wolverines

I've been watching a lot of the first season of Saturday Night Live, having recently read a biography of Michael O'Donoghue. It's bizarre to delve back into the genesis of something so culturally seminal and radical for its time; most of my life SNL has been sub-par to say the least, and it's easy to forget just how extraordinarily it stood out in the mid seventies.
I think it was the right time for a show like SNL, with dark humor, surreal interludes, and a glorious skewering of all things held sacred by decent Americans. It's a trite comparison perhaps to draw between Beatlesmania somehow emerging from the shock of the Kennedy Assassination, but I think it's no coincidence that SNL found such a willing audience in a much more cynical American public still in an addled post-Watergate fog. And rather than being funnier per se than the SNL in later years, the original season is so much more, well dangerous.
First off it was more of an old fashioned variety show than most people remember. The Muppets were an original fixture, Andy Kauffman did his routines on most of the early episodes, as well as Albert Brooks' short, ultra-surreal featurettes that I remember loving so much when I saw these shows on reruns as a kid.
It's not until the middle of the first season that the show really hit a confident stride, and I think it really comes together on the first Buck Henry episode. Chevy Chase does one of his remarkable Gerald Ford bits with vaudeville slapstick worthy of Buster Keaton, there's the great "Samurai Delicatessen" but with Belushi and Buck Henry, and one the most brilliant Michael O'Donoghue penned skits, "Citizen Kane 2". Oh, and Bill Withers is the musical guest.
Every generation continually misled and deceived by its elected powers finds its collective therapy in comedy. The Depression had Chaplin, we have the "Daily Show". It's easy to see how the original Saturday Night Live must have brought people together in living rooms the same way Roosevelt's fireside chats did, albeit with a different kind of hope offered over the airwaves.
Here's the first skit ever aired on SNL, featuring Belushi and O'Donoghue.