Saturday Night Live & American TV

Nick Marx, Matt Sienkiewicz, Ron Becker, Nick Marx, Matt Sienkiewicz, Ron Becker

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780253010902
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica della televisione

Thought-provoking and "undeniably interesting" essays on this cultural institution of comedy and what it says about our society ( Booklist ). Since 1975, "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!" has greeted late night–TV viewers looking for the best in sketch comedy and popular music. SNL is the variety show that launched the careers of countless comedians, including Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Chris Farley, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Adam Sandler. Week after week, SNL has produced everything from unforgettable parodies to provocative political satire—adapting to changing times decade after decade while staying true to its original vision of performing timely topical humor. With essays that address issues ranging from race and gender to authorship and comedic performance, Saturday Night Live and American TV follows the history of this iconic show, and its place in the shifting social and media landscape of American television.

PART ONE

Live from New York on NBC

The Evolution of Saturday Night

MICHELE HILMES

What happened to transform the small hours of Saturday night from the low-rent haunt of old movies, reruns, dusty talk shows, and strange preachers to a must-see event for three generations of youthful viewers? The answer can be found by looking at changes in the American broadcasting industry, the rise of the youth audience, and the new prominence of sketch comedy, powered by transatlantic currents of popular culture flowing across the airwaves. Saturday Night Live drew on all these factors to create a new type of serialized sketch comedy format with one foot in vaudeville and the other in television’s future, but few would have guessed that it would continue to serve as an incubator and showcase of film, television, and musical talent across more than three decades. It also began a return to high-profile, live television production, after two decades of increased reliance on filmed series, and marked the death throes of the prime-time variety show, a staple of broadcasting since the 1920s.

In many ways Saturday Night Live, when it debuted at 11:30 PM Eastern time on October 11, 1975, simply represented the latest manifestation of a broadcast form that had dominated U.S. radio and television schedules from the beginning: the comedy-variety show. Drawing directly on the vaudeville tradition of combining musical performances, comedy sketches, humorous emcee-hosts, and a wide variety of other materials ranging from tap dancing to poetry readings, such programs proliferated on local radio stations around the nation, although we will never know about many of them since records, if kept, have long since disappeared. Networks, when they emerged in the late 1920s, took up the form immediately, and for the next thirty years, comedy-variety was never missing from their lineups (though not typically on Saturday nights; Sunday was by far the more popular). The comedy-variety format carried over to early television, often directly, as in the migration of the long-successful Texaco Star Theater from radio to TV in 1948 complete with its host, Milton Berle.

In other ways, however, SNL represented a significant break with that tradition as it had developed by the 1970s, revolutionizing the form and creating a new kind of audience for comedy, yet remaining a singular exception—an innovation network TV could not repeat, leaving it to stand alone until cable TV and new, targeted networks of the 1990s managed to replicate some of the unique conditions that it had created. Though other shows, such as Fox’s MADtv (1995–2009) and In Living Color (1990–1994), clearly owe much of their format to Saturday Night Live, they reproduced neither its conditions of truly live production (being filmed before live studio audiences and broadcast later) nor the wide reach of NBC in its prime. This chapter examines the history of the comedy-variety format, from its roots in radio to its early television manifestations, in order to set up an analysis of what has made SNL unique and what it has contributed to the ongoing development of television forms and practices. In today’s media arena of fragmented platforms and segmented audiences, it is easy to lose sight of the conditions under which innovation occurred in the earlier network period, conditions that tie SNL to its roots in pre-TV radio and early live television as much as to current programs. Yet these are precisely the factors that contributed to its success and that mark its truly original trajectory.

RADIO ROOTS

Two of the most influential early comedy-variety programs on radio were The Capitol Theater Gang, hosted by Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel, manager of New York City’s Capitol Theater (later, Roxy and His Gang), and The Eveready Hour, hosted by xylophonist-turned-ukelele-player Wendell Hall. Both debuted on WEAF, the first experimental network in the United States, operated by AT&T, in 1922 and 1923, respectively, becoming early radio’s first big hit shows. We know about them because they were WEAF programs and AT&T promoted and publicized them; no doubt there were many others on local stations that remain lost to the historical record. Roxy’s program was a direct carry-over from the vaudeville shows put on in the Capitol Theater before film screenings, a common custom in the 1920s. The Eveready Hour may represent the first comedy-variety program created specifically for commercial network radio, since it was originated by its sponsor, the National Carbon Company, to promote its Eveready batteries, much used in early radio sets. Both continued the vaudeville tradition of presenting a wide variety of disparate acts linked together by a host or emcee.

But the serializing structure of radio, with new shows presented to a consistent audience every week (unlike vaudeville’s fixed show with changing audiences), meant that a new combination of continuity and innovation was necessary. Each week’s show had to be different from the week before, yet similar enough from one to the next to create a brand presence and attract listeners back week after week. Thus the radio variety format was born, adapting vaudeville’s content to radio’s technological, aesthetic, and economic needs for stability and predictability, as well as its “intimate” presence in the home. A genial host served as the main anchor and trademark of the program, at the center of a comedic and musical “family” of regular performers and personalities punctuated by guest appearances, keeping to a general theme or fictional setting while introducing controlled variations for each weekly installment.

