Howmanyageshence

　　Shallthisourloftyscenebeactedover

　　Instates unbornandaccentsyetunknown!

　　HowmanytimesshallCaesarbleedinsport …

　　—Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (3.1)

　　Humor is “the best guide to changing perceptions,” writes Marshall McLuhan. Because “older societies thrived on purely literary plots” and “demanded storylines” to channel sophomoric energy, they employed elaborate farce in poems, plays, operas, and later books and films. But formed by modern communications technology, a wilder sense of levity wandered home, from Vaudeville acts, gag-heavy serials, the Looney Tunes, to Mad magazine. “Today’s humor,” McLuhan adds, “has no storyline—no sequence,” being “usually a compressed overlay of stories.”

　　Mid-century television was a slow, plot-based affair, with lightly-structured entries Laugh-In and The Carol Burnett Show in the minority. Then came Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Generally lacking framing narratives, its skits worked by a chain of association. Rather, recurring themes, ideas, and even props tethered any episode together like a mad dream. Sometimes, this new TV comedy recalled the Theater of the Absurd more than The Dick Van Dyke Show.

　　But if it was a court jester, the other courtiers acted seriously. When Americans watching Watergate distrusted their government, they still trusted their TVs. President Nixon might lie; Walter Cronkite—never. Television was “the earnest, worried eye on the reality behind all images,” David Foster Wallace writes, despite “the irony that television” is “a river of image” that gradually molds irony into its viewers.

　　If the illusion was lost on older folks at home, their kids raised on a daily Boob-tube diet got the joke. But not even Wallace, who “sat there rapt” by “images and ironies all over the place,” could turn away when “Saturday Night Live, that Athens of irreverent cynicism, specializing in parodies of (1) politics and (2) television, premiered the next fall” on October 11, 1975.

　　Like Monty Python targeting the BBC, Lorne Michaels’s SNL team went after broadcast television with fake commercials and parody news amid sketches and standup. Finally, those baby boomers raised by television grabbed it to reinvent comedy. “They’ve done it!” recalls Steve Martin. “They did the zeitgeist, they did what was out there, what we all had in our heads, this new kind of comedy.” It was part of a revolution we never forgot. We were never allowed to.

　　Boomer Forever

　　Because Hollywood needs brand recognition, corporate biopics represent virgin territory. ThusSaturday Night Live—after fifty seasons and eleven features—finally got its own treatment in Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night (2024). Much like his late father, Ivan Reitman of Ghostbusters (1984) fame, Jason Reitman makes biting satire that hides its sentimental heart, whereas his career mimics Hollywood exhaustion.

　　After indie hits like Thank You for Smoking (2005), Juno (2006), and Up in the Air (2009), Reitman lacked mega-success until he “finally got the keys to the car” and rebooted Ghostbusters. Like all legacy franchises, his version (2021–24) recycles the original plot, roles, and even equipment, with diminishing results from a fading world built by boomers but rented by their children.

　　In Saturday Night, though, the younger Reitman shows he can drive more than his old man’s Ecto-mobile by depicting its creative-destructive spirit. Long tracking-shots follow fly-by-the-wire auteur Lorne Michaels (played by Gabriel LaBelle) guiding his cast and crew—all high, crude, but endearing—away from organizational collapse.

　　The film’s drama comes from mounting behind-the-scenes chaos, whether acts of God—as lights fall, bricks crumble, a fire starts, and the guy bringing in a donkey is mugged—or personality conflicts.

　　Staff quit, lay around, or have unsigned contracts. Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) fights with John Belushi (Matt Wood), who goes missing. And besides the other prima-donnas with identity crises—Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris), Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podnay), Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun), and George Carlin (Matthew Rhys)—Milton Berle (J. K. Simmons) is stealing girls with his old party trick.

　　Meanwhile, cast members hail the devil to insult the network censor. Their blasphemies are outnumbered only by the sexual innuendos redlined in an overstuffed script that is outweighed only by the ounces of drugs present. The SNL solution to heroin is cocaine, while its remedy is a handy Dan Akroyd massage.

