Back in 1975, Lorne Michaels laid down a few rules for his new show, Saturday Night. One pillar was that his program would be everything the popular Carol Burnett Show was not. The prime time variety show “lacked subtlety and nuance; it was too broad, too bourgeois, and too smug—especially when the performers broke out laughing in mid-sketch, doubling up at the hilarity of themselves,” according to Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live. Lorne demanded “more integrity and respect for the writing here,” dismissing corny sketch ideas as, “That’s Carol Burnett.”
Burnett was rightly offended when word got back to her. “I don’t know what I did to upset that man, but I’m so sorry,” Burnett told The New Yorker earlier this year. Not that she’s ever been asked, but Burnett would refuse to host SNL if an offer came her way. “I would not be interested. That’s all I can say.”
But Lorne Michaels wasn’t wrong. As a young upstart comedy show featuring a cast of twentysomething comedians, the last thing early Saturday Night should have done was emulate the status quo. By bringing National Lampoon’s “burn it all down” mentality to late-night, Saturday Night established a counterculture comedy show for a younger generation.
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The irony, of course, was that the show, eventually called Saturday Night Live, stuck around. That longevity meant a couple of things. First, its hip guests of the time — Paul Simon, Steve Martin, Tom Hanks — eventually became the standard bearers of mainstream culture. Its audience aged with the show; a 20-year-old viewer in 1975 is now 70, so SNL’s signature catchphrases wouldn’t be out of place in AARP Magazine. A show that lasts for fifty years inevitably becomes the thing it set out to avoid: The definition of establishment, mainstream comedy.
Somewhere along the way, Lorne must have decided the things he hated about The Carol Burnett Show weren’t so bad after all. Today’s SNL definitely isn’t devoted to “sublety and nuance” — this season’s best sketch featured Ashley Padilla and her uncontrollable farting.
Harvey Korman and Tim Conway were too smug and self-satisfied when they cracked up at their own jokes? Then how does SNL’s producer feel about the fact that the biggest breakout sketches of the past few years — Lisa from Temecula, Beavis and Butthead, pretty much any of Kate McKinnon’s Close Encounters bits — went viral due to the performers breaking up?
Saturday Night Live is its generation’s version of The Carol Burnett Show. Own it, Lorne, and be proud of it. There’s nothing wrong with defining comedy for a generation or two. But realize that if you’re the cool kid of yesteryear, you can’t be the cutting-edge comedy of today, no matter how many times you drop Gen Z catchphrases.
And let this be a word of advice to the 20-something versions of Lorne Michaels out there. Want to create the next genre-defining show (if a “TV show” even represents what’s next)? When developing your vision, reject any idea if you can say, “That’s SNL.”
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