https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1975/11/24/saturday-night-live-review




This is probably as good a time as any to say a few words about an appealing new comedy program called "Saturday Night," which is broadcast at eleven-thirty each Saturday night by NBC and is definitely not to be confused with "Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell," which comes on earlier in the evening on ABC. The Cosell show and NBC’s "Saturday Night" are both mainly live, but there is a crucial difference between the two programs. Cosell’s show (as is the case with nearly all entertainment on commercial television), for all its "liveness," is based on and defined by the standard vocabulary of American show business. Some of the acts are well done, others are not so well done. The essential texture of the show, however, depends on that strange fantasy language of celebrity public relations which has been concocted for the public by mass-entertainment producers and stars and in recent years has become almost formalized as a kind of national version of a modern courtier style. It is the language of kisses blown, of "God bless you"s, of "this wonderful human being," of "a sensational performer and my very dear personal friend," and of "You’re just a beautiful audience!"—in short, the language of celebrity "hype" or, alternatively (though it amounts to the same thing), of celebrity "roast." It is the language of not daring to let anything alone to stand by itself, the language of bored artifice—perhaps a contemporary equivalent of dandyism and powdered wigs.

Much of the appeal of "Saturday Night" lies in its contrast with this ubiquitous show-business language. Its format, like that of most comedy programs, consists of a familiar assembly of skits, songs, and monologues, but the spirit of the material is in opposition to conventional show business—especially to the rituals of mass-entertainment television. To begin with, the physical presentation of the program is deliberately untidy and informal. The shows are broadcast from a cavernous, undecorated NBC working studio that has been filled largely with young people. In contrast to most studio-audience programs, in which the audience setup is rigid and theatrelike, the effect here is that of a huge, darkened, lively TV cabaret. Each Saturday night, the program has a different host (though neither "host" nor "m.c." seems quite the right word for the part)—for instance, George Carlin, the comedian, or Paul Simon (formerly of Simon and Garfunkel), or Candice Bergen. The hosts don’t do very much in the way of "hosting"—in the conventional TV manner of promoting themselves or the guests—but are content mainly to sit around, providing a periodic focus for the loosely tied-together skits and sometimes telling a story or two or, as in Paul Simon’s case, singing a few songs. As you might guess, the feel of the show is decidedly loose—loose but with generally able performances.

Skit humor usually defies cold description, so I won’t try much of it here. On the recent Saturday with Candice Bergen as host, the show began with a not very brilliant takeoff of a Presidential news conference, which showed the actor impersonating President Ford bumping his head on the lectern, fumbling with his drinking water, and repeatedly falling down. But then there was a crisply done parody of a TV news program, with the President once again featured ("President Ford has just asked for the resignation of his son Jack"), concluding with a lunatic "News for the Hard of Hearing," which consisted of a newsman yelling items of news very loud. There was also a funny takeoff of one of the local-TV-station counter-editorials. Also a takeoff of a "Black Perspective" program, with the black host attempting to interview a harebrained white girl on the subject of a book she had just written about black ghetto life. Also an amiable but fairly juvenile parody of "Jaws." Also some funny parodies of TV commercials, and some filmed parodies of TV serials: "Medical Season," about a heartless, incompetent old doctor; and "The Three of Us," about an ineptly arranged girl-boy-girl modern living arrangement. Also a freewheeling talk-show interview with a couple of demented kiwi trappers. Also a skit by a fine young comedian, Andy Kaufman, about a TV "guest" who couldn’t manage to perform properly, or at all. And so forth.

As I said, you can’t convey much of anything about comedy skits by describing them. The truth is that it’s a funny show and has enough comic spirit behind it so that even an actress of no notable comic expertise, such as Candice Bergen, can work along easily with the program. Still, it’s not really the gross tonnage of jokes in the skits which makes "Saturday Night" worth looking at. What is attractive and unusual about the program is that it is an attempt, finally, to provide entertainment on television in a recognizable, human, non-celebrity voice—and in a voice, too, that tries to deal with the morass of media-induced show-business culture that increasingly pervades American life.

