Well, home-skillets, it looks I'm going to be doing things a little differently here in the second installment of Saturday Night Live: Season Two TV Club Classic. Long, rambling, borderline incoherent free-form essays are out and neat little categories and compartmentalization are in. Also out: long walks on the beach, the sitcom Joey and Mocha Lattes. With no further ado here's my run-down of the Norman Lear/Boz Skaggs episode that aired September 25th, 1976
Opening segment:In a very meta opening bit Gilda Radner, Glinda The Good Witch to Chevy Chase's Wicked Witch of The East, explains that Chase hurt his back during the previous episode's Carter/Ford debate skit and couldn't make it to the show. In his absence she'd be performing their opening scene together by herself, an amusingly labored physical comedy routine that calls for her to climb up a rickety ladder to fix a light bulb with predictably hilarious results. Chase then calls in from his sickbed–where he's watching The Donald O'Connor Story–to encourage her not to risk injury through pratfalls. So instead of doing the crowd-pleasing opening pratfall herself she walks the receiver of her phone across a desk ("Muppet-style" Chase insists) and has the inanimate object perform the fall instead of her. Cue Chase hollering "Live from New York" via the phone. Ironically, Chase ends up dominating the show despite his absence. Saturday Night Live has long been a haven for post-modern comedy. It essentially started spoofing its traditions and tropes the moment it introduced them, sometimes to hilarious effect, sometimes not. This bit lingers somewhere in the middle: it's clever and quirky if not particularly funny. Host: Television super-producer Norman Lear, inexplicably wearing a Gilligan hat that makes him look like a befuddled vacationing New Englander. You get the sense that Lear appeared on the show largely because his daughter thought SNL was way neato. Despite his status as an edgy television pioneer he's not quite hip enough for the room, as it were.
Monologue: A clearly nervous and uncomfortable Lear fumbles his way through his opening spiel, racing through the standard lines (It's a pleasure to be here, the cast is great, we're going to have a lot of fun, there's apparently some sort of musical guest who will eat up time by performing songs of some sort, etc.) in a mad bit to get the monologue over with as quickly and painlessly as possible. Drenched in a thin coating of flop sweat, Lear stumbles over words and botches jokes that aren't particularly funny to begin with. It's not an encouraging sign that the biggest laugh comes when the sound drops out and the words "This interruption in sound is brought to you by the same ABC Facilities that brought you the first Ford-Carter debate" appear on the screen.
Oh snap! Take that, ABC facilities! Ah, the perils of timeliness. I'm sure if I'd watched the first Carter/Ford debate (I have an excuse: I was five months old at the time, and consequently way more into PBS, especially Masterpiece Theater) I might have found that mildly amusing. Possibly. This segues into a taped bit where Lear's collaborators gush about his genius in increasingly hyperbolic ways, the thin gag being that all his actors shoot him angry, goofy, cartoonish looks once his back is turned, though I was at least mildly amused at the big reveal that the famously Liberal Lear runs The Jeffersons as a sort of television chain gang where stars Sherman Helmsley and Isabel Sanford are kept from fleeing by the presence of cartoon-style ball and chains around their ankles. At least the monologue leaves nowhere to go but up. Musical Guest:The mellow AM sounds of Boz Scaggs (who, sad to say, I know primarily as a Mr. Show reference), flashing mucho chest hair in a saucily unbuttoned shirt with a butterfly collar. Plus flute! You can't jazz-rock it up seventies style without a flute. I found his songs to be pleasantly Steely Dan-like in their chilled-out smoothness but I'm not exactly rushing out to fill the Boz Scaggs-shaped hole in my CD collection. On a more promising note Radner, Jane Curtin and Laraine Newman sing a rapturous ode to Chevy Chase in the pop-melodramatic style of a classic Girl Group song, complete with clever couplets like "I know this shouldn't be said/I wish his girlfriend were dead/Her tragic "accidental" death I scheme and plot/So when in heaven we meet I will be able to say "Hi, I'm Mrs. Chevy Chase and you're not". It's funny but it also works as a surprisingly tuneful (and well-sung) pastiche. Damn you, talented SNL cast! Must you excel at everything?