Saturday Night Live

although oddly they staged it in a hallway; had they used up all the stage space?

whole murray thing felt super improvised to me. like it wasn't rehearsed at all, they just told bill to sing about jaws.

review:

http://www.vulture.com/2015/02/snl-40-was-patchy-but-it-had-moments-of-magic.html

btw whatever you think of Simon, his initial appearance (3rd episode?) with Garfunkel in '75 played a huge role in drawing attention to the show.

when is the piscopo comeback gonna happen

Besides Eddie (and the members of "the ringer season"), Piscopo was the only representation during the whole night of the Ebersol years right? They were lean years, sure, but not entirely devoid of funny people I'd have liked to have seen.

I remember the 15th anniversary SNL special (which, iirc, was their first such star-studded retrospective/reunion dealie) and Piscopo was in the audience wearing a sleveless tux to show off his weird-ass body-built arms. And it wasn't meant to be a comedy bit. I think he even flexed when he realized the camera was on him.

xpost Jim Belushi

I played with the app a little last night and it's fun, but def a big step up from shitty YouTube content but a big step down from actually having full episodes. A mix of stuff you'd thought you'd never see again, stuff you've seen a dozen times, and stuff that's not there for whatever inexplicable reason (one of these days I will prove that I saw a circa-2001 sketch loosely about Melt-Banana, but that day is not here)

Huge points off for providing the first 30 years in the wrong aspect ratio

take it to the AV Club buddy

Word, gotta pad those two grafs out to 8 or 9

This show stinks, always has. Get out a DVD set of one of those early series with the 'classic' cast and even those episodes are 75% crap.

Ooh yeah agree murray was good too. And seemed v spontaneous.

Xxp

Is there not an Android version of the app? Because fuck an iPhone.

Huge points off for providing the first 30 years in the wrong aspect ratio

^^^this, ugh

My favorite part of the show though is getting to search by cast member and watch stuff from Sarah Silverman, Ellen Cleghorne, Terry Sweeney, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, etc.

did J L-D make an appearance last night?

I did lol that dennis miller and victoria jackson were both awol

well they wouldn't want to be in the belly of the liberal beast, would they?

Sarah didn't seem to mind.

Palin, not Silverman.

Also Martin Short and Billy Crystal were Ebersol cast members.

I remember that 15th anniversary. Mary Tyler Moore came out with "Eddie Murphy's Entourage".

sarah palin doesn't mind anything as long as it extends her media exposure; that they would even give her such exposure demonstrates that SNL's " political satire" is bankrupt

i did like that martin short got a lot of airtime; how is that ever a bad thing?

http://i.imgur.com/KbQVMbl.jpg

Dennis Miller pulling a Nora Dunn during the Dice episode probably proves to his fans that it's the missing jigsaw piece you notice first.

I knew VJ was there because one of the syndicated entertainment shows was interviewing her during their wrap-up after the local news (I could hear her voice blaring from the other room). Dennis Miller was obviously busy across the street jerking off Bill O'Reilly.

This had a couple of laughs. I wish there had been a clip montage of musical guests, but that would have taken forever. I agree with Mark Evanier that Jim Henson should have been in the Obit section.

Yeah, I would have completely forgot about Henson in the obit section but their had a photo of Gilda with Scred!

(one of these days I will prove that I saw a circa-2001 sketch loosely about Melt-Banana, but that day is not here)

THIS HAPPENED! I SAW IT! It was the weirdest goddamn thing.

S27 E16, Cameron Diaz/Jimmy Eat World (lololol), aired 4/6/2002, band was called Crash Papayas

not at all vaguely racist

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/01/01pmtv4.phtml

It'll all be fixed when SNL hires it's first Asian cast members and writers in about fifty years

i still can't believe it happened in STUDIO 60 and it still hasn't happened on the real SNL. i mean even MadTV had Bobby Lee

Remember the sketch with people complaining about their iPhones being confronted by the people who made them? Yikes.

it was cringeworthy just reading that thing, I can't imagine having actually seen it

NY Times writer Alessandra Stanley says: "Last week, after Jon Stewart announced he would stop doing the fake news on “The Daily Show,” his fans mourned, saying that he had pioneered a genre of political satire. He didn’t. 'Weekend Update' was already there."

As if Weekend Update were the "first" news parody anyway, or produced more than a couple of weeks worth of material rivaling top level Daily Show during these magic 40 years.

as Chevy Chase said, the original point of WU was NOT to do jokes about the news. It was to mock the conventions of the newscast. (Chase's pomposity/ cluelessness, Laraine Newman doing remotes from deadly locales in Abe Beame-era NYC etc)

This is of course a joke that is lost on Airhead America then and now.

I find TDS a bit overrated as a whole but it's way way more than Weekend Update's constant barrage of one-liners - I think Norm's years were the only "pioneering" aspect of it, as I can't think of anyone doing deadpan comedy quite like that before

uh, Bob & Ray? "...ly Ballou here."

i mean i realize comedy was invented around 1968 at the latest but

SCTV was so much better at mocking the conventions of the newscast though, and so were Monty Python. It isn't even close.

The Daily Show breakthrough was of course using actual news footage from other channels and directly making fun of the coverage by name.

i mean i realize comedy was invented around 1968 at the latest but

― touch of a love-starved cobra (Dr Morbius), Monday, February 16, 2015 4:33 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Of course this started with Aristophanes classic "I'm not wearing any chiton, scrolls at 11" joke in the lost play Gadflies

NY Times writer Alessandra Stanley

stanley is a notoriously unqualified incompetent hack, move along

paper of record, old grey badbreath

The best eras of snl imo
1. hour-long reruns on comedy central in the 90s
2. the first few seasons after i was allowed to stay up for new episodes, before i started having better things to do on a saturday night
3. the invention of the dvr

I might be slightly older than you but the nick at night compressed episodes from the 70s cast were essential for me. Where else would I have seen this shit:
― panettone for the painfully alone (mayor jingleberries), Friday, January 30, 2015 1:37 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark

Also a few years back when Netflix had every episode (minus the sketches where they would've had to pay for music royalties).

How qualified do you have to be to write about television?

xp a lot of those were pretty butchered, though; some were 20-30 minutes

That 10 seconds of Larry David was probably the best part of snl40.

I might be slightly older than you but the nick at night compressed episodes from the 70s cast were essential for me. Where else would I have seen this shit:
― panettone for the painfully alone (mayor jingleberries), Friday, January 30, 2015 1:37 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark

These started in syndication in the early 80s. Musical guests were rarely (if ever) included, but sometimes the monologues were. Watching these made you want to see the whole episodes; watching the whole episodes made you want to only see the 30 minute edit.

That 10 seconds of Larry David was probably the best part of snl40.

― billstevejim, Tuesday, February 17, 2015 1:20 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I was thinking how weird it was that he was a stronger actor than most of the veteran performers

Yeah, it really felt like a lot of those people hadn't performed in any capacity in years.

@AlbertBrooks
I think it will take another 40 years. RT @mattthomas: Still waiting for the #SNL40 Albert Brooks tribute.