In the spring of 1984, SNL
faced a crisis. Eddie Murphy, who
had just accomplished the back to back smashes of 48 Hours and Trading Places, was leaving the series to pursue his film career. Facing this problem, Dick Ebersol did
something that I don’t think even Lorne Michaels would have tried.
He went to Billy Crystal and essentially made him an offer. You work on
SNL for one season and we will pay you whatever you want.. Crystal had
hosted the show that spring and clearly demonstrated a gift for it. He signed
on for those terms. Ebersol than made similar offers to some of the greatest
sketch comedians in history: Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer, who the
previous year had more or less created the mockumentary with This is Spinal Tap and Martin Short, who had already proven his
mettle on SCTV earlier in the decade. (John Candy, Joe Flaherty,
and Dave Thomas had all hosted the show during the Ebersol years, so he was
going that far.) Combined with the talents of Jim Belushi, who had joined the
cast the previous year, and the returns of Mary Gross and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, SNL went into 1984 with arguably its greatest assemblage of talent since
the show premiered.
From the beginning, the show was a rocket. Crystal ended up delivering
the opening monologue and absolutely brought the house down when he brought up
the fact that the show was ten years old, and how much had changed in that period.
There were brilliant jokes about age groups in bank lines, dealing with your
children’s taste (“Is it true Paul McCartney was in a group before ‘Wings’ he
claimed his daughter asked him?) and the wonders of childbirth. It was perfect from
beginning to end and a sign of how great the show would be that year.
In keeping with the general theme of experimentation throughout the
previous seasons, many of the segments that year were filmed. While there were
mixed reception to that from some of the cast and critics at the time - was it justified still calling the ‘show’
life – given how much energy is now given to sketches by Funny or Die in the
2000s and movie trailers that proceed to this, it was clear that everybody was
worried about nothing. Besides, these segments were hysterical. There were
segments called ‘Lifestyles of the Relatives of the Rich and Famous’, basically
an excuse for the cast to do impression. (Martin Short still does a mean
Katherine Hepburn by the way.) There were incredible filmed segments including ‘Male
Synchronized Swimming’ which for understandable reasons has gone down in comedy
history. (Please YouTube it. Description does it no justice.) And when Eddie
Murphy returned he did a provocative segment that in retrospect looks like it
was the best Chappelle’s Show sketch we never got: “White Like Me.”
Murphy, in order to see if there were two Americas, one black, one white,
donned makeup, watched Dallas and Dynasty and read a lot of
Hallmark cards. Then Mr. White went out to society – and learned the bitter –
but still hysterical – truth.
The lion’s share of the best recurring characters were, to little
surprise, done by Crystal himself and still have spots in history. Everybody thought
Hernando was ‘Mahvelous’ but there were also little bits he did that were perfect.
I don’t know if anyone who could have gotten away with his impression of Ali
(Ali himself never minded) and I seriously think the only reason we remember Joe
Franklin today was because of the sketches he did. Then there were the bits he
would do with Christopher Guest where the two played security guards or night
watchmen, who would end up discussing body manipulation and mutilation that
sounds like they were things Jigsaw would reject. “I hate when that happens,”
made it all worthwhile. Martin Short brought Ed Grimley to SNL stage, where
among other things he would dance with Tina Turner and Rich Hall would occasionally
grace with spot on impressions of eighties celebs like Paul Harvey and Doug
Hemming.
The guest hosts were somewhat less significant than they were in other
years, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be brilliant. Christopher Reeve hosted
and showed us his real audition for Superman.
Turns out he was actually the
second choice. He read well for the role, but he couldn’t catch a bullet in his
teeth or turn coal into a diamond as well as his biggest rival. Jessie Jackson
brought some brilliant laughter (as I mentioned before) Ringo Starr wasn’t able
to get a bid at an auction for Beatles memorabilia, and George Carlin came on ten
years later and did a routine just as memorable as his one on God.
And then, the next year everybody had moved on. It was inevitable that
the next season was going to be a disappointment; I don’t think anybody could
have expected that it would be so disastrous. Many of the cast members at the
time thought that the 1985-1986 season would be the last one, based on the
vehemence of the reviews and the drop in the ratings.
This is kind of astonishing when you consider who the replacements were
Joan Cusack, Anthony Michael Hall and Randy Quaid had joined the cast, along
with a complete unknown named Robert Downey. Future stalwarts for the series
Nora Dunn, Jon Lovitz and Dennis Miller joined the cast and they even found a
place in for a featured player named Damon Wayans. You’d think the sketches for
the shows would have to be genuinely horrible for all of this talent to be
wasted, and while I think much of the material for that season was inferior, I
also genuinely believe that there was more gold there than anyone – maybe even
the cast itself – wants to give credit for.
For one thing, Ron Reagan Jr. hosted the show and created an opening
number that has also earned a place in history. Reagan and Nancy (Quaid and
Terry Sweeney) are at Camp David and had left Ron in charge of the White House.
After carefully giving him instructions, we next see Ron only wearing a shirt
and sunglasses and doing the exact dance that Tom Cruise had shot the stardom
on in Risky Business for to ‘That Old’ Time Rock and Roll.” The
audience went into hysterics I’ve rarely heard from beginning to end. Nor
indeed was this the only good sketch from that episode. In a Back to the Future
parody, Ronald Reagan is an out of work actor in 1985 and he and Nancy have a troubled
marriage. Ron ends up going back in time on to the set of Hellcats of the Navy’ and interrupts his parents wooing. In order
to get them back together, he tells his younger father (who is a dyed in the
wool liberal) that in order to get Nancy he has to say he’s more conservative
and pro-business. I won’t go into more detail, except to say that even Ron’s
surprised when he ends up back where he used to live.
