Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - January 21, 2025, Winnipeg, Manitoba WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM ● C3 TUESDAY, JANUARY 21, 2025 Saturday Night Live is more than a show, it’s a world. And there’s nothing like it A HALF-CENTURY OF SATIRE L OS ANGELES — Saturday Night Live is having a 50th anniversary, and things are happening. Jason Reitman’s backstage dramedy Saturday Night, released last year, is set around the series’ first episode. There was a profile of executive pro- ducer Lorne Michaels in the New York- er last week, taken from Susan Morri- son’s upcoming biography, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night. Peacock, NBC’s streaming arm, has an engaging docuseries, SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night, now streaming, its stand-alone episodes focused respec- tively on auditions (Five Minutes), the creative system (Written By: A Week Inside the SNL Writers Room), an iconic sketch (More Cowbell) and when Michaels returned to run the show after a five-year break (Season 11: The Weird Year). Premiering Jan. 27 on NBC, La- dies & Gentlemen … 50 Years of SNL Music, co-directed by Questlove and Oz Rodriguez, looks at the show’s rich history of musical performances, musi- cians doing comedy and comedians do- ing music; it opens with a long, artful mash-up/medley of performances that makes one glad to have been alive in its time, and just glad to be alive. And on Feb. 16, NBC will air and Peacock will stream SNL50: The Anniversa- ry Special, a three-hour prime-time event. It’ll be live, naturally. Much about the show, which has been analyzed and reported on for half a century, is obvious. It isn’t always good — practically (or entirely) never through a whole episode, and some would say a whole season. It survives by constant churn. Counted out more than once, it has risen from the mat to fight again, new wins erasing old losses — a once and future champ. Over time, it has become some- thing more than a show — a network, a world. Favourite guest hosts and musical guests return again and again, defining SNL as much as the regular cast or writers. The cold open for the 2024 Christmas episode, hosted by Martin Short — a cast member in Sea- son 10 — revisited the premise of the “Five-Timers Club,” whose members have hosted (at least) five times, and featured cameos from Tom Hanks, Paul Rudd, John Mulaney, Emma Stone, Tina Fey, Kristen Wiig, Scarlett Johansson, Melissa McCarthy, Alec Baldwin and Jimmy Fallon. (There are more in that club, including Dwayne Johnson, Justin Timberlake, Candice Bergen and Christopher Walken, who played the record producer who called for “more cowbell.”) Whipped up out of nothing over six days (on the seventh they rest), SNL is unavoidably imperfect. Sketches go on too long. Jokes fall flat. Some hosts, especially those from outside show business, do not do well. At the same time, the show, even though it is revised until the last minute, is tightly organized, a machine involving scores of workers creating sets and wrangling costumes in the last couple of days before air. (Writers are responsible for directing their sketches.) There is little to no improvisation. The system, which seems to have remained substantially the same over the years, is arranged to mitigate failure, but failure is part of the process, as ideas are rejected and sketches cut. And what works in dress may not work on air. In the beginning, television was live by technological necessity; by 1975, it was strictly for sports and news and special events. SNL, which was created to replace reruns of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, called back to the spirit of Sid Caesar’s 1950s Your Show of Shows, but delivered its version of va - riety with a countercultural, youth-di- rected spin. (Caesar was still consid- ered groundbreaking. A compilation of sketches, Ten From Your Show of Shows, captured on kinescope, had been released in theatres in 1973; he would host SNL in 1983.) It was live not because it had to be, but because “live” was exciting and dangerous, and, by the standards of network television, raw; it courted disaster, and sometimes disaster won. It also bound the audience, partici- pating in real time (on the East Coast, anyway), to the event and to the players. That compact first cast, the Not Ready for Prime Time Players — Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Dan Aykroyd, John Be- lushi and Chevy Chase, replaced in the second season by Bill Murray — was covered like a rock band (the rock press having little use for the rest of televi- sion), and consumed like one. Producer Michaels played himself, as a character. Looking back, the