‘SNL’ At 50: Do You Ever Wish You’d Liked Something Just a Little More?
Saturday Night Live earned the 50th birthday party it threw for itself earlier this month.
Over those 50 years it has given us laughs, created cultural flashpoints, provided a home for live music and spawned a battalion of stars. In a media world where lifespan is calculated in dog years, Saturday Night Live has become something close to immortal.
I just wish I could get more excited about it.
At one time I did. In 1975 and 1976, like almost everyone I knew, I was hooked. “Weekend Update.” Gilda Radner’s characters. Garrett Morris’s Chico Escuela. Dan Aykroyd dropping the fish into the Bass-O-Matic. The chilling turn in the word association showdown between Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase. John Belushi ranting about how his friend got busted for pot possession in Texas — “25 years for a seed!”
Not everything worked. At the risk of sounding like a heretic, I was indifferent to the Coneheads, Samurai Deli, Mr. Bill and the Wild and Crazy Guys. But so much of it struck chords for my g-g-g-g-generation, or sometimes maybe just for me. I still laugh over the bit where Belushi was talking about trying to raise money by selling his record collection. When he pulled out Cream’s Wheels of Fire album, he shook his head and said sadly, “Only played once.”
Coming up with great stuff every week is, of course, not possible and it wasn’t long before the show had too many sketches that started with a cool premise and wandered off into nowhere. After some cast changes that with a couple of exceptions like Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy felt like downgrades, SNL for me became less of an appointment and more of an “I’ll turn it on it if I’m up anyway.” The good moments and the good performers, of whom there have been many over the years, no longer automatically made the other moments worth the time.
I’ve occasionally wondered why my interest waned, and I think the answer is that Saturday Night Live is the TV sketch comedy version of top-40 radio, contemporary entertainment packaged in short hits.
That’s not bad or trivial. It’s good. For a lot of us, top-40 was one of the first things that felt like it was all ours. Our parents didn’t pick it for us. Our teachers didn’t assign it. We found it and that bond lasts forever. When we’re 80, the right song brings us back to 10.
That said, none of us likes everything about top-40 radio. Some songs we like, some we don’t. Some DJs we like, some we don’t. We get exasperated about songs that are overplayed or not played at all. And then there are the ads.
Now sure, many young folks today get their contemporary popular music from sources other than traditional terrestrial top-40 radio. But I’m guessing most of those alternative streams induce the same mixed reaction. No music source gets it all right all the time.
In any case, most of us eventually drift away from top-40 radio. While we may still listen, our embrace loosens, usually because our lives fill with other things. Jobs, relationships, families. In Bob Seger’s phrase, ”what to leave in, what to leave out.”
So as new waves of discoverers gradually roll in, top-40 gives them new artists, songs and sounds.
That’s exactly how it has worked with SNL. Chris Farley, Tracy Morgan, Tina Fey, Eddie Murphy, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Dana Carvey, Will Ferrell, Jason Sudeikis, Molly Shannon, Amy Poehler, Mike Myers, Rachel Dratch, David Spade, Ana Gasteyer, Seth Meyers, Andy Samberg, Jon Lovitz, Kate McKinnon and Phil Hartman — my, this is an impressive list, and it’s not close to complete — all became faves of shifting viewer pods.
What remained unchanged was their mission, which is to make ’em laugh, and SNL mastermind Lorne Michaels tacitly understood from the start that you rode cheeseburgers, the Church Lady, Debbie Downer or Wayne’s World for a while, then you stopped. Like the Great White Shark, comedy moves forward or dies.
Peak SNL moments — the kind the birthday special should have spotlighted more — did their job. They left their mark. And, like Beyonce’s “Single Ladies,” Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off,” the Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” or Neil Sedaka’s “Bad Blood,” which was №1 the week SNL debuted, they all eventually yielded to what came next. .
If what came next gradually appealed less to me, it appealed more to someone else, which is a good summation of how popular culture works. John Belushi’s garage sale character and I may have only played Wheels of Fire once, but at last count it had sold more than four million copies.
