Saturday Night Live & American TV

Saturday Night Live & American TV

Saturday Night Live & American TV

Saturday Night Live & American TV

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Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780253010902
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Publication date: 11/01/2018
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 294
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Nick Marx is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Colorado State University.

Matt Sienkiewicz is Assistant Professor of Communication and International Studies at Boston College.

Ron Becker is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Miami University of Ohio where he is also an affiliate of the American Studies, Film Studies, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies programs. He is the author of Gay TV and Straight America.

Read an Excerpt

Saturday Night Live & American TV


By Nick Marx, Matt Sienkiewicz, Ron Becker

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 2013 Indiana University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01090-2



CHAPTER 1

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. 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. 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). 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. 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. 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 dancing as well, and television allowed orchestras some literal and figurative visibility. Over its four-year run, Your Show of Shows displayed the talents of an astonishing variety of later-famous writers, including Mel Tolkin, Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart, Neil Simon, and Woody Allen. Caesar and Coca created a number of recurring characters whose stories continued sporadically from show to show, most notably the dysfunctional couple Charlie and Doris Hickenlooper. Other classic live comedy-variety shows from this early period include The Texaco Star Theater (1948–1956) with Milton Berle and the The Colgate Comedy Hour (1950–1955), whose varied hosts included Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis most prominently.

As the 1950s segued into the '60s, filmed series grew in number while live shows of all kinds declined on the prime-time airwaves. Variety was one of the last to go, though by 1965 most variety shows had shifted to being filmed in front of a live studio audience. That year only three variety shows remained in prime time—The Red Skelton Hour (1951–1971), The Bob Hope Show (1952–1975), and The Jackie Gleason Show (1952–1970) (all comedy-variety); in 1975, the year that SNL debuted, the number was the same—Tony Orlando and Dawn (1974–1976), the long-running Carol Burnett Show (1967–1978), and Cher (1975–1976) as all that (briefly) remained of the old Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour (1971–1974). However, this broad leap through the decades obscures several important developments in the late '60s and early '70s that led in a wandering, indirect, yet still important line to SNL.


THE ROOTS OF SNL

In the late 1960s the networks awoke to the notion that a new youth audience existed out there. Baby boomers, many of whom were in their teen spending years, would require some variation on the types of programs that had been entertaining their parents on radio and television for the last thirty years. Youthful characters were written into crime dramas and soap operas, and a new focus on "relevance" introduced a more political note into sitcoms, all attempting to attract the baby boomer crowd while not alienating the rest of the audience. The impact of this strategy could be seen in the comedy-variety format with two of the most notable variations on the themes that led to SNL: The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1967–1969) and Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (1968–1973).

The travails of the Smothers Brothers have been well traced: beginning as a fairly traditional comedy-variety show with the two brothers as hosts and combining comedy skits and musical performances complete with an orchestra and a dancing troupe, the Smothers guest list became increasingly political and the network increasingly censorious. Musical performances by left-leaning guests like Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Harry Belafonte were summarily cut; comedians like David Steinberg and routines by the brothers themselves were rejected. Finally the show, despite growing ratings, received a mid-season cancellation notice in March 1969, effective immediately. This seemed to mark a limit of what networks deemed permissible in terms of incorporating the more political elements of 1960s youth culture into network television during the prime-time hours.

A more successful though less politically edgy attempt to capture something of the '60s ethos in television comedy was Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. Henry Jenkins pithily sums up the show's significance: "If The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour captured the political earnestness of the 1960s counterculture, Laugh-In snared the decade's flamboyance, its anarchic energy, and its pop aesthetic, combining the blackout comedy of the vaudeville tradition with a 1960s-style 'happening.'"

Influenced by a short-lived adaptation of a more edgy British news satire show, That Was the Week That Was, which aired on NBC in 1964–1965, Laugh-In returned to the tradition of gag comedy, with very short sketches and one-liners performed by a cast of recurring characters, eschewing the guest-star convention. Its style was zany and frenetic, its pace furious: most sketches lasted for less than a minute before another completely unrelated gag bumped them off the screen. Gyrating women in bikinis and lots of pop dancing rounded out its audience appeal. Laugh-In's comedy ensemble included Lily Tomlin, Goldie Hawn, Arte Johnson, Ruth Buzzi, Henry Gibson, Pigmeat Markham, and Jo Anne Worley, and many of them were elevated out of obscurity to stardom overnight. Though its topicality and '60s-specific pop breeziness meant a fast fade from cultural memory, Jenkins concludes, "Not until Saturday Night Live would another television variety show ensemble leave such a firm imprint on the evolution of American comedy." Among Laugh-In's writers was a young Lorne Michaels.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Saturday Night Live & American TV by Nick Marx, Matt Sienkiewicz, Ron Becker. Copyright © 2013 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Situating Saturday Night Live within American Television Culture / Nick Marx, Matt Sienkiewicz, and Ron Becker
Part I: Live from New York on NBC
2. The Evolution of Saturday Night / Michele Hilmes
3. "Live from New York!" / Susan Murray
4. Michael O’Donoghue, Experimental Television Comedy, and Saturday Night Live’s Authorship / Evan Elkins
Part II: Staying Alive on Saturday Night
5. Politics and the Brand: Saturday Night Live’s Campaign Season Humor and Cultural Relevance / Jeffrey P. Jones
6. Speaking Too Soon: SNL, 9/11 and the Remaking of American Irony / Matt Sienkiewicz
7. Live Music: Mediating Musical Performance and Discord on Saturday Night Live / Alyxandra Vesey
8. Going Backstage: Network Heritage, Industrial Identities, and Reiterated Mediation of Saturday Night Live’s Work Worlds / Derek Johnson
Part III: Social Politics and Comedic Representation
9: Bringing the Black: Eddie Murphy and African American Humor on Saturday Night Live / Racquel Gates
10. "Is this the Era of the Woman?": SNL’s Gender Politics in the New Millennium / Caryn Murphy
11. "Reading Fauxbama: ‘Honeyface’ Performance on SNL" / Mary Beltrán
Part IV: Beyond Saturday Night, Beyond Television
12.Skits Strung Together: Performance, Narrative, and the Sketch Comedy Aesthetic in SNL Films / Nick Marx
13. Andy Samberg’s Digital Success Story and Other Myths of the Internet Comedy Club / Ethan Thompson and Ethan Tussey
14. Sketches Gone Viral: From Watercooler Talk to Participatory Comedy / David Gurney
Contributors
Index

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