series did get off to a rough start but came into focus fairly quickly. Early classics include Radner’s The Judy Miller Show, Live From Her Bedroom, Aykroyd’s self-de- stroying Julia Child, an aged Belushi visiting the Not Ready for Prime Time cemetery as the only surviving cast member, Chase and host Richard Pry- or in an escalating, racially charged word association test. Anything with Murray feels oddly contemporary, so strong an impression has he made on the culture, and so fully formed was his persona from the beginning. But not all humour travels well. (Curtin looking back from 2023 at an old episode, told People magazine that “not one thing was funny.”) Two sketches that have stayed with me from that era, are not really comedy at all — the recurring Olympia Restaurant, whose only “jokes” are the repetition of the word “cheeseburger” and the phrase, “No Coke, Pepsi,” and the downbeat Reunion, a two-hander for Aykroyd and Curtin as two former high school classmates seated accidentally next to one another at a lunch counter. These are theatre pieces, really, from the show’s experimental youth, and they’ve stayed fresh. Those first seasons are ancient history, of course; the original cast are in their 70s or 80s, or have passed on. It’s a much-repeated axiom that one’s favourite SNL cast is the one you meet in high school (which does suggest there is something adolescent in its humour), and most everyone in the cast today grew up on the 21st century series. “Never mind,” “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead,” “Con- sume mass quantities,” “But nooooo!,” even the Wayne’s World cry “We’re not worthy!” — these catch phrases will ring no bells with younger viewers. It’s an institution, a frame in which to be displayed, a portal to pass through on the way to bigger things, or different things, or lesser things. Some players last a long while, some a little while; some leave of their own accord, some are shown the door. SNL is not the only hub of modern American com- edy, or the only path to success. But in terms of exposure, there’s nothing like it. At rare times, known properties have joined the cast — Kenan Thomp- son, on the show for an unmatched 22 seasons and counting, had already starred in a name-in-the-title Nick- elodeon series Kenan & Kel and its successful film spinoff Good Burger. But more often SNL is where careers take off. Eddie Murphy, Phil Hartman, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey (establishing their double act anchoring Weekend Update), Melissa McCarthy, Tracy Morgan, Maya Rudolph, Julia Lou- is-Dreyfus, Jon Lovitz, Chris Rock, Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg, Chris Farley, David Spade, Tim Meadows, Leslie Jones, Norm Macdonald, Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon, Fred Armisen, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Jason Sudeikis, Julia Sweeney and Bobby Moynihan number among its longer-serving alumni. Through Fallon and Seth Meyers, the show has colonized weeknight late- night television. (Both their shows are produced by Michaels’ Broadway Vid- eo.) Stephen Colbert auditioned for SNL — a clip of his audition is included in Five Minutes — and was turned down. Things worked out for him anyway. The world has come far since 1975, and SNL has left a little garbage in its wake. Notably, the show has been slow to evolve in matters of diversity. White cast would often play nonwhite cast, such as Billy Crystal’s blackface (if affectionate) Sammy Davis Jr. It’s a far cry from the days when Morris was required to play every Black character, male or female, but it was already 2013 when Thompson refused to portray Black women and demanded the show hire actual Black women instead. Bow- en Yang, who is of Chinese descent, was named to the repertory cast in 2019, making him the first “full-blood- ed” Asian cast member. At 50, it looks pretty good. A few younger players in the current cast make an amorphous impression, but the ranks of the veterans are strong: Thompson, who has been with the series nearly half its life, and at 46, nearly half his; Mikey Day (44); Heidi Gardner (41); Bowen Yang (34); Chloe Fineman (36); Ego Nwodim (36); Michael Che (41) and Colin Jost (42), anchoring Weekend Update for more than a decade. (In a cast with 15 “rep- ertory players,” and three “featured players,” they stand out just by virtue of having been around longer.) And some of those younger players will go on to become older players as new younger players move in behind them, and so turns the circle of life. You don’t have to look far to find viewers declaring the show to be “Not as funny as it used to be.” That’s a common enough complaint when it comes to comedy. By