SNL Memories are Made of These

The first episode of Saturday Night Live that I remember watching was not an actual episode but its 15th Anniversary special in 1989, demonstrating that even back then the sketch comedy show had a penchant for celebrating itself. Then again, such self-admiration might be earned given its ongoing status as a survivor through the ever-evolving landscape of television, illustrated in its 50th anniversary special airing tonight, and even if its survival was predicated upon, as others have noted over the years, institutionalizing counterculture, an ethos in opposition. Indeed, as we celebrate SNL, let us not forget the show and Lorne Michaels threw Sinead O’Connor under the bus in 1992 even if now they proudly cite it as part of their history, cravenly seeking retroactive credit for it, went yellow belly when Rage Against the Machine appeared in 1996, and buried a Robert Smigel cartoon in 1998 because of its anti-corporate mockery. Their oft-stated notion of anarchy only goes so far.

That does not mean, however, that Saturday Night Live was just flat unfunny nor that it’s only funny through the lens of youth. I remember in December 2018 when my friend Daryl pulled up the Best Christmas Ever sketch starring Matt Damon and Cecily Strong on his phone and showed it to me. It was like being a NASA technician and suddenly waking up to a signal from Voyager 1 beyond the solar system; it’s still out there! Even if you, yourself, have long since stopped paying attention, SNL keeps transmitting comedy, so long as you are willing to tune into its frequency. And that is what I find myself thinking about on the verge of its golden anniversary, the sketches themselves, not zooming out for a 10,000 foot view but zooming in and acknowledging how for 50 years, Saturday after Saturday in fall, winter, and spring, writers and actors and comics have gathered together and tried to figure out how to be funny. They have failed more than they have succeeded, rules of the game, but have still accumulated plenty of hits and sometimes even raised the Home Run Apple.

Daryl showing me that sketch on his phone demonstrates how people now consume Saturday Night Live. When I went looking for the Rock for Michael sketch after watching the “We Are the World” documentary, I found it on TikTok. Not that it’s entirely different than how I consumed it during middle school and high school in the 90s. Though back then you had to literally watch it live or not at all, I would often record SNL sketches to our VCR, sort of the analog era TikTok. And so, I decided to let my mind wander and see what sketches drifted to the top, compiling a metaphysical mixtape to the VHS recorder of my heart.

(Note: NBC notoriously makes it difficult to find SNL sketches via the interwebs, so I will link to what I discuss below in the best form I can.)

That mixtape would include Waikiki Hockey (May 1989), for sure, because I cherish Elvis movies and the infamously wooden host Wayne Gretzky was not a hindrance but help in spoofing them and their own wooden star. Also, RIP Jan Hooks (as Ann-Margret), and RIP Phil Hartman who is totally at his most Phil Hartman here, not called upon to be funny, exactly, merely the glue that melds it all together.

I would include the Dysfunctional Family Dinner (January 1998) starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Will Ferrell, and Ana Gasteyer, released a year-and-a-half before “American Beauty” and a hundred times more profound. 

There would have to be room for the “What Is Love” sketch, which is what I call the Roxbury Guys sketch, the one that concluded the 1996 season and gave rise to the 1998 movie “Night at the Roxbury.” Because really, it isn’t even all that funny, sort of falling apart humor-wise about halfway in, and still, the whole thing gets by, nay, is propelled by Haddaway’s 1993 dance track. There’s nothing else like it in the whole SNL canon.

Well, except for the Emma Stone-led sketch from November 2011 that wasn’t even a comedy sketch so much as an astute embodiment of Adele’s “Someone Like You” as an instinctive tearjerker. 

For our mixtape ode to Weekend Update, let’s honor 50 years of fake commentators with Kate McKinnon as Olya Povlatsky talking about the Chelyabinsk meteor in 2013 (I love bleak Russian humor, apparently) and 50 years of jokes with this fatalistic slice of consummate Norm Macdonald (RIP) deadpan from 1997: “This week, Janet Reno charged Microsoft with trying to monopolize access to the internet and asked a court to fine the company a million dollars per day. Analysts say that, at this rate, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates will be broke just ten years after the Earth crashes into the sun.”

