Today, ‘Saturday Night Live’ Is an Institution. In 1974, It Was Pure Anarchy

Saturday Night Live wasn’t Saturday Night Live, both literally and spiritually, when it premiered on Oct. 11, 1975. Weeks earlier, ABC had debuted a prime-time variety show called Saturday Night Live With Howard Cosell. So Lorne Michaels’ late-night creation had to go by, simply, Saturday Night — the same title of the Jason Reitman film (out now) about the sketch-comedy institution’s very first telecast. But that inaugural season was different from what we think of as Saturday Night Live in ways that go much further and deeper than the name. In that first year, Michaels, Chevy Chase, and company were still figuring out exactly what the show was, in terms of both structure and sensibility.

The first episode features four monologues by host George Carlin, a piece of comic performance art from Andy Kaufman, a short film by Albert Brooks, and a group of adult-oriented Muppets from “the Land of Gorch.” Kaufman, Brooks’ films, and the Muppets would appear periodically over the next few months before each was eventually dropped for not being the right fit. Outside of Chase anchoring “Weekend Update,” the second episode has only a brief cameo from the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, and plays more like a musical-variety showcase for host Paul Simon. It’s not until the fourth, Candice Bergen-led show that you get a full 90-minute episode that vaguely resembles what SNL would eventually become.

But the more important separation between then and now is in the spirit of ebullient anarchism that infuses Saturday Night. The first season was so aggressively irreverent — toward politics, television, and even comedy itself — that SNL, now in its 50th season, still has something of an outlaw reputation, even as it’s become much more of an institutional behemoth over the decades. Consider the opening sketch of the Carlin episode: writer Michael O’Donoghue teaching an ESL class to a heavily-accented John Belushi. O’Donoghue invites Belushi to repeat after him, but all of his phrases have to do with wolverines, like, “I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverines.” Belushi dutifully mimics each line, and when O’Donoghue appears to suffer a heart attack and collapses to the floor, Belushi does the same. The sketch is not clearly parodying anything. It can barely be said to be about anything. It’s just odd, and trusts that the dialogue, and Belushi’s commitment to the bit, will sell it.
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A lot of the season was defiantly idiosyncratic like that. The Killer Bees (who were played at various points by members of the entire cast) became the show’s first recurring characters only because Michaels didn’t appreciate an NBC executive asking that they not appear again. Belushi’s audition for the show included an unexpected impression of Japanese movie legend Toshiro Mifune; soon, he was grunting his way through sketches as a samurai who worked at a hotel, a deli, and other mundane locales. Michaels began appearing on camera as himself, making repeated pleas for the Beatles to reunite on the show for a whopping $3,000. (The sum later increased to $3,200, plus hotel accommodations.) By that point, Saturday Night was already such a big deal that John Lennon and Paul McCartney later said they nearly made an impromptu trip to Studio 8H to take Michaels up on it.

Even the show’s first famous political impression, Chase’s Gerald Ford, ran against comedy tradition. Unlike famous JFK impersonator Vaughn Meader — or, for that matter, every other SNL cast member who has since played a politician or celebrity — Chase made no attempt whatsoever to look or sound like his subject. He just fell down a lot, and otherwise acted like a twit. That he was hardly trying made the Ford sketches even more cutting than if he’d worn a bald cap and intoned “Our long national nightmare is over.”
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The impact Chase’s performance was having on Ford’s reputation became so strong that White House press secretary Ron Nessen hosted an episode late in that first season. As legend has it, Michaels and his writers assumed Nessen would reject any material about the president that was too pointed, so they instead showed off their anti-authority bona fides by placing Nessen into an episode with as much disgusting nonpolitical material as possible, including memorable fake commercials for the Super Bass-O-Matic ’76 (a blender for fish), Fluckers jam (as well as other jams with names like Dog Vomit, Monkey Pus, and Painful Rectal Itch), and Autumn Fizz, “the carbonated douche.”

That first season also features what remains arguably the boldest SNL sketch of them all, with Chase interviewing host Richard Pryor about a custodian job, playing a game of word association that quickly leads to racial epithets. Michaels had fought to have the boundary-breaking stand-up on the show, even threatening to quit over it (one of several times he did so that year), and hired Pryor’s friend and writer Paul Mooney to join the staff for that week. It was vital to Michaels to establish Saturday Night as operating on the very cutting edge of modern comedy, and the show more than earned its reputation. By late in Season Two, when the name officially became Saturday Night Live, the show was much less rough around the edges. But there’s a reason Reitman made a movie about the start of the series, rather than a look at some of the later golden eras. SNL today is still a great comedy show. The dawn of Saturday Night, though, felt like a revolution.