Sunday, February 16, 2025


The Painted Timbers, 47th Day of Childwinter, 525 M.E. (Electra): Last night, as a part of its much publicized 50-year anniversary, Saturday Night Live aired its very first episode from 1975. I watched it all, and there's 90 minutes of my life I'm never getting back again.

I had forgotten how thuddingly unfunny the show was, even back then. It's fairly well recognized now that the show is painfully unfunny, but boomer legend how that show used to be great "back in the day."  

It  wasn't. I didn't laugh last night once the entire show. The brief Andy Kauffman bit was amusing in its quirky way, but was more weird than funny. I also remembered a fair number of the skits, although I honestly don't know if I remember them from first seeing them 50 years ago on t.v., or from subsequent replays on talk shows, YouTube, etc. 

I also forgot how short the bits were back then. One of the many things that make the current version so painful to watch is that the skits go on and on for way too long, well past the point of amusement. At least the old version kept them short and sweet.

But I do remember the cultural impact the show had in its time. Long before the internet, the show was a weekly generator of catch phrases and the equivalent of memes. The week following each episode, everyone would be dropping lines like, "Well, excuuuuse me!" and "land shark" into their conversations to show their hipness bona fides. Look, before the internet, email, and social media, back in the days of the monoculture, it was all we had. Up to that point, there was virtually no representation at all of pot-smoking, hip young people on television - not in any positive light, a least. Early SNL, while it still hadn't yet openly embraced the rock 'n' roll, drug culture, dropped enough references that certain viewers knew the writers were "one of us." IYKYK.

The show lasted for 50 years not because it was so funny, not because it was so good, but because there was nothing else on television during its timeslot and would always win the ratings for late-night Saturdays. It was cheap to produce and could always find advertisers, so no one ever pulled the plug on that cash cow. So as NBC continues to beat its chest over its "cultural phenomenon," just remember - it really was never very funny.      

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