Our first mixtape musical guest is Neil Young translating the pledge of allegiance, so to speak, into a thunderous political broadside with “Rockin’ in the Free World” for the 1989 season premiere. Nirvana famously smashed up their instruments after performing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1992 and Win Butler of Arcade Fire smashed a guitar in 2007 and Phoebe Bridgers smashed a guitar in 2021, and rock on, all of them, but Neil Young figuratively smashed a guitar in a way all those other literal guitar-smashings will never know. 

Speaking of political moments on Saturday Night Live. When it comes to sketches of that variety, we tend to think of the obviously political ones, and some of those made true marks, like the spoof of the final Bush/Dukakis Presidential Debate from October 1988 that may as well be, as the kids say, my whole personality. But better than that, there was the Kandahar sketch in November 2001 that satirized the Freedom Fries jingoism of the era with a boldness and eccentric incisiveness rare for the show, and even better than that was The Lost Ending of “It’s A Wonderful Life” (December 1986) in which Bedford Fall becomes a mob like France circa 1789. I have been thinking about that sketch a lot lately.

John Mulaney’s musical-inspired Diner Lobster sketch might be tighter, not least because it sticks exclusively to songs from Les Misérables, but I genuinely prefer Airport Sushi (February 2020), which borrows from all manner of Broadway musicals and gets tied together by The Talking Heads. It’s nothing if not an effective anti-P.S.A. for the state of air travel these days, a semi-surreal answer to Spielberg’s sugary sweet “The Terminal.”

While we’re on the topic of Mulaney’s recurring musical parodies, I suppose it’s time to bring up SNL recurring characters, so many of which, no matter how many of them might have been good to begin with, were destined to run out steam by being run into the ground. If there was one that never did, at least to my way of thinking, it was Mike Myers as Linda Richman, maybe because, taken in tandem with my deep affection for “Seinfeld,” and despite being a Midwesterner raised Lutheran, I have a predilection for Jewish humor. Including the Madonna/Roseanne/Barbra sketch from February 1992 might be obvious, but it’s the exemplar of the show working its guest stars successfully into pre-existing material and the literal surprise Streisand appearance at the end (the story goes only Lorne Michaels knew she would turn up) was one of the moments when a live show truly was. (As a bonus, my favorite Linda Richman discussion topic: “Rhode Island, neither a road nor an island. Discuss.”)

The sketch does not appear to exist online, but here’s visual proof, at least, that I am not making the whole thing up.

Given 50 years, you’ve gotta dig around the crates and find at least one deep cut. And while Alec Baldwin’s most famous of his innumerable SNL turns is undoubtedly Schweddy Balls, I prefer him as the grizzled marine aboard the Chinese Spy Plane that led the news in April 2001 trying to rally his unwilling compatriots to a sneak attack. Turns out, this one was so unrememberable to everybody else that I couldn’t find it online anywhere. 

For our second musical mixtape performance, I mean, those who know me, who really know me, know: what else is there? Lady Gaga performing “Paparazzi” in 2009 is not just my favorite SNL musical performance; it is one of my favorite things in the history of the world. You can’t often pinpoint the exact moments when your life irrevocably changes, but in this case, the first time the chorus comes in, right there, that’s when my life changed. “The Fame” was a year old, I honestly hadn’t paid any attention, and then I went and bought it the next day and there was no going back.

Lady Gaga closed her hosting gig in November 2013 by playing herself at some indeterminate point in the future as a Manhattan version of the faded starlet Cosmo Kramer lives next door to during his brief stint in L.A., trying to get the apartment handyman (Kenan Thompson, invaluable as always) to recognize her to no avail, having fun with her then-big single “Applause” in a way that becomes, honestly, less funny than legitimately melancholy. If it evoked Gaga’s commitment to a bit, foreshadowing her eventual turn in “House of Gucci,” it also evoked the sensation of a show-ending SNL sketch, that point when Saturday night has bled into Sunday morning, sleepiness overtakes being awake, and you wonder if what you’re seeing is real. 

It’s counterintuitive to close with a cold open, but nothing brings 50 years of SNL home like the Steve Martin-led musical number Not Gonna Phone it in Tonight that kicked off the December 14th, 1991, episode. It essentially becomes a song and dance embodiment of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in “Airplane!” telling Joey that he’s out there busting his buns every night, taking both the show’s familiar 50-year-old criticism of coasting and that the show used to be better at some indeterminate point in the past and then gleefully, playfully, magnificently sending it up.