturday Night Live is its penchant for bringing back recurring characters.
If a character does well in a sketch, you can bet that they’ll be revived in future sketches, and possibly even for movies and/or soulless commercials.
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But, according to Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live by Susan Morrison, bringing back characters wasn’t a part of the original vision for the show. John Belushi debuted his stereotypical Samurai character, which even SNL now admits has “aged horribly,” in the seventh episode of the first season. The “Samurai Hotel” sketch also featured Chevy Chase and that week’s guest host Richard Pryor.
But when the sketch was over and done with, no thought was given to bringing the character back for another episode. Which is a little surprising, considering that the Samurai was part of Belushi’s audition for the show, beginning as an impression of Japanese screen legend Toshiro Mifune (again, not cool, John). Still, repeating characters wasn’t part of SNL’s “plan,” since some staff members thought it “felt hacky.”
Just a month after the Pryor episode, though, the show was hosted by writer Buck Henry. While not all of Henry’s suggestions were welcome (at one point he floated an idea for a punchline that was shot down by the writers and branded “too Carol Burnett”), he did tell Lorne Michaels that they should really bring the Samurai character back.
Despite the stigma around repeat sketches, Michaels, eager to have dependably solid material, thought it was a “good idea.” So, the first sketch following Henry’s monologue in his debut episode was “Samurai Delicatessen,” starring Belushi as the same character.
Henry, who passed away in 2020, wasn’t so sure that he deserved any credit for this. “Lorne says I was the first to suggest repeating bits,” Henry told The Television Academy in 2009. “I don’t think I was, it’s a staple of comedy in the history of television. But I’ll take credit for it if he wants me to.”
Henry recalled that the sketch quickly became a “formula,” in which the Samurai character would be plopped into a different professional scenario. Unfortunately, one of these sketches led to Henry being inadvertently stabbed by Belushi.
The repeating character trend is something of a double-edged sword, pun not intended. On the one hand, some comic bits were given room to develop and improve over time. And recurring characters provided a sense of comfort and community around SNL. On the other hand, some initially funny ideas were clearly driven deep, deep into the ground.
