This Comedian Was the Top Choice to Host the First ‘SNL’ (And It Wasn’t George Carlin)
In the movie Saturday Night, the show’s first host, George Carlin, proves himself to be quite the a-hole, snorting coke in his dressing room, refusing at the last minute to appear in sketches and eating Billy Crystal’s props.
Even by Carlin’s own admission, Saturday Night didn’t stray far from the truth. The comedian performed the wrong bits during SNL’s first live show, plugged his album when he was asked not to and visibly ground his jaw on live television due to an excess of cocaine.
All of the antics had to gall Lorne Michaels. Even though Carlin was a stand-up superstar in 1975, he wasn’t the producer’s first choice for the show’s inaugural host. The comedian “was slightly older than us, a little more jazz-influenced, a little different music,” Michaels said later, according to Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live.
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Michaels also didn’t want to kick off his show with his friend Paul Simon, even though that would have been a natural choice. The reason had to do with the first pancake theory — the first one is never quite as good as the ones that come after. “I thought (the first Saturday Night) might be a disaster,” Michaels said. “And it’s always been a strategy of mine to try to make the second show ‘hotter’ than the first, because you want the ratings and the word of mouth to go up, and I thought Paul could do that.”
So if not Carlin or Simon, who did Michaels want to host the inaugural show? That was Tommy Smothers, a comedy hero of Michaels’ from his days as a writer on Laugh-In.
While Laugh-In went for counterculture comedy with its psychedelic sets and jokes about women’s lib, its daring only went so far. But The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was the real deal, inviting Pete Seeger to sing protest songs and constantly hammering political leaders for the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Michaels and Tommy Smothers both used the same phrase to describe the comedy they favored: “What was happening in the streets.” Michaels made friends with a couple of Smothers’ writers, Rob Reiner and Steve Martin, and felt like he was stuck on the wrong show.
But what Michaels admired is what got Smothers fired. CBS canceled The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour due to the show’s refusal to back away from counterculture comedy. By 1975, Michaels reasoned, the world was ready for Smothers to give it another go on late-night television.
So how did Michaels end up with Carlin instead? Tommy Smothers turned down the invitation to be Saturday Night’s first host. He was still so angry about his experience at CBS that he refused to return to television in any form. The anger must have subsided over time because the Smothers Brothers agreed to host the show in 1982, a year in which Michaels was away from the show.
Instead, it was Carlin who said yes, cementing his place in Saturday Night Live history.
