If we’re gonna talk about classic SNL, let’s pour one out for Michael O’Donoghue, who when asked to put together some skits for the Muppets who were on season one, replied “I don’t write for felt.”
The responsibility for the Muppet sketch was passed around from writer to writer every week like a curse or a punishment. Now it's hard to believe that SNL once had puppets.
Hard to believe anybody had the balls to ask him to write something for that. Especially with his temper
Thank God they didn't cast Carrey. Based on that audition clip that wasn't funny at all, I can't imagine why he would've been cast. SNL went downhill with the mid-90s cast change when it tried to do Carrey's style of silly, cartoonish, over-the-top physical comedy. Like the Cheerleaders or Chris Kattan as that monkey character. That kind of simpleminded, childish stuff was never what the show was about. The damage Jim Carrey did to modern comedy is immense. His influence is a main reason for the decline in SNL and the decline in movie comedies in general. What he did to film comedy in the '90s is analogous to what the advent of CGI special effects did to science-fiction and adventure movies. Suddenly screenwriting took a backseat to the amount of visual vomit that could be thrown up on the screen, be it through CGI or a weird comedian contorting his body and jumping around like a maniac in the manner of a grotesque carnival freak show.
Yeah but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t get uncomfortable at times. Which was his raison d’être I think. His biography is awesome if you haven’t read it.
And then there was this sketch: I remember the initial reaction to this sketch online, some thought it was incredibly hilarious, others considered it the most inane sketch ever.
Yeah but they had to find their groove. Show didn't come together until like the 4th episode in terms of what the format and flow would ultimately be. You could say the same thing about the Albert Brooks and Schiller's Reel shorts (although those are both WAY more appropriate for SNL than puppets)
Sometimes the writers put raunchy stuff into the Muppets sketches to see what they could get away with.
Ironically, Chevy Chase and Gilda Radnet would work with muppets later in their career (Chevy in Follow That Bird, and Gilda when she hosted The Muppet Show).
Also, going back to the Peacock edits, unfortunately, the end of the Angelica Huston/Billy Martin episode (where Billy sets the studio on fire) is cut from the Peacock version, they just cut to generic credits over a static pic of the NYC skyline.
Yeah but those skits always fell apart with the actors saying how ridiculous the costumes were, so everybody was in on the joke. It was stupid but clever.
I know - just poking a little fun at the idea that "SNL" was always high-minded or sophisticated in its early days. I don't think it takes a lot of effort to find some pretty juvenile stuff from the first 5 years!
I did mean "first 5 years" because the earlier post held up the original era as being the "sophisticated period"! But the show's never had a shortage of juvenile material throughout the period after 1980 as well!
The words I used were simpleminded and childish, and at least the Bees sketch I just watched with Elliot Gould was anything but that. It became a huge fourth-wall breaking sketch with Lorne coming on and visiting the control room. There was lots of writing and thought put into it, so not simpleminded at all. If the bees sketch had been done after 1995, the bees would have just been jumping up and down, buzzing, stinging people in the butt and spitting pollen on everybody.
These are bits from an early Dana Carvey stand-up performance that used to play on Nickelodeon's Turkey TV a couple years before Dana joined SNL. At 6:39 is my favorite version of Choppin' Broccoli he's ever done. It has the best gobbledygook introduction, the facial expression caricature, all the right nonsense singing at the finish and he does NOT include "making it up as he goes" as part of the premise. The premise is just that the rock star totally believes in the ridiculous lyrics. So he's mocking the pretension of musicians harder this way.
Another mystery edit. In season 13, the last episode that Robin Williams would host, it looks like they edited out the goodbyes at the end of the show and cut directly to the credits with a long shot of Robin Williams (I guess) pretending to faint. I can't find any info on this so I guess it's possible the show had been running long (with Robin Williams? Impossible!) and this was how it actually aired.
i asked someone who has an original airing and they said the following “Nothing unusual in his goodbyes. I noticed there's also an edit in the credit scroll in the rerun, so I'm guessing it may just be a timing issue.”
