Fifty years of laughs on Saturday night
“Saturday Night Live,” or “SNL” for short, is a comedy sketch show that airs—you guessed it—live, on Saturday nights. It comes on at 11:30 p.m. in New York. It’s on NBC, one of America’s four national broadcast networks.
It has held its time slot for fifty years—half a century on the same channel, at the same time. This is a remarkable achievement. Few other shows have had such staying power, and certainly no other comedy show has. So what makes SNL so special?
To answer that question, let’s start with what Saturday Night Live is. The short answer is that it’s a live comedy performance, with a little bit of live pop music mixed in. The show has a standing cast of performers; the performers usually spend between three and seven years on the show. That’s long enough for them to develop their voice. But every season features new performers, so the show always feels fresh and updated.
In addition to the standing cast, there’s always a guest host and a musical guest. There’s a new guest host and a new musician or band every week. The guest host opens the show with a monologue, and the host appears in some of the sketches. Famous people, including politicians, tend to play themselves. The musicians play two songs in two different segments later in the show.
But the heart of Saturday Night Live is the live sketches. The sketches are short comedy performances, usually about five minutes long. The sketches poke fun at real-life situations, pop culture, celebrities, or politicians. Each sketch has a fully-built-out set and the performers are in costume.
While the sets are being changed and the cast members jump on and off the stage, the show airs pre-recorded segments like parody commercials or parody public service announcements. Most shows have a segment called “Weekend Update,” a parody news bulletin.
One of the great things about SNL is that it captures the mood of the moment. The sketches you see performed live on Saturday night were written on Wednesday of that same week. That means the writing didn’t go through layers of approval or weeks or months of revisions. The humor is raw and up-to-date. Generations of viewers have the same comment about SNL: they say it was funniest when they were young.
Most SNL sketches are one-time routines. Here’s an example. The sketch is a parody of daytime talk shows. In the sketch, a celebrity psychologist tries to help a couple solve their marital problems. The wife is angry because her husband was two hours late to their anniversary dinner. The wife starts crying. The audience boos the husband. The talk-show host and the therapist chide the man, who didn’t even call to tell his wife he’d be late.
Only at the end of the segment do we learn that the man is a firefighter: on the night in question, he was fighting a fire, saving lives. But the therapist won’t hear it: “you’re all about excuses,” he tells the firefighter, as the studio audience jeers.
In another sketch, a couple sits at the kitchen table, wondering what to do about all their credit card debt. A man comes into the kitchen, with an innovative new program to get out of debt. It’s called, “Don’t buy stuff you cannot afford.” The couple struggles to understand the concepts in the one-page booklet.
Other sketches are recurring. “Church Chat” is a local tv show with a judgmental host who can’t stop herself from criticizing other people’s behavior. “Celebrity Jeopardy!” showed clueless celebrities trying, in vain, to win at a quiz show. “Debbie Downer” was a woman who always found a way to ruin a happy moment with a negative or depressing comment. “Target Lady” was the store employee who made intrusive comments about what shoppers were buying.
Some SNL sketches have been adapted into movies. You may have seen Blues Brothers, Coneheads, Wayne’s World, or Superstar. They all started as SNL sketches. Other times, the sketches became so popular that their punch lines became part of the vernacular. “More cowbell,” “a van down by the river,” and “simmer down now.”
The celebrity parodies are funny. Martha Stewart, Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, and basically every president and major candidate have been parodied. In one famous sketch, a debate moderator asked then-candidate George W. Bush to summarize his campaign in one word. He looked straight into the camera and said, “strategery,” which is…not a word. But the real Bush White House took it in stride and started holding “strategery” meetings in the real White House.
Lorne Michaels is the creator of Saturday Night Live and has been the producer for all but five years of its half-century existence. He is the one who chooses which sketches make it into the show. Early in the week, writers and performers create more sketches than are needed that week. Throughout the week, some are re-written, and others are cut entirely.
At 8:00 p.m. on Saturday, the cast does a live rehearsal of that week’s show in front of an audience. Lorne Michaels watches the rehearsal and makes last-minute changes to lines and stories based on what the audience likes best. Then, the whole team has a frantic 90 minutes to make the final cuts and edits before the live show begins before a fresh audience at 11:30 p.m.
Jeff’s take
I mentioned Lorne Michaels, the producer. He describes Saturday Night Live like a Snickers bar: it’s not the best candy bar, but it’s reliable and most people like it. And when you bite into a Snickers, you expect a certain portion to be peanuts, a certain amount of chocolate, and a certain amount of caramel.
And so the show has a certain amount of celebrity parodies, a certain amount of current events, and a certain amount of—let’s call it juvenile humor.
Anyway, if you want to get an idea of what Saturday Night Live is like, I’ve put links to the sketches I talked about in the transcript of this episode. So go to PlainEnglish.com/748 and you’ll see links in the whole transcript to videos of the sketches that I mentioned—there are probably fifteen of them. So, click on those and enjoy.
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