020 - Saturday Night Life
How a silly late night TV show helped define my idea of adulthood
Leave it to Saturday Night Live to celebrate its 50th Anniversary on a Sunday night.
The three-hour-plus spectacular that aired on Presidents’ Day Eve dumped another 18-wheeler’s worth of cement on SNL’s legacy as the longest-running variety/sketch comedy show in the history of American television.
Through 14 presidential administrations and 12 Congolese civil wars, from the birth of Betamax to the rise of Bitcoin, since the crack of your uncle’s first can of Miller Lite to his most recent sober toast with Michelob ULTRA Zero, a rotating repertory of 167 comic actors and thousands of writers, producers, crew members, and celebrity hosts/musical guests have come together for 939 weeks to broadcast 61,000 minutes of live entertainment from 30 Rockefeller Center in New York City.
I’ve probably seen about 50,000 of them.
If I had to pin down when I first became aware of Saturday Night Live, it might have been as an overly precocious (in mind only; body development was verrrry much belated) seven-year-old when I clocked the cultural furor following Sinéad O’Connor’s iconic and iconoclastic October 3, 1992 papal-pulverizing performance on the second episode of the 18th season. I imagine I must have had a conversation around the dinner table with my parents that played out something like this:
“Momma, Poppa, pray tell… what is the news man saying about that bald lady?”
“Dear child, that ‘bald lady’ is none other than Irish songstress Sinéad O’Connor whose cover of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U from her debut album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got was named the #1 World Single at the 1990 Billboard Music Awards. The news man is reporting about her controversial decision to tear up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on a live, late night televised comedy program.”
“Live? Late night? Comedy television? What marvelous concepts! And they combine to form a venue where eccentric pop stars are invited to profane the sacred? What amusement! What excitation! Oh Momma, Poppa, may I watch this program?”
“Blessed child, you may not, as it airs far past your bedtime at 11:30pm on Saturday nights and is rife with adult themes unsuited for your unsophisticated sensibility. We are afraid you must wait until you are longer in the tooth to partake of such nocturnal viewership, and any insistence to the contrary is utter nonsense that a little boy would be wise to banish from his fantastical imagination.”
… something like that.
But where there is a Will, there is a Ferrell, and desperate to escape my unserious pre-tween station in life, I wouldn’t take “No” lying down. Or rather, that’s exactly how I took it, for I would soon begin a new Saturday night routine of surreptitiously faking sleep when my parents made the rounds at lights out, gingerly stepping out of bed as 11:30 approached, and low-crawling like a Scout Sniper across the hall to the foot of the door to their bedroom. Through the narrow gap between the base and the threshold, I could delight in the dancing patterns of cathode rays filtering out from their chunky Panasonic onto the carpet in front of me, and pressing my ear to the jamb I could strain to make out the faint sounds of the SNL cast amid delirious bursts of audience applause and guffaws.
As I got a bit older and bolder, I began sneaking down to the basement to watch SNL on the oversized Zenith, volume adjusted to a mite above mute. From that furtive vantage I can very clearly recall forming my earliest, sketchiest memory: guest host (and not-yet-Sir) Patrick Stewart playing the proprietor of an erotic bakery, sexually obsessed with the idea of women going to the bathroom.
Nine-year-old Scott couldn’t quite understand what was unfolding before his eyes… nevertheless, HE WAS (JAN) HOOKED. While somewhat mystified by the word ‘erotic,’ he not only recognized but positively THRILLED TO the words ‘sex’ and ‘sexy’ — and the characters in this sketch were saying them a lot!!! It’s apparent only now upon rewatch, 31 years after those four minutes irrevocably imprinted onto my developing brain, that the biggest laugh line — David Spade’s sheepishly delivered “Yes, the man-on-man lemon meringue” — was completely lost on me at the time.
Another skit that made its mark that night was oddly also retail-oriented: Mike Myers reprised one of his many catchphrase vehicles as owner of “All Things Scottish.” It was enough to hear the word ‘CRAP’ loudly screamed on television (as in, “If it’s not Scottish, it's____”) to make me nearly piss myself. Throw in ‘friggin’ and ‘bastard,’ a gratuitously bloody head butt, and an outrageous display of drunkenness, and my noodle was fully fried.
