From “The Continental” to “Pyramid,” TV history as seen in parody sketches
Sketch comedy shows have a proud tradition of lampooning TV fare found elsewhere on the broadcast dial. Whether it’s Inside Amy Schumer sending up Aaron Sorkin with “The Foodroom” or Saturday Night Live cast members playing dumb on the old Password set, the best TV parody sketches bring out the most ridiculous elements of television from the past and present. In this post, we’re focusing on the past, constructing a history of American TV decade by decade, as seen through parody sketches.
This post is sponsored by Friends Of The People, TruTV’s irreverent, pop culture-savvy sketch comedy show. New episodes of Friends Of The People kick off July 16 at 10:30 p.m./9:30 Central on TruTV. And visit the show’s official page on TruTV.com to catch up on some of Friends’ best sketches, like “Tuber,” “Jurassic Narc,” and “The Dark McKnight.”
1950s: “The Continental,” Saturday Night Live
“The Continental” is a staple of Christopher Walken’s many turns as a Saturday Night Live host: Speaking directly to the camera, Walken’s slimy, mustachioed bachelor character tries to woo a female visitor with unsubtle innuendo and offers of “cham-pan-ya.” Most viewers probably don’t even realize this sketch is a TV parody, but it’s based on an actual short-lived TV show of the ’50s—which was also called The Continental and starred an actor named Renzo Cesana. The real Continental was shot the same way as the sketch, with Cesana romancing the camera directly: “Don’t be afraid, darling, it’s only a man’s apartment,” he would tell the viewer. Clearly someone at SNL saw a clip of the original show and realized it would be a perfect milieu for Walken, and so in a roundabout way, an obscure piece of TV history was preserved by way of a bizarre sketch.
1960s: “The Merv Griffith Show,” SCTV
SCTV gives viewers two ’60s TV parodies for the price of one in “The Merv Griffith Show,” pairing the glitzy celebrity chats of The Merv Griffin Show with the aw-shucks homey sitcom The Andy Griffith Show. Somehow, the SCTV cast manages to capture both shows brilliantly. Joe Flaherty does a mean impression of Andy Griffith’s bug-eyed sheriff deputy, and John Candy even makes an appearance as the minor recurring character Otis, the town drunk. But the highlight of the sketch is Rick Moranis’ rendition of Merv Griffin’s gravelly baritone and obsequious interviewing style—not to mention Merv’s extra padding in the rear.
1970s: Commercial parodies, The Carol Burnett Show
Each year, The Carol Burnett Show would parody some of TV’s most notorious and/or annoying ads in its salute to “unforgettable commercials.” Most of these quick bits worked the same way: They’d begin with the premise of the actual ad and then steer it toward a zany ending. But if you haven’t seen the commercials in question, these old sketches are even weirder, and perhaps even funnier, as a disorienting time capsule of forgotten advertising.
1980s: “$7,000 Pyramid,” The State
Dick Clark was a man whose reputation and cultural connotations transcended mere decades, but the game show he hosted helped to define ’80s daytime television. The $25,000 Pyramid (which began life as The $10,000 Pyramid in the ’70s, the title changing through the years to reflect the top prize amount) combined two of America’s favorite things: celebrities and winning money. Happily, these were also two of The State’s favorite targets, making it a natural choice for parody. The MTV sketch comedy troupe re-envisioned the game as a sadly diminished affair, with famous disaster couple Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungeon slurring their way through such awkwardly on-point categories as “Things That Kill” and “Things People Do On Heroin.” By putting the bleakest celebrities imaginable into the format, The State pulled a David Lynch—it turned something as American as apple pie into a televised nightmare. (Much like the ’80s themselves.)
1990s: “The McLaughlin Group,” Saturday Night Live
For many kids who grew up doing goofy impressions of political commentator John McLaughlin, Saturday Night Live’s spoof was likely the only version of The McLaughlin Group they knew. A syndicated half-hour political affairs program, its public profile skyrocketed after Dana Carvey began doing his stentorian impersonation of McLaughlin’s style. Sternly shouting out “Wrong!” after every answer his panelists offer—regardless of what they say, or if they’ve finished saying it—Carvey and his fellow actors sent up the increasingly absurd and combative nature of political talk shows with laser precision. Anyone watching probably had as little idea what McLaughlin was talking about as the man himself, which was the whole point of SNL’s joke. In the ’90s, we started to take it for granted that many of our TV pundits really were just as clueless as the rest of us.
2000s: “Desperate Houseplants,” Sesame Street
Sesame Street has always been keen of seize whatever pop culture artifacts are currently trending and turning them into genially absurd fodder for kids. (See its Mad Men spoof for a recent example.) And in the mid-2000s, there was no show with more water-cooler cachet than Desperate Housewives, ABC’s juggernaut hit about disaffected suburban women and their soapy travails. The primetime sudser had a sharp wit and a black heart, two things Sesame Street smartly excised for its vegetation-based parody. What it kept, however, was more than might be expected. The plants languish on a sill until a man in a revealing tank top comes along to water them and give them sun. Plus, he does so with dramatic head-whips, as he faces the camera to announce his intentions. It walks right up to the line of being a little bit saucy—and then, because this is Sesame Street—it walks right back.