By Gary Bennett
This article appears in the Fredrick News-Post’s February 6, 2025, “72 Hours” entertainment insert.
It’s difficult to overstate the cultural significance of Saturday Night Live. It may not seem so today, but the show literally changed the way young people approached Saturday nights in the 1970s.
Saturday Night Live will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2025 with a three-hour prime time special on NBC on Feb. 16. As of this writing, a host has not been named, but one thing is certain, the show will be chock full of hilarious clips from its 50-year reign.
Much about Saturday Night Live, especially the early years, has passed into legend. But when the show hit the airwaves in October 1975, no one knew what to expect. A young writer named Lorne Michaels talked NBC executives into taking a chance on a live, late-night, weekend comedy show. This had not been tried before.
He wanted nothing less than to redefine comedy the way the Beatles, 10 years earlier, had redefined pop music. “That required not pandering, and it also required removing neediness, the need to please,” Michaels says in the book “Live from New York” by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller. “We were only going to please those people who are like us, and that’s what we did.”
The show aired at 11:30 on Saturday night. If you were a college student at that time, like I was, 11:30 was prime time for parties, drinking, dancing and blowing off steam. Many of us didn’t even head out until that time. Once word got around that you had to see this new show, it didn’t take long for us to adjust our loose schedules accordingly. NBC banked that we would do both — stay in to watch the show but still go out before, after or both — and we did.
A little known fact is that Johnny Carson is largely responsible for the airing of Saturday Night Live. Carson ruled late-night TV during the week. By 1975, he had had enough of NBC airing his reruns on Saturday night; he wanted to use the reruns himself during the week so he could take more time off. NBC had the option of returning this weekend time to the local affiliates, and thereby giving up a chunk of ad revenue, or trying to fill the time with other programming.
It was no surprise when word went out from NBC executives to develop a late-night weekend show. Had the powerful Carson never made this demand, it’s quite possible there would never have been a Saturday Night Live. After all, Carson did not retire until 1992.
The man NBC took a chance on, 30-year-old Lorne Michaels, gave them much more than I’m sure they bargained for: an adventurous, topical, satire series with a live studio audience that, had executives and advertisers known of its content in advance, might never have seen the light of day.
Michaels wanted the show to be the first one in the history of television to talk the same language being talked on college campuses, streets and everywhere else young people gathered. In this, he succeeded wildly.
The show was originally called NBC’s Saturday Night. It was the first show the television generation — baby boomers, as we are now called — could call their own. It was unlike anything else on the air, and it would be years before rivals even tried to imitate it. It was new, unusual, surprising and boy, did it make us laugh. It had the proverbial inmates running the asylum, and it showed.
The show made stars of unknowns and superstars of stars. The brash young players that comprised the Not Ready for Prime Time Players in those first few seasons are now household names. Belushi, Chase, Aykroyd, Radner, Murray, Murphy, Piscopo and more delighted in trashing TV taboos.
Many of these would-be stars wanted no part of TV but took on the gig anyway because they could look down on even the most successful prime-time show — because their show was different. It was one of a kind. It made fun of television. John Belushi made his feelings about television known at the time by famously saying, “My television has spit all over it.”
And who in the boomer generation can forget the Coneheads, Mad Samurai, Nick the Lounge Singer, Fred Garvin (Male Prostitute), the Wild and Crazy Guys, Killer Bees, Blues Brothers, Roseanne Roseannadanna, Wayne and Garth, Mr. Bill, Fernando, Hans and Franz, Lisa Loopner and Todd, The Church Lady, Pete Schweddy and the Greek deli owner selling “chee-burger, chee-burger, and Petsie.”
The very first show featured a “cold opening” that portended of things to come. Belushi appeared as a semi-literate immigrant dutifully keeling over with a heart attack because his English teacher suddenly dies of one. With that, Chevy Chase, as stage manager with clipboard in hand, looks in at the dead bodies and flashes that fake Hollywood smile and says, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” Then cue the saxophone-infused music. Those words from Chase, the music and the accompanying scenes from New York’s shady underbelly had an exciting feel to them. We were hooked.
Another instant hit from the early shows was Chase as the bumbling but cooler-than-you newscaster for Weekend Update, an absurdist view of the goings-on in Washington and around the country. The segment was so topical and up-to-date that writers tell stories of being under Chase’s desk live on air handing notes up to him.
His goofy but sincere opening line of the newscast — “Good evening. I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not” — became a national catchphrase that even President Ford used. Because of this segment and the stage manager schtick when opening the show, Chase became the first breakout star, leaving after only one season to act in movies.
He was replaced by none other than Bill Murray in season two. The show barely skipped a beat. In short order, Belushi and Dan Aykroyd became major stars, too.
Feuds, fights and romances among staff members were in the paper seemingly every week. Boozy after-parties were legendary. Sex and drugs were rampant backstage. Network executives tended to steer clear of the 17th floor, where the show was written and performed, not wishing to be enmeshed in marijuana smoke and other strange aromas that would be hard to explain. Better to not know.
By the beginning of the second season, Saturday Night Live was the talk of television, a national phenomenon.
Even the performers who joined the cast later are legendary in their own right: Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Phil Hartman, Chris Farley, Mike Meyers, Dana Carvey, Chris Rock, Darrell Hammond, Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler, Jimmy Fallon, Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Jon Lovitz, Dennis Miller, Kevin Nealon, Tracy Morgan, Amy Poehler … the list goes on and on. Big stars like Hanks, Martin, Baldwin and Timberlake fell all over themselves wanting to host.
For better or worse, Saturday Night Live lives on as a testament to what you can accomplish if you really believe in something — and “don’t give a flying f— if it fails,” as Chase put it in 1975, when a reporter asked him how the show succeeded.
Gary Bennett is a longtime Frederick resident who spends his time hiking, biking, volunteering and providing childcare for grandchildren. He is married and retired from his career as a nonprofit marketing executive.