Saturday Night Live celebrated its 40th year with a 3 1/2-hour prime time special Sunday evening.
As I watched, I was amazed at the steady stream of comedic talent over a four-decade period.
Everyone has their favorites, of course, and I suspect the preference has much to do with who was on stage when the viewer was in his/her teens/early 20s. SNL has always found this demographic to be its most loyal fans.
For that reason, there is no objective argument to be made for John Belushi over Eddie Murphy or Will Ferrell. Who was better: Gilda Radner or Tina Fey? Tell me your age, and I’ll tell you your preference.
I suspect you might be able to guess my preference, too.
As for me, I liked the original cast best – Bubba was the host. The cast members included Lea, Steve, Randall, Bill, Keith and Mike, although there were others who made semi-regular appearances.
Those names are not familiar to most of you, I realize. The original “Not Ready for Prime Time Players” were, of course, Chase, Belushi, Aykroyd, Radner, Curtin, Newman and Morris.
But to fully appreciate the phenomenon of SNL at its birth, you must understand that the show was very much a shared event. In those early days, at least, watching SNL was very much a communal experience. We watched in groups, usually the same groups.
So it was with me.
1975 was the year I became fully mobile. Back then, you could get your driver’s license at age 15, which made my world much, much larger. Getting that license was the first great liberating event of my life. It opened the door to so many choices and like most teens, I made a whole lot of new decisions, some good, some bad, some just silly. Along the way, I realize now, I was just beginning to learn something about who I was. Until then, I had followed a script I hadn’t written, which is hardly unique. We all travel that path.
At the time SNL burst onto the scene, I had found a group of friends, a place where I fit in, where I could be me.
So while SNL was broadcast from Studio 8-H at Rockefeller Center in New York, I was part of a cast which gathered in basement at Bubba Nash’s house, mainly because it was the one place where we were permitted to be teen-aged boys. On any given Saturday, a group of 8 to 10 of us would gather at Bubba’s house around 7 o’clock and spend the next few hours drinking beer, playing poker, smoking cigarettes or cigars and telling lies (mostly) about our sexual escapades.
We played two- and three-card Western poker and built and lost great fortunes. Usually, we started out with 10 or 20 bucks, but the credit was liberal. Each Sunday morning, the winners from the weekly poker games would empty out jeans pockets to find IOUs — $20 from Bubba, $10 from Randall, $80 from Lea (Lea, being an especially bold bettor with exceptionally poor judgment). The IOUs would be written on scraps of paper from the brown-paper bags that had once held the cheap beer we brought to Bubba’s house.
By 9, all the cash had been exhausted and the losers were all playing on credit. I think Lea owes roughly $20,000 in gambling bets, although I doubt any of his creditors still have the IOUs to prove it.
At 10:30, the poker playing stopped and we gathered around the TV to watch Belushi and Aykroyd and Curtain, et al, which sent us into convulsions of laughter. We had never seen anything remotely like SNL. Fake ads were something entirely new, and the first Bass-O-Matic ad had us falling out of our chairs.
Somehow, the jokes were always funnier when you hear them surrounded by other laughing people. Laughing alone is a lesser form of laughter, oddly.
SNL was fresh and new and funny, a show that did what no one then would have ever predicted because ours was just one group of kids who planned their Saturday nights around SNL. It happened everywhere.
That a television show could attract that particular audience during the key hours of a Saturday night were simply something no one could have imagined.
Among our group, it changed dating rituals. If you had a date, you planned it for Friday night. Saturday night was reserved for watching SNL with your buddies.
As I watched the 40th anniversary show, I was delighted to see those original cast members and those old, familiar skits.
And as I watched, my thoughts turned to the own “cast of characters” that I once belonged to. Time, distance, experiences, even beliefs and attitudes have conspired to separate us, of course. I haven’t seen most of that old gang in decades now.
But as I watched, I could almost taste the cold beer. I could almost see my gang, frozen in their teen-aged years, gathered around the poker table, laughing and lying and taking those first slow steps toward becoming the men we would someday be.
So who was the best cast in SNL’s 40-year history?
If you grew up watching Saturday Night Live, that’s an easy question, isn’t it?
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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