　　As for Lorne Michaels: next to his failing marriage and over-budgeted show, he mumbles pitches, lacks advertisers, and hires technicians and writers at the last minute. Pressuring Johnny Carson to accept weekend reruns, NBC greenlit those crazy ideas so the oblivious showrunner would fail. And with no rehearsal tape, Michaels must broadcast or die as a Carson rerun airs instead. Of course, his show survives.

　　Saturday Night shows how television assimilated these struggling artists. “I spent years collecting orphaned comedians off the street,” says Lorne, and found a “home for our little circus of rejects on national television.” But his goal is less Dickensian than demonstration. Explaining “theres never been a television show made for or by the generation that grew up watching television,” he then cites Che Guevera.

　　The revolution will be televised—as a TV night on the town. Saturday Night Live, he sums up, lets viewers feel the random rush of Big Apple nightlife, from catching Richard Pryor do standup or Paul Simon sing to meeting girls and “getting lucky in a phone booth.” All brought to you by NBC.

　　If boomers seized in the sexual revolution the means of reproduction, they seized in television those of studio production to broadcasted humor and hedonism. Of course, their days of rage soon got old, both in culture and technology. From hippies singing on hilltops in Coca-Cola ads to armed Maoists negotiating contracts in Network (1976), corporations quickly co-opted the counterculture. But airing radical chic meant taming it, making the rebellion deathlessly playacted as a cringe performance for the kids.

　　Reitman aims to reverse that, delivering “the electricity of the new” through manic pacing. If High Noon (1952) occurs in real-time—when portrayed events match the running time—Saturday Night mimics that technique, using 109 actual minutes to countdown 90.

　　But wistful for when subversive irony was first aired, Saturday Night has a time-warped perspective. “Do you ever have nostalgia for a moment when youre still in it,” its Gilda Radner asks, “thinking about how youre going to think” of it while it’s “still happening?” Indeed, the dozen times characters say how much time is left till showtime breaks the illusion, as if on purpose. It seems by fighting self-parody, Reitman induces self-irony.

　　The comedy world Saturday Night Live seized is dying. Nevertheless, the comedy world it inspired—from standup to podcasts to Netflix specials—is alive and well.

　　His film cannot make many waves with $25-30 million spent but under $10 million earned. Nevertheless, just as Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) casted many daughters of famous stars who themselves became leading ladies, Reitman’s Saturday Night contains dozens of older actors’ kids who populate HBO shows, indie films, and recent work by Paul Thomas Anderson and Steven Spielberg.

　　This alignment creates a paradox. A sendup of cultural innovation when boomers trashed out the old and crashed in the new, Saturday Night relives their self-conceit through younger generations. Jason Reitman is a Gen X director whose millennial and zoomer castLARP their parents and grandparents’ glory days. Thus when one character mentions “the vibes,” he draws more from the stagnating 2020s than groovy 1970s.

　　If it takes great foes to summon greater energy to win, then the swinging sixties met American religion and patriotism at historic peaks. “The old forms were still powerful and vital,” Ross Douthat writes, so “the new forms had to be powerful as well.” Today when corporations advertise as rebels and the traditional forms are ragged leftovers, that cultural vitality has become institutional decadence.

　　If anything, the boomer victory was too complete. When rock-n-roll turns conventional, its seduction is lost. And like old French novels always replaying the trauma of La Revolution or drama of Napoleonic conquest, no American can escape that first overthrow when art and life merge together. Our movies, like our music, must parrot yesteryear’s hits.

　　Revisiting Innovation

　　What is the actual history behind Reitman’s nostalgic art? As Hollywood’s Golden Age ended, writes Peter Biskind, an opportunity came to reinvent cinema. The usual story—how auteurs made movies, not shows, picking gritty drama over lighthearted laughs—often neglects that New Hollywood reinvented comedy first on the small screen.

　　1970s Hollywood comedy, Nick de Semlyen writes, “can be encapsulated with one image: a wimp in specs.” And if the movie did not star Woody Allen, or Mel Brooks, it had either Burt Reynolds or Clint Eastwood with an ape. Then on Saturday night, some guys stole the spotlight who “looked more like maintenance staff, or appliance salesmen, than members of the Rat Pack.”

