By 1977 Saturday Night Live was very firmly established as an old boy's club, especially if those boys happened to be of the Caucasian persuasion. Yes, early Saturday Night Live was all about honkys doing their honky thing while swinging their pasty white cocks around homoerotically. Consequently, issues of vital importance to womanfolk, like shopping for hats, doily repair, synchronizing menstrual cycles and vagina maintenance were blithely ignored by this He-Man Woman Haters Club of a comic institution.
This institutional sexism, even on an ostensibly progressive, counterculture-friendly new show, must have made the tragically overlooked, underutilized broads of Saturday Night Live madder than a rattlesnake at a Thai wedding. They must have been overjoyed, then, when Lorne Michaels deigned, in his infinite generosity, to let a woman host.
I can't say I was too excited when I found out that actress Mary Kay Place was hosting today's episode of Saturday Night Live Classic but sweet blessed Lord did she do a heckuva job. Today's episode was easily the tightest, most consistent episode of the season. Part of the charm and excitement of early Saturday Night Live lie in its roughness, in the missed cues, flubbed lines, inconvenient giggles and other assorted fuck-ups. But today's was shockingly polished. From the host on down every brought their A game, came to play, gave 110 percent and many other meaningless show-business clichés.
The estrogen-fueled womanpalooza began with Place, decked out in a cheerleader's outfit, leading the Not Ready For Prime Time Players in a retro pep rally, then segued into a hilarious commercial for "Hey You", the perfume for one-night stands. Ah, the seventies. The kicker was a final scene where "Hey You" gal Gilda Radner looking ragged and weary as she endured a walk of shame following an evening of soft-focus debauchery with a barroom hook-up.
Just about every sketch killed, or at least wounded. A disconcertingly on-script John Belushi played an alarmist insect expert who filled host Jane Curtin in on all sorts of terrifying developments involving creepy crawly critters, including an insect that lives in between the eyeball and the contact lens and another that makes the underwear its home.
But today was all about the ladies, who stripped down to their lacy underthings for "Total Womanhood Meeting", a clever sketch with a distinct feminist bent about a club where women compete to see who can be the most docile, sycophantic fucktoy to their husband or boyfriend. Mmm, that's good satire!
Then the always awesome Willie Nelson came on to perform back-to-back numbers, a raucous, uptempo take on "Whiskey River" and an appropriately lonesome, bittersweet version of "Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain". Bill Murray stole "Weekend Update" playing a real-life sixty-five-year-old news commentator who was being put out to pasture on account of his advanced age. Knowing absolutely nothing about the actual gentleman Murray was playing, I can say with one hundred percent certainty that Murray absolutely nailed him.