Opening segment: I wrote earlier that the cast and crew's resentment of Chevy Chase provides an endlessly fascinating subtext for the show's first and second season. In this brief cold open it officially went from subtext to text as Jane Curtin resentfully introduces the return of Chevy Chase (Yay! Hiss! Boo!) and John Belushi promptly rolls a dazed, wheelchair-bound Chase onstage with a Richard Widmarkian gleam of malice in his eyes. Sure enough, Belushi promptly pushes Chase and his wheelchair off the stage. Cue pratfall and "Live From New York It's Saturday Night!"
Monologue: I was warned by a commenter last week (well two weeks really,since I took last week off) that tonight's episode was trainwrecktastic. So I was pleasantly surprised by Black's performance. I'm starting to suspect that what people say on the internet may not, in fact, be one hundred percent reliable. In her monologue Black offered a satirical "history of motherhood" that doubled as a parody of the industrial revolution and the inexorable march of progress. But the real attraction of the monologue was a squirmy newborn babe intent on upstaging dear old mom. In blatant defiance of every parenting book known to man, Black held the baby up to her ear like a telephone, but not before it pawed hungrily at Black's bosom, earning nervous titters from the audience (pun at least partially intended). After taping I would imagine she probably had to fend off various cast-members and hangers-on hungrily pawing at her bosoms as well.
Host: Karen Black, who reigned as either one of the seventies' creepiest-looking sexy women or one of its sexiest creepy-looking women. Though she seemed a little spaced out Black acquitted herself nicely in a handful of skits and later offered a breathy, dramatic, surprisingly affecting version of the old Rodgers and Hart standard "10 Cents a Dance". She didn't elevate the show like an Eric Idle or Lily Tomlin (Steve Martin's first episode looms tantalizingly in our future next week) but she didn't embarrass herself, even in a dignity-unfriendly Catherine The Great/Mr. Ed spoof. Unlike a certain Raquel Welch she did not subject audiences to a wholly unnecessary and wildly incongruous dance number either. Good on you, the voluptuous horror of Karen Black.
The Good: Though Belushi seemed to be wrestling with a cold and seemed largely distracted the skits were largely, if not uniformly solid, from a fake-commercial for cupcakes guaranteed not to cause Cancer to a typically strong Carter/Ford debate skit where Chase's Ford goes through the entire skit with an unexplained hypodermic needle jutting out of arm. It's hard to believe that our fine country was once ruled by a man who wasn't particularly bright and constantly mangled the English language. In a riff on Carter's controversial Playboy interview (the one where he conceded that he had lusted in heart for other woman) Aykroyd's Carter tells Jane Curtin's pretty female journalist ""At this moment in my heart I'm wearing a leather mask and breathing in your ear". Having just seen Aykroyd don a leather mask in Exit To Eden that comment seemed eerily prescient. A seventies cop-show parody called A*M*I*S*H (an acronym for Active Moralists In Search of Harmony) was a supremely dumb idea smartly executed. The sequence where the rule-following trio patiently wait in line at the bank while pitch-perfect seventies cop-show wah-wah guitar plays in the background was fairly genius. Even the lesser skits had eminently quotable lines like "Three kings and a barber, not so bad" and "Here's a picture of the locusts raping my sister."