Would Saturday Night Live be able to crank out ninety minutes of gut-busting hilarity every episode if it weren't for that ingenious crutch known as the cue card? Cue cards are the training wheels that keep the show from flying off the rails, a sturdy cheat sheet for cast and hosts alike. In the coked-up seventies in particular I suspect that cue cards kept the show from devolving into an incoherent, amateurish mess.
Yet conventional cue cards probably wouldn't be of much use to the host and musical guest of today's episode of Saturday Night Live classic, the estimable Ray Charles, though it is entirely possible that he stashes away Braille cue cards somewhere in his piano to make the prospect of doing live television a little less risky.
As I've written before, early Saturday Night Live tended to take its cues from its hosts. The second episode of the first season, for example, was essentially a Paul Simon variety show with a few sketches thrown in. When game amateurs like Ralph Nader or Gerald Ford's press secretary popped in the cast understandably tended to do the comedic heavy lifting.
So it's not surprising that today's episode was half Ray Charles And Friends variety show, half raucous televised house party. The show's attitude towards its esteemed host mixed reverence with cheek: blind jokes dominated the episode but Charles always ended up getting the upper hand, beginning with an amusing opening monologue where Charles talks about he would only host the show on the condition that it be filmed at Carnegie Hall before conspiratorially confiding in the audience that the joke's on the show, since he's not the real Ray Charles; the real Charles is at Carnegie Hall, leaving an imposter in his place.
That gag is repeated to great comic effect when Michael O'Donoghue, resplendent in his trademark white suit comes on later in the show to announce that while they've all enjoyed a larf blindness is really no laughing matter and that NBC has generously decided to donate a Monet to Lighthouse of the Blind in Charles' honor. O'Donoghue then unveils the "Monet", which is actually just a board reading "Please Don't Tell Him". Again, Charles gets the last laugh when he informs the audience that he knows exactly what's going on and that at the wrap party "ten or twelve of the biggest black dudes (O'Donoghue) has ever seen in his life" are going to beat the crap out of him.
In the culture-wide afterglow that followed Obama's victory I found myself thinking a lot about Jimmy Carter and Dan Aykroyd's masterful impersonation of him on Saturday Night Live. Aykroyd's respectful take on Carter captures the widespread conviction among progressives that one of their own had finally rose to supreme power, that real, lasting, profound and positive social change now seemed possible, if not probable.