The Good: A commenter a few weeks back called today's episode the single greatest episode ever. That struck me as just a tad bit hyperbolic (Can any SNL episode be deemed truly great without an appearance by the "Makin' copies!" guy?) But I will most assuredly co-sign on this episode being singularly spectacular. C'mon, it's got a home movie by Robert Altman for Chrissakes! And the latest in Gary Weis' ongoing series on how awesome cute girls look in slow motion. Forget Emmys. Somebody should have given that man a Nobel prize or something.
The episode got off to a spectacularly dark start with the fake death of Saturday Night Live director Dave Wilson. A clearly flummoxed Dan Aykroyd led the awkwardness brigade as one by one the cast strived desperately to say something eloquent and moving about the deceased but the best they can come up with is that he liked the Beatles ("A white man who liked the Beatles. Now that's interesting" marvels Garrett Morris) and warned Bill Murray that the milk in the coffee machine was bad. It's a clammily funny skit that also adroitly satirizes the way death elevates even the least remarkable among us into Saints and geniuses in the honeyed/dishonest words of our eulogizers.
One of the neat aspects of SNL transcripts is that it sometimes lists the writers of individual skits. It didn't list a writer for the cold open but it felt unmistakably like the work of Michael O'Donoghue, the dark Prince of early SNL. Like a lot of comedy buffs of my generation I know O'Donoghue more through his legend than his actual body of work so it's been fascinating seeing whether the facts live up to the legend. What do you guys think? I'm also thinking I need to re-read the O'Donoghue bio I reviewed in these here pages about a decade back.
The cold open established an agreeably nasty tone for the rest of the show. In an especially dark "Weekend Update" Curtin even tells a bracingly mean-spirited joke about NBC's The Tonight Show being put out of its misery that seems a little too nasty even for the swinging hipsters in the SNL audience. Then there was a brilliantly written and performed skit with Bill Murray as a man who managed to become an author and learning disability expert despite boasting a vocabulary of exactly five words ("That's true. You're absolutely right.") It's a testament to Murray's skill that he says nothing but those five words in the entire skit without it ever seeming awkward or stilted. According to SNL transcripts he actually fucked up and said two more words at one point but I didn't notice. Perhaps because, like many members of my generation, I am gay for Bill Murray. Comedy-wise.
Murray took center stage with a surprisingly dead-on Walter Cronkite impersonation in a skit where Jimmy Carter took questions from callers, including a man in the midst of a hellacious acid trip. I love Aykryod's take on Carter as a man so refreshingly honest, candid and knowledgeable that he's borderline insane. Ah Jimmy Carter, you were a terrible disappointment as a President and a shining example for ex-Presidents everywhere.