The cold opening (I’ve avoided that term for the first 18 episodes) is a killer.
Chevy Chase (of course) as Ronald Reagan…prefiguring the stilted-hip of Bill Clinton on Arsenio Hall by a decade and change.
What we learn…Chevy can actually play the organ. Some nice B-3 licks.
But the killer is Garrett Morris’ priceless contribution.
Like a silent film actor, Morris takes each condescending, racist jab from Reagan and grows more and more outraged…in such a believable Miles Davis kind of way (if we ignore the alto sax he’s holding).
What a start to a great episode!
Morris is in another high-art bit of humor later…for the fake donation solicitation Fondue Pots For Namibia. Yes, it sounds like the title of a Zappa song (or perhaps Captain Beefheart), yet it is Saturday night variety show humor from 1976 at its best. Bloody genius!
Some of the more elaborate skits are guest host Madeline Kahn as the “bride of Frankenstein” singing Leonard Bernstein’s “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story. Howard Shore and band are great in this skit (especially pianist/vocalist Paul Schaffer…of future Letterman fame).
Another amazing skit involves Dan Aykroyd as Richard Nixon. Rounding out this bizarre, vast set piece is John Belushi as Henry Kissinger.
Now for the bad. Carly Simon is godawful in her first prerecorded number “Half a Chance”. I mean, really godawful.
What is apparent over the course of the show is that Madeline Kahn was a much better singer than Carly.
At least Simon somewhat redeems herself on the ubiquitous “You’re So Vain”. It’s obvious Carly had talent. She has a great, soulful voice. Not sure what the problem was on “Half a Chance”. Perhaps it was the cheesy, out-of-tune, canned backing vocals. Also, the song is a clunker.
Alternately, I could listen to the line “…clouds in my coffee” from now till eternity. It has that 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle vibe to it which is truly profound…the transcendental moment of spotting a microcosm in the mundane.
The name might have been unfamiliar to most, but run that clip of “Puttin’ On the Ritz” from Young Frankenstein and you have a strange bit of film immortality.
Mr. Boyle was, of course, the tap-dancing Frankenstein monster who so gracefully delivered his one and only (repeated) singing line at sporadic intervals [“puttin’ on the riiiiiiiitttttzzzzzzz…”].
Irving Berlin, the song’s composer, published it barely more than a month after the stock market crash of 1929. Aw hell…I don’t often do this, but it’s important you see this laugh-out-loud clip if you’re unfamiliar with the “super dooper” Mel Brooks moment:
Now then…
That’s Peter Boyle. I suppose he had TWO lines in actuality.
Well, he’s here as the host of Saturday Night Live on Valentine’s Day 1976.
Ah, Valentine’s…or as the beautiful, genius Sophie Crumb (30 years later) called it “valentine-wanna-kill-myself-day!” Yeah…
Sometimes it feels about like that.
So this episode of SNL has an occasionally sappy, lazy, wrist-slitting sentimentality to it. Ok, I admit: the Gary Weis film is cute. But God…that Simon & Garfunkel music… It’s such a tearjerker.
Really, it peeves me when SNL recycles footage. I mean, hello! We’re only 13 episodes into this thing. First season! Are they really out of material? Hell, we’d seen ’em do it earlier with an Albert Brooks film.
At least the repeated faux commercials are usually funny. And they’re tolerable because they’re 30 seconds long (I’m guessing) [give or take].
So, yeah…
This episode has some good parts. Samurai Divorce Court is pretty good (mainly due to John Belushi and Jane Curtin).
Really, this episode is pretty strong until the back half.
Al Jarreau is surprisingly good as the musical guest. I wasn’t really familiar with his stuff (just his name), but he really is a musical freak! The guy really nails it on both of his performances…going from a simmering Valentine’s romantic tone to savant bebop scatting.
Wikipedia has a very sparse sketch of the events in this episode.
Some, admittedly, aren’t really worth mentioning.
The wrestling skit with The Bees and The W.A.S.P.s (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants) is pretty underwhelming.
Really, the most-improved (and continually improving) portion of the show was the Weekend Update with Chevy Chase. The writing was pretty free and wild. And think of all the great cultural references we get.
The description of Dorothy Hamill’s Olympic routine is frankly hilarious. Also, by this time George H.W. Bush was director of the CIA. One particularly funny question posed by the show’s writers was, “Is America a front for the CIA?”
Such humor evinces politically-aware writers. We must remember that the Church Committee had just met the previous year (1975). It was one of the few times (perhaps the only time) that the American intelligence community came under any sort of actual scrutiny by Congress (and, by extension, the American people).
CIA, NSA, FBI…no one was completely spared from this investigation occasioned by Watergate.
Which reminds me. Perhaps the most classic bit in this episode is Dan Aykroyd doing a Nixon impersonation in a rubber monkey mask. The surreal act of breathing (which causes the entire mask to be sucked in and, alternately, blown back out) perfectly sums up the bizarre nature of American politics at that time.
It was a time when Reagan was but a former “fascist” governor (and yet to be President). Yes, Weekend Update uses the word “fascist”. (!) How far SNL has sunk now.
But, to be fair, SNL was projecting the humor of the American liberal movement. At least that’s the impression I get.
One final note. The trial of Patricia (Patty) Hearst was also big news about this time. Obviously, her case captured national attention for quite a while. [An earlier episode with Lily Tomlin involved a fictional sorority sister [Tomlin] writing a letter to the imprisoned Hearst while, in an aside, asking another sister to return her Carpenters records. Ahh, the 70s…]
Perhaps the greatest coup of the episode under consideration is the montage of art photos which purport to be an “Artist Rendering” of the Hearst trial. From Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights to Dalí’s La persistencia de la memoria, the effect is both highbrow and ridiculous.
And it is for nuggets just such as these that we continue to be enthralled with America’s most storied variety show.
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