R | 1h 49m | Comedy, History | Oct. 11, 2024
“Saturday Night” reveals how NBC’s then paradigmatic, now long-running mainstay sketch-comedy show—Saturday Night Live—all began.
It’s very difficult for post-Boomer and post-Gen X generations to understand the seismic impact “Saturday Night Live” had on the world of comedy, Hollywood, the American lexicon, American culture in general, and even the world. By seismic impact, I mean both good and bad. Since its inception, SNL is now up to 50 seasons and 971 episodes.
There’s no way for kids coming across random clips and bits of SNL sketches on social media to be able to comprehend their original impact: things like Christopher Walken’s “More Cowbell,” Chris Farley’s motivational speaker (“I live in a van down by the river!”), Eddie Murphy’s Mr.-Rogers-if-he-lived-in-the-ghetto, and Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin’s “We’re two wild and crazy guys.”
Wait I’m not done yet—Aykroyd’s “Because I’m Fred Garvin—male prostitute,” Eddie Murphy’s “Buckwheat Sings!,” Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella, Alec Baldwin’s “Schwetty” episodes, Jim Carrey’s long guest-tenure, and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and—where was I? Oh yeah—kids today may not know who Eddie Murphy is, let alone know who the Buckwheat character was. They can’t grasp the amount of movie and music careers SNL spawned.
That First Night
“Saturday Night” tells the story of what happened during the hour prior to the show’s Oct. 11, 1975, 10 p.m. debut. Taking its cue from 2014’s “Birdman,” director Jason Reitman gives us a lead-up to that first performance in a hectic, frenetic, anxiety-inducing way, accompanied by a slightly Broadway show tune-like, 1970s, jazz-and-bongos infused soundtrack.
In fake-real time, we follow the cast and crew during their pre-show prep. It’s an all-encompassing catastrophic omnishambles. It features coked-up primadonna actors like John Belushi (Matt Wood) and giant-ego Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) causing extreme chaos. Then there’s meddling, vulture-like producer Dave Tebet (Willem Dafoe) who’s looking for any excuse to abort Michael’s brainchild and reroute the impending train-wreck back into the tried-and-true Johnny Carson depot.
Furthermore, it features head writer Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey) attempting to subvert NBC’s standards and practices via verbal fencing matches with the resident puritanical censorship lady.
Pre-curtain call SNL consists of a thousand moving parts, ego brush-fires, chaos-bombs going off in all the various showbiz departments: costuming, hair, make-up, writers, stage-hands, catering, the producers, and Canadian Lorne Michaels’s ability to wheedle, cajole, and massage all of them.
Then there’s Michaels’s need to navigate the index-card infested bulletin board that’s jam-packed with at least 50 possible sketches (way too many) for the nights’ line-up. He’s the calm at the center of the storm, and it’s not even that calm in there, in his head. But the man thrives on it, clearly. He’s created a sleeping giant, woken it up, and will now have to witness it maniacally stomp NBC studios through Manhattan concrete and into television hell. In a nutshell, “Saturday Night” showcases the talent of Lorne Michaels’s astounding ability to persevere under pressure in the face of unimaginable nuttiness.
Performances
Notable performances include LaBelle as Michaels, Smith as Chevy Chase, and Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd. Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris (no relation) is outstanding as the SNL cast’s sole black performer. He’s having a hilarious real-time existential crisis as a trained opera singer who is now supposed to play butlers and shoeshine boys.Nicholas Braun does an excellent job playing both SNL legends Andy Kaufman and Muppets creator Jim Henson, and Matthew Rhys shines as a highly disagreeable George Carlin. J.K. Simmons as legendary funnyman Milton Berle is particularly fun, as he obliterates Chevy Chase’s massive ego with his comparably more monumental ego, not to mention the other monumental thing for which Berle is perhaps better-known, even, than his comedy.
Jason Reitman captures the grimy 1970s aesthetic. Comedy nerds will enjoy the plentiful Easter eggs and inside jokes he managed to cram into the script.
‘Saturday Night’
All in all, “Saturday Night” needed more exposition to explain who the cast members are and what their places in comedy history were. Just like I would’ve liked to see a “Lord Of The Rings” where each movie was six hours long, “Saturday Night” might’ve benefited from a miniseries format on Netflix or HBO. There’s just so much material to cover to do it justice. The result, however, is a slim, trim film, which is amusing for audience members familiar with Saturday Night Live’s early years.As we now know, “Saturday Night Live” went on to ironically become the same-old, old-fashioned, comedy dinosaur it once sought to subvert. “Saturday Night” is a fun homage to the show that stood comedy on its head. It was a time when the jokes felt deliciously dangerous, excitingly cutting-edge, and even revolutionary.
Now in my dotage, I agree with the old-school church-lady—not to be confused with Dana Carvey’s hilarious, lascivious-but-repressed, passive-aggressive Church Lady character who arrived on SNL much later. I can now clearly see how SNL elevated comedy technique to great heights of hilarity, while simultaneously lowering the bar on morality in America to a shocking degree. We'll probably never recover from that without a massive cultural reset possibly brought on by some kind of geological catastrophe.
Ultimately, the cultural crime of “Saturday Night Live” was irreverence, when reverence is crucial for society to function (respect being a lower-rung form) and for any kind of spiritual awareness. It made fun of things that were previously respected. At the time, I enjoyed the whole raucous trip. I still do. But we’re still all currently headed to hell on a rocket sled, and SNL helped grease the rails.
