SNL’s Television Comedy Roots
In the beginning, Saturday Night Live’s special brand of humor combined the comedic antics of Second City improv and sketch comedy with the envelope-pushing irreverence of National Lampoon. But satirical commentary, topical parody, and absurdist tomfoolery were not exactly new to television. SNL’s comedic roots can be traced to several American and British variety and sketch comedy shows, some of which still managed, despite varying degrees of interference from the networks, advertisers, irate viewers, and the Nixon administration, to break new ground in the 1960s and 1970s. They raised the bar for television comedy and in the process occasionally lowered its standards in pursuit of a laugh.
Your Show of Shows (1950–1954)/Caesar’s Hour (1954–1957)
The description of Your Show of Shows sounds awfully familiar: an original, ninety-minute sketch comedy show broadcast live on NBC every Saturday night from 30 Rockefeller Plaza featuring a repertory of comic actors. Sid Caesar, with his company of players (Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, and Howard Morris) and a team of young, talented, and mostly Jewish comedy writers (including Reiner, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Danny Simon, and Mel Tolkin), were the true pioneers of live television comedy. Caesar’s blend of verbal and physical comedy, which consisted of parodies of television shows and films, musical sketches and pantomimes, and something that would become a staple on SNL, recurring character sketches (The Professor, The Hickenloopers, etc.) had a profound and lasting influence on all the sketch comedy shows that followed. In his memoir, Laughing Matters, Larry Gelbart, a staff writer on Caesar’s second series, Caesar’s Hour, recalled how the material “sprang from our collective backgrounds, our tastes in literature, in film, in theatre, music, ballet, our marriages, our psychoanalyses.” And their comedic targets? “Everything, every subject, was fair game. Nothing was too hip for the [writers’] room.” The SNL writers, particularly in the beginning, followed a similar credo. Consider the overdose of drug humor in the early days and the attention SNL paid to Chevy Chase’s meteoric rise to stardom and his hasty departure during the second season.
The best part of Your Show of Shows was that it was performed live in front of audience (and, unlike SNL, without cue cards!). Audiences cherished the moments when something went wrong, like a problem with a costume or a wig, or an actor forgetting his or her lines, or the host forgetting the name of this week’s guest star. That’s exactly what happened when Caesar totally blanked for a minute on the name of his guest, British actor Basil Rathbone, who got back at his host by referring to him as “Mr. Sid Silvers.”
In his autobiography, Caesar’s Hours: My Life in Comedy with Love and Laughter, Caesar acknowledges the influences his show had on television comedy: “Our work has been credited for setting the stage, figuratively and literally, for almost every variety show and sketch and parody-driven program from Saturday Night Live to Monty Python’s Flying Circus. We made the rules, broke new ground, and had a lot of fun and interesting times.” Although Caesar admits he gets more enjoyment today watching the History Channel than television comedy, he acknowledged in his interview for the AAT that he has watched Saturday Night Live and that they “had some very good stuff on there.”
On February 5, 1983, thirty-three years after the debut of Your Show of Shows, Caesar hosted Saturday Night Live (8.12). When he appeared onstage during the cold opening, the audience gave him a standing ovation as the cast joined in the applause. In his heartfelt monologue, he shared how happy he was to be hosting the show. Later in the show, he revisited one of his most popular characters, the Professor, and in the final credits he received a plaque making him an honorary SNL cast member.
That Was the Week That Was (BBC: 1962–1963; NBC: 1964–1965)
There haven’t been many comedy shows on television that are as timely as Saturday Night Live when it comes to satirizing current events. For example, if something newsworthy happens on a Thursday night (let’s be more specific and say, for instance, during a Republican presidential debate), SNL can present their comic take on what happened two days later.