Now to be clear, not all the hosts and sketches were this good. But just
as in the years previous you got a sense the show was trying just as hard to be
experimental as it had in the Dick Ebersol years. Penn and Teller, who were
just starting out their act, did several bits for the show, including the world’s
most expensive card trick and a plan to kill Teller live on stage. Guest hosts like Jay Leno and John Lithgow
had individual sketches that were memorable and genuinely funny. Paul Simon started the show with “You Can Call Me Al’ instead of an opening sketch and
then ended up in a Twilight Zone parody where young versions of himself and
Garfunkel made a deal with the Devil for superstardom – and then later on a
much older Simon ended up in the perfect version of Hell. . Geri Hall hosted
the show and told Jon Lovitz’s ‘Liar’ that she was married to a rock star – and
then Mick Jagger showed up. And the show did a meta-level that was still at the
time very radical. During a Star
Search parody, Joan Cusack and
Dennis Miller did a deliberately painful reenactment of the famous ‘Cheeseburger’
sketch. Dennis Miller interrupted the news
for a bit that he said was ‘only good when SNL was still on the air’ And Jon
Lovitz opened the show as his liar character – playing the owner of NBC, assuring
the audience that SNL was doing great, everybody was watching it,
the cast was perfect – but was unable to tell a lie about just what the reviews
were.
And in the middle of the season at their absolute popular nadir, SNL did what might very well have been the most experimental thing they
ever did. The show opens with the cast discussing that to help the show Francis
Ford Coppola has been called into direct. The cast is unnerved and asks what
changes will he makes? Will the show still open the same way? And instead of
the ‘Live From New York’, the show fades to opening credits of Saturday Night Live a Francis Ford Coppola production with Godfather type theme music playing.
George Wendt comes out to do his monologue but he doesn’t get far
before Coppola calls cut, asks Wendt if he’s sure he’s reading the line right,
and then starts directs the audience as to how to react properly. Wendt does
the exact same line again. After the monologue ends, Terry Sweeney introduces
himself. During the cold open he had doubts, now he throws himself on Coppola
and cries: “Only you can save this sinking ship!”
The show than proceeds entire askew. Coppola wants a new image for a
That Black Girl sketch that is ‘edgier’. He goes into the control room to
personally supervise the camera work on a mystery parody and his angles
completely obscure every single revelation. A worried Lorne asks Francis if he
knows what he’s doing and he says been getting assurances from Grant Tinker –
Lovitz’s liar character. The climax comes in a military sketch when Hall ends
up getting shot and injured because Coppola has been using real bullets.
Everybody breaks character and starts walking out, berating Coppola: “The Godfather never worked!” Hall yells as he’s carried out on a stretcher. And Wendt
abandons his job. Coppola wanders off the set, wondering if he’s actually a
hack. Only to be reassured by the Devil there is still hope before he tries one
climatic effort. The show ends with Wendt watching the sketch from a bar,
saying the show is ruined.
I’m not sure anybody, not the critics, the viewers, and definitely not
the audience on set, who spend the entire episode laughing uneasily when they
do at all, ever really appreciated what Coppola and the writers were trying to
do: the whole thing basically plays as if Andy Kaufman was running every aspect
of the show instead of just making a bizarre appearance. It was daring –
probably too daring for comedy audiences at the time. It seems more like the
kind of thing that some comedy shows might be able to get away with now – IFC’s
Documentary Now operates almost fundamentally on this
principle and a decade after the fact rival sketch show Mad TV would try variations on this to some effect. But not even the original
cast had ever been willing to take its audience this far out on a limb before,
full blast. I don’t pretend it was perfect, nor do I understand what the
writers were trying to do with it. Was it a Hail Mary to get critics and audiences
talking about the show again? Something that the cast members want to cross off
their bucket list before the cancellation they all thought was inevitable.
Whatever the reason, SNL never tried anything that radical again.
When the season ended, the show did one last radical thing. The cast
was in the middle of an end-of-season party celebrating. Lorne was seen
backstage starting a fire on the set of 30 Rock. Before he walked off, he told Lovitz
to come with him. The season ended with fake flames all around and every one of
the ending credits with a question make next to it. The final shot of the show was
a giant question mark.
The next season opened with Madonna, who had hosted the season premiere
before. She said: ‘The producers asked me to tell you this.” She took out a
piece of paper and read out: “Last season was a dream. A horrible, horrible dream.”
There was immense laughter and cheers. The new season – and a new era – began, and with it the true end of
Saturday Night Live’s trying to be radically different. I’m not
saying they weren’t brilliant – the next article in this series will illustrate
just how incredibly funny the next five years were – but after that they never
tried to test the boundaries of sketch comedy or the medium they were performing
in the same way that they had done the first decade they were on the air.
I don’t pretend that everything that SNL did during the Dick Ebersol
era was genius, but a lot of it truly was. You don’t launch Billy Crystal and
Eddie Murphy into the stratosphere without truly remarkable comedy. And I think
that at times the show was trying even it was considered its absolute popular
nadir (for a while) that it was still trying to swing for the fences. But they
were done with being experimental. A new approach and a new breed of comics
would have to lead the show for the rest of the decade.
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