Flakiest Night of the Week

“Satire is what closes Saturday night” said George Kaufman. NBC’s Saturday Night is proving him wrong. For 90 minutes, three out of four Saturday nights after 11:30, a small, subversive group of iconoclasts is throwing the air waves into disorder, tossing barbs at the presidency, the system, the revolution(s), motherhood, feminism, civil rights and democracy. Only on the air for four months, this live and unpredictable show is the season’s surprise hit. It already has a loyal following of more than seven million. Says Dick Ebersol, 28, the network’s late-night programming vice president, who is responsible for the whole thing: “It’s NBC’s hottest show, the most attractive show to advertisers, in 25 years.”

Hi, Studmuffins. Saturday Night has no organized format. A jumble of political satire, tasteless jokes and off-balance sketches is delivered by the rambunctious “Not Ready for Prime Time Players,” a cast of mostly unknowns who have a breezy informality that makes Carol Burnett and Archie Bunker look like waxworks. President Ford falls over all the time on SN, crying, “No problem.” Viewers are urged to send samples of marijuana to be tested for quality. Don Vito Corleone is trapped in a therapy session with a blonde who screams, “You’re blocking, Vito”; female hardhats rib male passersby: “Hi, studmuffins. Watch out, joy chunks.”

There are some regular features, including Jim Henson and his Muppets, from Sesame Street, and Chevy Chase’s Weekend Update. Chevy, who started as a writer on the show (see box), is fast becoming its comedy star. He is a tall, conventional-looking young man, who opens a rude and funny parody of the nation’s newscasters with “I’m Chevy Chase—and you’re not.” His news breaks are bizarre: “Vandals broke into the Louvre and attached arms onto the Venus de Milo.” His favorite long-running story is: “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still seriously dead.”

There is one other regular feature: the false advertisement deftly inserted in the middle of commercial breaks. “Hi,” says a bright-eyed woman coming into her kitchen, “I’m a nuclear physicist and chairman of consumer affairs.” How does she do it? “She takes speed.” A young man playing tennis says: “Right now I’m having a vasectomy.” How does he do it? Golden Needles Voodoo Acupuncture—for those who don’t have the time or money for costly operations. The put-ons have been too successful. The Gay Activists Alliance is mad at an ad that shows a homosexual reminiscing about the joys of dressing in his mother’s clothes even as he places a long-distance call to Mom: “The next best thing to being her.”

SN owes a debt to Laugh-In and to Monty Python, last year’s hit on PBS, for its free-associating mixture of inanity and insult. It owes another one, too: without Python’s national success, it is doubtful whether Herb Schlosser, president of NBC, would have offered Dick Ebersol such a free hand when he told him last year to come up with a live show from Manhattan. Ebersol turned to Lorne Michaels, 31, a Canadian who was a writer and co-producer for Comedienne Lily Tomlin’s award-winning specials. Michaels recalls: “I wanted a show to and for and by the TV generation. Thirty-year-olds are left out of television. Our reference points, our humor, reflect a life-style never aired on TV. Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda are the most up-to-date shows on the air now, but they are liberated ’50s.”

In addition to Chase, Michaels recruited a core of writers including his own wife Rosie, 29, who had also worked for Tomlin; Michael O’Donoghue, 36, and Anne Beatts, 28, both formerly of the National Lampoon; and Herb Sargent, fiftyish, whose credits include That Was the Week That Was. Their styles are diverse. Their humor is not. Says O’Donoghue: “At some point in your life, you decide to either grow up or look like grownups. We’ve chosen the latter.” Some critics think the show is sophomoric. Replies O’Donoghue: “Sophomoric is just the liberal word for funny.”

God Can’t Be Perfect. Sometimes SN is awful. Comedian Albert Brooks’ taped films were at first a regular feature, but offered only ten minutes of boredom. The Muppets are cloying grotesques. The funniest jokes are the simplest: a land shark who gobbles up apartment dwellers; a parody of Catherine Deneuve’s Chanel No. 5 ad which ended with a perfume bottle stuck to Guest Host Candice Bergen’s head. A lot depends on the guest hosts who change each week and around whom an entire show is written. Among the first tapped by Michaels were Comedian George Carlin and Actor Rob Reiner. Says Reiner: “I didn’t care if the show fell flat on its ass. TV needed it.” He adds: “It’s like an express train that no one can stop. You just have to hop aboard and hope it won’t crash.”

SN’s most endearing and human quality is its unevenness. Guest hosts participate in the sketches themselves and some write their own jokes too. Carlin set the pace on his, the first show, with a line that would make prime-time programmers blanch: “God can’t be perfect; everything he makes dies.” By the time Lily Tomlin came on to host the fifth show, SN had a cult following. She made it a smash, her double-edged style and swift undercuts setting off SN’s frenzied variety. Suddenly, everyone wanted to act as host: Richard Pryor, Elliott Gould, Buck Henry, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, the British satirists, and this week Dick Cavett. The writers, of course, want someone a little different: King Olav of Norway, Patty Hearst (“but we don’t want to blow her defense”), Ernest and Julio Gallo with Cesar Chavez as their guest.

Nothing is wasted on the show. For the first one, Rosie Michaels thought of the Bees, the repertory company dressed up in striped costumes with springy antennae, who descended on a startled host. But nobody laughed. Then Candy Bergen fell in love with them and became a Bee for the Bee-capades. Now the Bees are a staple. Recently they became South American killer bees who crossed the border crying, “Your pollen or your wife!”

SN was devised as a development project from which people and ideas could be spun off. In fact, the whole show may be spun off by NBC. The network is anxious to air a prime-time special. But Ebersol and Michaels fear that could kill the whole thing. “And if it did work,” says Ebersol with a sigh, “we’d have to think up a whole new idea for late Saturday night.”