One British program that devoted an entire fifty minutes each week to political satire was the groundbreaking series That Was the Week That Was (also known as TW3), which aired late on Saturday nights on BBC. The program, which was part of the British “satire boom” in the early 1960s, took a satirical look at current events and politics in Britain through a mixture of songs, sketches, and running commentary provided by its host, David Frost. No topic or public figure was off-limits. The show’s team of writers, which included future Monty Pythoners Graham Chapman and John Cleese, comedian Peter Cook, novelist Roald Dahl (James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), and dramatist Dennis Potter (The Singing Detective), didn’t shy away from controversial subject matter (race relations in the U.S., apartheid in South Africa) and reveled in exposing government hypocrisy. Along the way they slung barbs at Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, the British monarchy, the military, and, in one episode, thirteen members of Parliament who hadn’t made a speech in three years (the latter prompted a parliamentary debate). The show ran for two seasons (or what the Brits call a “series”) on BBC, but was not brought back for a third because of all the controversy it stirred and the fact it was an election year.
TW3 took a serious turn on Saturday, November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination of President Kennedy, who was honored with a twenty-minute tribute that included cast member Millicent Martin singing “In the Summer of His Years.” The special aired in the United States on NBC the following day.
A few weeks before, NBC aired an American version of TW3 as a special, which led to a half-hour weekly series beginning in January of 1964. According to historians Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh, the show used a similar format and tackled controversial topics (religion, race, and, of course, politics), but it was preempted during the first half of the 1964–1965 season due to the election (ironically, often by paid political announcements for Republican candidates). By the time the show returned in the spring, it couldn’t compete with Peyton Place (1964–1969) and Petticoat Junction (1963–1970) and was canceled.
TW3 should also be noted for its extensive use of an “open studio” in which the camera and the show’s crew could be seen by the home audience as the performers moved freely about through the studio. Although it doesn’t use this method during sketches and musical performances, SNL often previews what’s coming up next with a long shot of the set or the musical stage as everyone’s getting ready. Sketches also typically end with a quick long shot of the set where we see the performers and the crew racing to the next sketch.
In Frost on Satire, a 2012 special for BBC4, TW3 host David Frost sat down with Lorne Michaels in Studio 8H, which was also the former home of the American version of TW3 back in 1964–1965. Michaels explained that when SNL debuted in the mid-1970s, there was a distrust and opposition to authority in the air due to Watergate. “Weekend Update is a direct descendant of That Was The Week That Was,” he added, “so we came on with somehow the right to question.”
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1967–1969)
In 1967, CBS gave comedy duo Tom and Dick Smothers their own hour variety show on Sunday evenings from 9 to 10 p.m., immediately following The Ed Sullivan Show (1948–1971), now in its nineteenth season. When The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour debuted on February 5, 1967, Sullivan did the introduction: “Now I’d like to kick off the premiere of an exciting new comedy show which we’re all going to enjoy for a long, long time.” The show, a mixture of musical performances, comedy sketches, and verbal sparring between Tom and Dick, was popular with critics and audiences (it ranked #16 in its freshman season). At the time, CBS’s highest-rated shows were long-running comedy and variety shows that were popular among older viewers in Middle America: The Red Skelton Hour (1951–1971), The Andy Griffith Show (1960–1968), The Lucy Show (1962–1968), and The Jackie Gleason Show (1966–1970). While the Smothers Brothers aimed to appeal to older folks with guest stars like Kate Smith, Carol Burnett, Bette Davis, Carl Reiner, Mickey Rooney, and George Burns, they also managed to attract younger viewers, a highly desirable demographic for advertisers, with guests like Jefferson Airplane, the Beatles, the Doors, Simon & Garfunkel, and the Who.
Young people (now known as “baby boomers”) were also tuning in because The Smothers Brothers was the first show on network television to “speak their language” and express their left-of-center political views. Their political commentary in the form of sketches and the comical exchanges between Dick and Tom tackled the Vietnam War and the draft, gun control, and religion—hot-button topics, especially for Middle America, which happened to be CBS’s core audience. There was also drug-laced humor about marijuana and LSD, but unlike SNL, drugs were never explicitly mentioned. A popular segment called “Share a Little Tea with Goldie,” in which comedian Leigh French plays the hippie TV host who gives advice to housewives, was laden with double entendres (like “high” and “roaches”), most of which went straight over the heads of CBS executives and the network’s core audience in Middle America.
The tension between the Smothers Brothers and CBS escalated during the show’s third and final season, beginning with the network’s refusal to air singer/political activist Harry Belafonte singing “Don’t Stop the Carnival” against footage of the antiwar protests that broke out at the ’68 Democratic Convention in Chicago. By the end of season 3, CBS pulled the plug on the show.