Up until this rogue expedition into the after dark hinterlands of the VHF band, television was a medium that strictly conveyed cartoon bears and ponies and gnomes and human-scale turtles skilled in martial arts. Suddenly, a curtain had been opened onto another world of entertainment, a world of which I had been made vaguely aware in the form of the obscured, bagged magazines on the upper shelves of the newsstand at Big Top and the restricted backroom section beyond the saloon-style doors of the local video store. It was part and parcel of the same world that required me to sit at a separate table from my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles at Seder; the same world that decreed my friends and me vacate the community pool at the conclusion of “Free Swim” to make way for the lap lanes and the capped and goggled gaggle who followed; the same world that cracked wise about Joey Buttafuoco and Lorena Bobbitt and Dan Quayle and Dr. Kevorkian.
It was the Adult World, and Saturday Night Live seemed to be some version of its Bat Signal: a late night beam of light calling all adults around the country to spring into inaction and settle down for 90 minutes of goofs and spoofs, hilarity and musicality, social commentary and political satire accessible to Adults Only. Kids need not apply.
But on the backs of Matt Foley, Linda Richman, the Church Lady, the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, and Bill Swerski’s Super Fans, I forced my way in. The covert solo watch parties continued as my weekend bedtime ticked up till I reached an age where I didn’t have to hide it anymore: “Mom, Dad, I’m gay… FOR JOKES!” I was an out and proud comedy geek, and SNL was my support system.1
When it came time to commemorate my becoming a Man before the eyes of my Jewish God, and I was tasked with choosing a motif for the party to be thrown in honor of my maiden voyage to the Torah as a Bar Mitzvah, there was only one true contender. If I was now officially coming of age as an Adult, then I was going to party as an Adult, with the most Adult theme an Adult mind could possibly, Adultly conceive…
And that is why, rather than being greeted with an “All-Star Bar Mitzvah” or “Rock n’ Roll Bar Mitzvah” so seemingly standard among my peers, the 120 guests who arrived at the Brae Burn Country Club in Purchase, NY on the evening of December 13, 1997 (a Saturday night) were met with SCOTTURDAY NIGHT LIVE.
My friends were invited to “join the cast” at tables featuring centerpieces of the Spartan Cheerleaders, Mary Katherine Gallagher, Harry Caray, and Goat Boy,2 while my parents’s friends and elder relatives joined the Coneheads, the Land Shark, the Wild and Crazy Guys, Roseanne Roseannadanna, John Belushi’s Samurai, and Father Guido Sarducci.
I watched SNL50 on the couch with my parents in my childhood home, specifically in the “home office” which replaced my original bedroom as part of a massive 2004 remodeling. The door frame remains the same, as does the distance I used to crawl between my room and theirs on those undercover, overnight missions across No Man’s Land to my ersatz adulthood; ten feet that felt like a football field to nine-year-old me.
I thought I had outgrown this home, just as I thought I had outgrown this show (I can’t honestly say I’ve tuned in too much since the 40th anniversary). But as I laughed myself silly alongside my septuagenarian roommates at the antics of Martin and Mulaney and McKinnon and Meryl and “All the Way” Ray May, I couldn’t help but admire the irony inherent in the moment.
After a childhood defined by my defiance at being a child, here I was all these decades later, finally at one as a fully-formed, self-actualized, bona fide Adult Man…
Leave it to Saturday Night Live to make me feel like a kid again.
I was also buoyed along by The Simpsons, Seinfeld, Adam Sandler and Weird Al tapes, The Far Side and Garfield comics, all things Chris Farley and Jim Carrey and Leslie Nielsen… and that’s not even counting the classics that I absorbed as quickly as I could discover them (the Marx Brothers, Monty Python, Allan Sherman, Mel Brooks, Steve Martin, Dean Martin’s Celebrity Roasts…)
Shoutout the GOAT of late 20th Century Westchester party design, the late Les Benjamin who went above and beyond in making my dream theme a reality.