I was going to add that the show is topical, but "topical" has become another of those contemporary vogue words, and, as an automatic value-enhancing adjective, it no longer means what it used to mean. In mass entertainment nowadays, just about everyone is topical. Hardly anyone tells mother-in-law jokes anymore. Mary Tyler Moore is topical. Howard Cosell is topical. Even Dean Martin is topical. Any comedian within twelve feet of a microphone makes jokes about government, politicians, even Presidents. Last year, when President Ford dispensed win buttons, the airwaves crackled with professional show-business jokes on the subject. Bob Hope, for one, has consistently made jokes on subjects drawn from the news pages of the newspapers—many of them funny jokes. But Bob Hope (as is true of most of his colleagues) is primarily a joke machine. Jokes are rattled off almost promiscuously: some are about the C.I.A., others about golf—or the energy crisis or football or the White House swimming pool or Bing Crosby. These jokes are topical in the contemporary sense of being about everyday, or "relevant," topics, but they have no center. What does the person telling the joke really think? Bob Hope, for one, rigorously plays the part of a man who doesn’t think. He is the conventional professional entertainer. From the audience’s vantage point, he had no political sensibility and no personal life. In a way, there is a certain purity to the Hope approach. Everything in the world becomes a potential joke, which can be fashioned crisply, neatly, with detached expertise, and then told purely, unmarred by the kind of synthetic personality ("My wife is the kind of woman who . . .") that lesser comedians attempt to inject into their routines. The Hope style (like that of his professional heirs, such as Rowan and Martin, and even Johnny Carson) is basically a triumph of technological comedy. There is a laugh in anything, but the comedian is not necessarily connected to, or disconnected from, the source of laughter. He is a processor of jokes. He stands apart.

This technological approach to humor is difficult to carry off, because each of the isolated, impersonal jokes has to work right. Most conventional mass-entertainment comedians have neither the established presence nor the timing nor the joke writers of a Bob Hope, and so they are usually compelled to create half-realized and synthetic dramatic personalities for themselves: Red Skelton’s punch-drunk prizefighter, or Jackie Gleason’s roguish fat man, or Lucille Ball’s zany housewife, or Milton Berle’s life of the party, or Carol Burnett’s hysterical wallflower, and so on. Indeed, for years most television comedy has been frozen in these ancient and synthetic molds: of a playacted dramatic "personality" (where part of the fun, supposedly, lies in knowing that Carroll O’Connor isn’t really a bigot, or that Carol Burnett isn’t really demented) or else of the detached, technical precision of mass-entertainment topical joke-telling (where the comedian appears to be talking about a topic of current interest but a personally felt texture of concern is rarely acknowledged). This isn’t to say that a number of conventional mass-entertainment comedy routines aren’t funny, or that there won’t always be a place, or a need, for a clown simply to play a clown. But during all the years that commercial television (with a few exceptions, notably Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca) has remained stuck in its conventional postures of synthetic comedy several wholly new approaches to popular humor have been evolving, which network television (ever the guardian of the Public Weal) has resolutely ignored.