On June 8, 1969, the writing team of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour received the Emmy for “Outstanding Writing Achievement in Comedy, Variety, or Music.” Although he received writing credit on the show, Tom Smothers did not submit his name for consideration for fear that all the controversy surrounding him would prevent his fellow writers from winning. Forty years later, Steve Martin, a member of the show’s Emmy-winning writing staff, presented Tom Smothers with the Emmy he deserved. In his acceptance speech, he thanked his fellow writers “for all the great writing that got me . . . fired” and reminded us of the importance to speak the truth: “There’s nothing more scary than watching ignorance in action, so I dedicate this Emmy to all people who feel compelled to speak out, to speak to power and won’t shut up and refuse to be silenced.”
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (1968–1973)
This Monday night comedy free-for-all was the #1 show in America during its first two seasons (1968–1969, 1969–1970) and put “beautiful downtown Burbank” (where it was taped) on the map. When Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In premiered on January 22, 1968, there was nothing like it on television in terms of both its comedic style and format. Along with The Monkees, American television’s version of the 1964 Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night, which aired in an earlier time slot on the same night, Laugh-In was the closest NBC ever came to successfully capitalizing on the counterculture and the changing political climate of the late 1960s. Compared to The Smothers Brothers, Laugh-In’s political content was tamer and less in-your-face, though it managed to take jabs at elected officials and comment on political and social issues. They also bestowed the “Flying Fickle Finger of Fate Award” (a statue of a hand with an extended winged finger) to such dubious recipients as the City of Cleveland (the Cuyahoga River was at one point so polluted it caught fire), L.A. chief of police Ed Davis (for suggesting installable portable gallows in airports so hijackers could be immediately tried and hanged), and California governor Ronald Reagan (“There’s no reason right now, but we’re sure he’ll come up with one”). There was also a news segment, “Laugh-In Looks at the News,” which was in the same spirit as That Was The Week That Was. As Hal Erickson observed in his revealing critical history of Laugh-In, From Beautiful Downtown Burbank, “political commentary was treated with the same comic impiety as everything else on the program.” Still, it’s doubtful the Smothers Brothers would have invited Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon on their program two months before the election, as Laugh-In did, to utter one of the show’s most famous catchphrases (in the form of a question)—“Sock it to me?” Nixon no doubt scored some votes with the younger set that night. Head writer Paul Keyes, a Nixon supporter who quit after two seasons, went to work for the president.
Laugh-In catered to audience members with impaired attention spans with its rapid-fire editing techniques and weekly surge of blackout sketches, sight gags, running jokes, musical numbers, and a grab bag of corny, bawdy, topical (yet cheap) jokes. If a joke wasn’t funny it didn’t matter because they were delivered at warp speed. In addition to “Sock-it-to-Me,” Laugh-In was also the birthplace of many popular catchphrases: “Here comes the judge,” “Say good night, Dick,” “You bet your sweet Bippy” (what is a Bippy, exactly?), “Look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls,” and “Verrrry Interesting.”
Hosted by the comedy team of Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, Laugh-In, like SNL, featured an ensemble cast of—eight to ten unknown players, several of whom emerged as the show’s breakout stars: Judy Carne, Goldie Hawn, Ruth Buzzi, Henry Gibson, Arte Johnson, Lily Tomlin, and Joanne Worley. SNL creator Lorne Michaels was a staff writer on the show (along with his partner Hart Pomerantz) during the 1968–1969 season, but he didn’t care for the writing process because it involved submitting jokes to the head writer, who then compiled them into a script. In George Plasketes’s profile of Michaels, the producer recalled, “It was very confusing to me because at the end of it, I didn’t know what I’d done. Everyone was sitting around, congratulating the writers, saying what a great script it was.” The show was taped without a studio audience, so there was no real feedback from an audience. In the same article, Michaels reflected further on this time on Laugh-In: “What I did learn from there was the structure and sort of industrial way in which television shows were produced. The show’s producer, George Schlatter, was brilliant, as were the editors. They were the real ‘stars’ of that show. The writers were only a part of it and the audience was less a part of it. It was all electronics, but very innovative for its day.”
Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969–1974)
Two Oxford graduates (Terry Jones, Michael Palin), three Cambridge grads (Graham Chapman, John Cleese, and Eric Idle), and one American (Terry Gilliam) wrote a new chapter in the annals of television comedy with this inventive British sketch comedy series that premiered on BBC One in 1969 and later aired on PBS in the United States, where it developed a cult following. This postmodern romp comprised of filmed segments, sketches performed in front of a live studio audience, and bits of animation by Gilliam lived up to its catchphrase, “And now for something completely different.” It was unlike anything audiences on both continents had ever seen before. Their unique brand of humor ranged from the absurdist (“Spam, Spam, Eggs, Spam”) to the sometimes shocking (“The Prejudice Game”) to the downright silly (“The Lumberjack Song”). The show was smart, original, and hyperconscious about the fact that it was a sketch comedy show, often reminding the audience by calling attention to a sketch’s lack of an ending or a punch line. The show was also media conscious. One of its favorite targets was television and the BBC in particular with spoofs of the news, talk shows, game shows, and children’s programming. The Pythoners also hated pretension and enjoyed poking fun at the upper class (especially Britain’s “twit” population).
Two Pythoners, Eric Idle and Michael Palin, made regular appearances on SNL. Lorne Michaels served as executive producer on Idle’s mockumentary of the Beatles entitled The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash, which was codirected by SNL filmmaker Gary Weis and featured Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and Franken and Davis in bit roles. The special aired in prime time on March 22, 1978.
John Cleese never hosted, but he did make an appearance alongside Palin to explain SNL’s new sketch ratings system and to recreate the famous “Dead Parrot” sketch (22.10). In Autobiography of the Pythons, Cleese recognized the influence Python had on American television. “In America,” Cleese observed, “of course, Saturday Night Live was influenced by it in a very positive way, in fact what was so funny was that kids who watched Saturday Night Live and then watched Python thought that we’d stolen from Saturday Night Live.”
The Great American Dream Machine (1971–1972)
Public broadcasting in the United States during the 1970s conjures up images of British costume dramas, Big Bird, science and nature documentaries, and roundtable discussions on the state of the world. But amidst all the programming aimed to expand our minds, NET (National Education Television), the predecessor of PBS (Public Broadcasting Service), briefly ventured into original comedy programming with the innovative series The Great American Dream Machine. The show, which ran from October 1971 through February 1972, had no host, and each episode was comprised of twelve to twenty segments of various lengths in the form of comedy sketches, documentary shorts, musical performances, dramatic readings, play excerpts, and social and political commentary on different aspects of American life. Some episodes revolved around a specific theme, like death, war, and attaining success in America. Authors Kurt Vonnegut and Studs Terkel provided social commentary, and humorist Marshall Efron offered his perspective on American consumerism. There were musical performances by pianist Eubie Blake, singer Joan Baez, Broadway star Elaine Stritch (singing “Ladies Who Lunch” from the musical Company), Carly Simon (singing her hit single “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be”), and Don McLean. Writer/director Ken Shapiro (The Groove Tube [1974]) and two future SNLers, Chevy Chase and Albert Brooks, appeared in comedy segments.
The critics praised the show. Time magazine’s Richard Burgheim dubbed Great American Dream Machine an “ambitious series . . . [that] combines elements of the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes and NBC’s Laugh-In, with a useful admixture of iconoclasm.” Fred Ferretti began his review for the New York Times with a declaration: “Television, real television, came at last to television last night in The Great American Dream Machine. It’s been a long time coming.”
The response from the White House was less than enthusiastic. In an interview with the Archive of American Television, director Don Mischer claimed the Nixon administration, which did not appreciate that public money was funding a show that was critical of the president and his policies, was responsible for the show’s cancellation: “We were a thorn in the establishment’s side. We were always raising issues that questioned decisions made by the administration. Nixon had a man named Clay Whitehead, who was director of communications at the White House. And at that time public television had quite a bit of government funding. And if we made fun of Nixon or made fun of one of his policies, or whatever, the more we did that—but we were fairly balanced, we were not like just Democratic vs. Republican, we kind of made fun of everybody. . . . They just got so upset they put so much pressure on them [NET], that they had to take them off the air.”