　　Saturday Night Live minted this comedic generation—Chase, Belushi, and Akroyd, later Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy—who subsequently became movie stars in National Lampoon films and others directed by Ivan Reitman, John Landis, and Harold Ramis. Notwithstanding its influence on Spielberg, the Zucker Brothers, and John Hughes, mainstream success blunted SNL’s edginess. In 1980s Hollywood, Tarantino notes, “likability was everything.” Thus if Chase was slightly less an aloof jerk by the film’s end, Murray, his SNL replacement, always became a redeemed man. Maybe blame sobriety.

　　After all, “cocaine was a drug well-suited to the driven, megalomaniacal, macho lifestyle of Hollywood,” Siskind explains, unlike “grass, which had a mellow, laid-back effect, or psychedelics, which facilitated self-exploration.” But even if the cast sobered after Belushi and Chris Farley overdosed, the organization still felt scars. The SNL work schedule was, Tina Fey explains, “designed around cocaine.” By “the nineties,” the “cocaine was gone, but we were still staying up all night” crafting the next show, which caused “OCD in people who never had OCD before.”

　　Lorne Michaels—as told in Live from New York, the SNL oral history—got less high than others and advised switching around drugs. Chase recalls Lorne saying, “Coke was God’s way of telling you that you have too much money.” This “token grown-up in a sea of children and coeds,” says Carrie Fisher, “was very professorial” and “only rated R.” With mannerisms parodied by Dr. Evil, the aloof Canadian discreetly maintained order as Hollywood’s weirdest father figure.

　　Michaels would “lord over people who want to kneel at his feet,” explains Jane Curtain. By being unacknowledged, they worked harder. Allegedly setting fire to wastebaskets earned his attention faster than scheduling meetings. Some found his approach infantilizing, others mentoring, but always authoritative. “Don’t you know,” Bill Murray once joked to his brother Brian-Doyle, “you’re supposed to go kiss the Pope’s ring?”

　　Originally an equal to his colleagues Radner and Michael O’Donoghue, Michaels grew detached after he aged past the cast. “He used to wear jeans and a blazer,” Paul Simon says, “then he became a suit-and-tie guy.” That chilled outsiders. If comedy meant “a crazy bunch of people sitting around making each other laugh with casual chaos,” argues Bob Odenkirk, unlike this “democracy of chaos,” Saturday Night Live had “this one distant and cold guy” ruling it like he did decades before.

　　Now, a successful company must survive its founder. Take Steve Jobs, who despite his hippie rhetoric was a polished businessman. If most boomers “were institution destroyers,” notes Helen Andrews, Jobs “was an institution builder” driven to pass on his cutting-edge company to future generations. Apple survived Jobs, yes, but less so the same spirit of innovation beyond managerial stasis.

　　A founder who maintained his hold over his show, Michaels adjusted its formula, altering standup and musical content to changing youth tastes. Notably, former NBC-chief Robert Wright dubsMichaels “the Sumner Redstone” (a longtime media magnate) “of live comedy programming, with one show.” Yet as a better comparison, Lorne Michaels is the Roger Corman of New Hollywood comedy. As Corman discovered directors and actors for decades, Michaels—from his cult-classic Kids in the Hall to his SNL—kept jumpstarting comedy writers and actors who made their own films and shows.

　　However, even as Saturday Night Live was reborn every few years—thus seemingly declining upon every high school graduation—it finally broke when the Internet devoured television. SNL cast members (as Valentine Steele notes) used to either graduate into their own movies or shows, but streaming platforms killed this pipeline and clogged the program. Now, old and new cast members fight for airtime like scraps from a shrinking table. To survive, Saturday Night needs rehauling, a biweekly schedule, and new management—preferably under an alum like Tina Fey.

　　The comedy world Saturday Night Live seized is dying. Late night has not been funny since Norm Macdonald closed out Letterman in 2015, just before most mainstream sitcoms signed off and right after movie comedies had all but ended. Nevertheless, the comedy world it inspired—from standup to podcasts to Netflix specials—is alive and well.

　　Saturday Night Live arose when boomers rebooted film and television. It will finally end if both big and small screens wither away in the age of AI and smartphones. Yet comedy still remains vital to American culture, but on new media, not old. Maybe both old mediums can be reinvented. But hopefully postponing the Sunday dawn does not require so many drugs like before. Sobriety is not the same as tragedy.