In a sense, there have been two key modern developments in comedy. One originated in America in the postwar period, and on the small, peripheral stages of Chicago and San Francisco: Nichols and May with Chicago’s Compass Players (some of whose members evolved into the Second City troupe), Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, and Lenny Bruce at the "hungry i" in San Francisco. These performers were first acclaimed by the young, and for their qualities of "topicality" and "relevance." Their style was loose, conversational, personal. That was a period when middle-class America was beginning a nearly mass communion with psychiatry, or, certainly, with the forms or language of the psychiatric experience, and it was the personal gropings of the psychiatric patient—the stumbling, sensibility-prone, identity-obsessed assertions—that formed both the underpinning of the new humor and the material to play off on. Many Americans were attempting to find their "real selves." The new entertainers, in addition to playing off on these searches after identity, attempted to gain the good will and regard of their audiences by revealing—or, anyway, acknowledging—their "real selves." One could almost say that the basis for the new comedy routines was an absence of detachment, an absence of conventional professionalism—an absence of the traditional notions of compartmentalization. Much of the American public was trying to deal with new concepts of "wholeness" and "relatedness" in private life and public life: public officials and ordinary men and women were to be accountable for their whole and interconnected lives—not just for one visible corner of them. The new American comedians seemed to be saying that they would now be accountable for their jokes. For instance, an old-style comedian might make a joke about the C.I.A.: "The C.I.A. is in plenty of hot water lately. Why, things are so bad down there they sent a self-destructing letter to one of their agents and it came back ‘Opened by Mistake.’ " Superficially, this might be termed a topical joke, but its topicality is virtually meaningless, being buried in traditional show-business paraphernalia. The comedian uses the C.I.A. as a fashionable topic, but he doesn’t touch it or connect to it. And the audience (which nonetheless thinks for itself) is left out in the cold except for the automatic ha-haing at the punch line. Nor is it true to say that the old-style comedian would spoil the simple clownlike purity of his position if he were to take a personal point of view—by admitting to his own reality. For the fact is that by claiming to view the "topic" of the C.I.A. only as the detached subject of a disconnected wisecrack he is already being "political." A new-style comedian—for example, Mort Sahl—not only would connect a topic such as the C.I.A. to his own point of view but, by cumulatively and publicly uncovering his various points of view on various topics, would unfold his own "real self" and present that to the audience. Whatever else it might feel in the grip of the new humorous self-consciousness, the growing audience for the new comedians was not being left out in the cold.
The other key trend or tributary which fed into modern comedy developed mainly in England, also in the postwar period—first in the radio "Goon Show" routines of Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, then with such educated lunacies as "Beyond the Fringe," and more recently with "Monty Python’s Flying Circus." Superficially, the humor of these English actor-comedians seemed to be based largely, and restrictively, on English concepts and English culture. But their considerable success in America has shown that what was actually being exported was two other ingredients. The first was a fairly ancient English comic standby: the eccentric, and the concept of eccentricity. For some time, American Anglophiles had been fond of remarking affectionately, and perhaps a trifle condescendingly, on "the English eccentric." Since Dickens, eccentricity had been regarded as an approved, even a unique, feature of English life and literature. American eccentricity was not thought to properly exist as such. Except for a handful of absentminded college professors and an occasional inventor, American literature had a rather scant record of American eccentricity. Important or established Americans were thought to be too busy, or too important or established, to serve as suitable vessels for eccentricity. Times changed, however, and, with them, national assertions and national self-knowledge. As a result, in recent years American films and literature have fairly teemed with examples of American eccentricity, and what was once thought of as a uniquely English habit of detecting lunacy in seemingly stable Englishmen has turned out to be an extremely successful export item—applicable equally to Foreign Office and State Department, to addled noble lords and demented Pentagon generals. Indeed, it was one of the original Goons, Peter Sellers, who played that quintessential Cold War warrior Dr. Strangelove. The other ingredient originally exported by the new English comedians can perhaps best be described as a comedy of surplus education. In England, for generations (such being the dutifulness of the English school systems), a major part of the population has consistently been taught vast quantities of useless knowledge. In America, the mass acquisition of useless knowledge didn’t really come into its own until the great surge in "humanist" college studies after the Second World War, but since then it has been proceeding apace. When Nichols and May used to do improvised parodies of Pirandello, they were connecting to this subterranean pool of expensively acquired surplus information, in the same way that "Monty Python" has appealed to a randomly overinformed audience with its film about the Holy Grail.

What all this has to do with NBC’s "Saturday Night" is simply this. For the most part, in the past twenty years commercial television has largely ignored the important new trends in modern comedy—which are important not as trends but as basic ways of trying to view and organize experience. To deny the public a consistent view of modern art, say, would be to deny people an important way of looking at and identifying with their world. The same is true (perhaps on a different plane) with comedy—the so-called "comic vision." Whether as a result of the caution of advertisers or of the personal prejudices of network bosses, mass-entertainment television comedy has been firmly rooted in the past—a synthetic, Hollywood-style, show-business past—despite the fact that the new forms of comedy have demonstrated a considerable popular appeal. It is not a matter of wishing to replace Bob Hope with an "élitist," in-group kind of humor. The popular audience continues to adore Bob Hope, but it is also true that for years substantial segments of this same popular audience have been sneaking away in droves from its Hoopla Show Business Comedy Hours in order to commune with the rising number of lesser-known, more personal, more political, more sexual, more connectively humorous comedians who for the most part have existed outside the carefully patrolled guard fence of network-television entertainment.

Thus, what is noteworthy about "Saturday Night," and why I commend it, is not the result of any spectacular, star-studded brilliance on its part; indeed, it has no real stars, though I hope that the ensemble of actor-comics who perform most of the skits will make individual names for themselves. It is, as the saying goes, an uneven program, with ups and downs and too many commercial breaks. But it is a direct and funny show, which seems to speak out of the real, non-show-business world that most people inhabit—and it exists. One wonders (without expecting an answer) what took it so long. One wonders, too, what simple human pleasures the simple, human TV viewer might some day conceivably experience if network television—that grinning, gun-toting, wisecracking ("You’re just a beautiful audience!"), still youthful courtesan—should ever start peeling off the rest of the cosmetics. ♦

A previous version of this article mischaracterized the actions of a character in the sketch about Gerald Ford, and also the background of the female character in the "Black Perspective" sketch.
Published in the print edition of the November 24, 1975, issue, with the headline "A Crack in the Greasepaint."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1975/11/24/saturday-night-live-review