changing with the changing times, but not changing so much as to lose itself, Saturday Night Live has survived everything the last 50 years have thrown at it, at us, charting a path between the slightly left of main- stream and the more than slightly left of mainstream, between familiarity and surprise. What it offers, Saturday after Saturday, is possibility. What might go right? What could go wrong? — Los Angeles Times ROBERT LLOYD NBC The original cast of Saturday Night Live (from left), Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, Chevy Chase, Laraine Newman, Garrett Morris, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. ARTS ● LIFE I ENTERTAINMENT Chappelle praises Carter, implores Trump to do better IT has become a Saturday Night Live tradition to invite comedian Dave Chappelle on the show in the wake of a presidential election. He famously did it in 2016 before Donald Trump assumed the White House, and again in 2020 right after Joe Biden defeated Trump for the presidency. On Saturday, Chappelle used his 17-minute opening monologue (the lon- gest in SNL history) to tell Trump, who was to be inaugurated in a divided and frigid Washington, D.C., two days later, to “do better next time.” But Chappelle, sitting on a stool, wearing a navy-blue suit and smoking a cigarette, also used his time to praise former President Jimmy Carter, the Georgia native who died Dec. 30 at the age of 100. Chappelle said he was not qualified to judge if Carter was a good or bad president, but he told a touching story about the former president’s empathy. Years ago, after he quit his own Chappelle’s Show on Comedy Central, Chappelle found himself in the Middle East. At the same time, he said, Carter was visiting Israel in the wake of the release of his controversial 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The book generated a passionate response from critics who claimed that the bestseller was slanted toward Palestinians. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported at the time that Carter met with Israeli President Shimon Peres, but several senior political officials snubbed him. The Israeli secret service initially declined to help the American agents guarding Carter. As part of his Middle East tour, Carter made plans to meet with the exiled head of Hamas, Khaled Meshal. Chappelle, in his monologue Satur- day night, said Carter informed the Israeli government that he wanted to venture to Palestine while on the trip, but officials told him that they couldn’t protect him because it was too dangerous. In a 2008 “trip report” filed through the Carter Center, Carter wrote: “All my requests to meet with ministers of the government were publicly rejected and, more seriously, three requests from our Secret Service detail to work with Israeli security were rejected.” “And, man, Jimmy Carter went any- way. I will never forget the images of a former American president walking with little to no security while thou- sands of Palestinians were cheering him on,” Chappelle said Saturday night. “And when I saw that picture, it brought tears to my eyes. I said, ‘I don’t know if that’s a good president, but that right there, I am sure, is a great man.’ It made me feel very proud.” The trip report noted that Carter was undeterred by the challenges and that, after several news stories on the subject of security during the trip, Is- raeli security met Carter’s delegation at the airport and worked with them. Chappelle’s comedy routines have become open therapy and healing sessions, mixed with sharp, funny and sometimes biting stories. He touched on Luigi Mangione, who is charged in the killing of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson last month; the California wildfires; and even Sean “Diddy” Combs and his notorious “White Parties.” But Chappelle closed his monologue by tying the divergent personalities of Carter and Trump together. “The presidency is no place for petty people,” Chappelle said. “So, Donald Trump, I know you watch the show. Man, remember, whether people voted for you or not, they’re all counting on you. Whether they like you or not, the whole world is counting on you. “And I mean this when I say this: Good luck. Please, do better next time. Please, all of us, do better next time. Do not forget your humanity, and please have empathy for displaced peo- ple, whether they’re in the Palisades or Palestine.” — The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ERNIE SUGGS JASON MENDEZ / GETTY FILES Comedian Dave Chappelle, in his SNL monologue, recounted how former U.S. President Jimmy Carter was denied Israeli security protection for a visit to Palestine but went anyway. FRAZER HARRISON / GETTY IMAGES Lorne Michaels ;