Early listings refer to several different types of variety show on network schedules: general variety, like The Eveready Hour, with a broad combination of acts; musical variety, by far the most common, whose host might crack a few mild jokes but mainly served to introduce a mix of musical performances; and comedy-variety.¹ For the first decade of radio, the comedy-variety form was closely linked to the minstrel/blackface format, such as the Majestic Theater Hour’s Two Black Crows, starting in 1928; the Henry George Program, billed as “negro comedy,” in 1929; and much of the early humor of Eddie Cantor, who debuted on radio in 1931. Not until 1932 did the comedy-variety form begin to proliferate, with twelve shows on the air that year, up from only two the year before. No doubt this had something to do with radio’s stabilizing economic situation, as networks extended their reach across the country and sponsors began to regard radio as a profitable advertising medium. As advertising agencies embraced showmanship and began to take over prime-time program production from the networks, well-known comedians began to rival famous bandleaders as star attractions. Most of 1932–1933’s astonishing crop of comedy-variety hosts had started out in vaudeville, many went on to long careers on radio and in film, and a few eventually turned up on early television: Al Jolson, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Ed Wynn, Fred Allen, Jack Benny, the Marx Brothers.

Interestingly, the only night not featuring a comedy-variety program during the early 1930s, as the format found its footing, was Saturday. Sundays through Fridays were good nights for comedy-variety, it seems, but Saturday network schedules remained dominated by musical variety programs, many of them broadcast live from hotel ballrooms and clubs. If you couldn’t go out on Saturday night, listening at home to a popular orchestra playing from the Plaza ballroom in New York was an excellent substitute. Here we see the meaning of “live” begin to make a shift from the dominant form of early radio—preexisting entertainments transmitted live on location—to the production of specialized radio programs transmitted live from a broadcast studio, the direction in which radio innovation would grow.

Comedy-variety hit its peak on radio in the mid-1940s, with nearly twenty programs aired in prime-time hours. They earned some of the top ratings in radio, especially for staples like Bob Hope, Burns and Allen, Charlie McCarthy, Fibber McGee and Molly, Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Judy Canova, and Red Skelton. Typically, such programs combined both stand-up and sketch comedy routines, along with music and guest-star turns.² But over the course of two decades, as the list above suggests, sketch comedy had become the dominant mode, so thoroughly integrated within the format that it had become serialized along with the rest of the show. By the mid-1940s most of the long-running comedy-variety programs on radio had developed a central sketch situation—often a self-referential one, such as Jack Benny’s “group of performers trying to put on a radio show” or Judy Canova’s “country girl star in Hollywood” persona—from which each week’s episodes were spun. Such recurring sketches employed ongoing storylines and character development that were looser than the emergent format of the situation comedy—well under way by 1947—but certainly different from the intermittent, loosely connected sketches of earlier years.

TRANSITION TO TV

This well-established format changed again when television entered the scene. By now, the genre referred to as situation comedy had emerged to move broadcast humor in a new direction. Radio sitcoms had grown out of sketches developed in the comedy-variety matrix, and many of them, or their stars, made a smooth transition to television. This was the case with The Burns and Allen Show. Starting as comedy-variety, it gradually took on most of the characteristics of a sitcom: a half-hour divided into two fifteen-minute extended sketches with a continuing storyline, with a brief musical performance in between. This is the format its veteran stars carried over to TV in 1950. Joan Davis, who debuted doing sketch comedy as a summer replacement host on The Rudy Vallee Show, quickly built it into a radio sitcom, The Joan Davis Show, then brought it to television in I Married Joan (NBC, 1952–1955).³ This kind of extended sketch, often with a domestic setting, provided far more favorable conditions for female comedians than the comedy-variety format, with its emphasis on suggestive one-liners and gags.⁴ The radio and early television situation comedy was built by women like Davis, Lucille Ball, Marie Wilson, Fanny Brice, Eve Arden, Ann Sothern, and Hattie McDaniel. By the 1960s it would be television comedy’s most popular form.

However, in the early 1950s, the live variety format dominated early television. More than forty variety shows aired weekly, from fifteen-minute musical variety shorts that still might feature big stars—Perry Como, Dinah Shore—to high-profile hour-long showcases, available nearly every night of the week and hosted by names made famous in radio and in Hollywood: Kate Smith, Ed Sullivan, Arthur Godfrey, Dinah Shore, Faye Emerson.⁵ In contrast to radio, Saturday nights were the prime time for television comedy, anchored by NBC’s ninety-minute behemoth, Your Show of Shows (1950–1954). Hosted by veteran comedians Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, it featured radio’s mix of sketch comedy and stand-up, along with television’s retrieval of slapstick comedy from vaudeville’s repertoire. Musical productions now could feature not only singing but ...