Humor, like beauty, doesn't always last. Chevy Chase and Eddie Murphy proved that.
And even the most secure institutions aren't impregnable, as Jerry Seinfeld's joke about the disgraced NBC News anchor Brian Williams suggested. But Sunday night's 3 1/2-hour special honoring the 40th anniversary of Saturday Night Live worked and was well deserved. The NBC show, which in 1975 seemed likely not to live out its decade, turns out to have great bones and enduring blood lines.
The event had as many stars in the audience as onstage, and it also had many of the strengths and failings of SNL, which has been on television longer than any other sketch comedy or variety show. It remains a standard-bearer, even for people who never watch it.
Yet the special was still a high-spirited, generous tribute, self-mocking (there were several jokes about the show's lack of diversity and overly drawn-out live skits), as well as self-congratulatory. Some of it was awkward. After a huge, minutes-long buildup by Chris Rock, Murphy didn't try to amuse, and despite getting a standing ovation, said almost nothing before the show cut to commercial. Chase also seemed startled to be there. But it was the flashbacks to their youth that made it fun.
There has never been a comedy farm team like SNL: The series has been finding and nurturing talent for so many decades, waxing and waning in quality, but never ceasing to feed the movie and television systems with a next generation of standouts.
SNL isn't nearly as bold and cheerfully nihilistic as it was in 1975, nor is it as fueled by reckless behavior behind the scenes. (As Tina Fey put it: "Also joining us, one of the show's original producers - cocaine.") It's also never as good as we remember it being. In real time, critics and viewers are always bemoaning how not-quite-funny-enough it is. And then, years later, the same voices complain that the current seasons and casts aren't as good as previous ones. It was always thus with SNL, yet it is hard to dismiss or overlook, even today in the era of YouTube, Comedy Central and Internet streaming channels.
Jane Curtin, one of the show's original cast members, did a star turn Sunday at the "Weekend Update" anchor desk, alongside Fey and Poehler.
Not every revived sketch worked. Dan Aykroyd valiantly raced through his lines while feeding fish into a blender on a fake late-night ad for Bass-o-Matic, but it didn't really seem funny. A revival "Celebrity Jeopardy!" parody, with Darrell Hammond as Sean Connery and Will Ferrell as Alex Trebek, was better, helped by the addition of Alec Baldwin in a fake nose as Tony Bennett.
Accordingly, the most unsettling moment of the night was a clip from an old filmed sketch, shot in black and white, that starred John Belushi as an elderly version of himself, walking haltingly through the snow-covered Not Ready for Prime Time Players Cemetery.
"I was one of those 'live fast/die young/leave a good-looking corpse types,'" Belushi says. "But I guess they were wrong."
The memory of cast members who died too soon - Belushi, Gilda Radner, Chris Farley - hovered over the evening, but the show took the edge off by ending a long "In Memoriam" segment of deceased actors, writers and crew members with a picture of Jon Lovitz, recalling a similar joke from the show's opening monologue. (Lovitz is, of course, alive, and was in the audience, bristling with feigned indignation.)
One of the easiest moments was a joke about Lorne Michaels, the SNL creator. Mike Myers, who had mimicked his former boss' accent to portray Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies, paid tribute to Michaels by making fun of him.
"Well, it got a laugh," Myers said in his best impression. "But did it get the right laugh?"
As is his wont, Michaels stayed out of the limelight until the end of the show, when he took the stage for a quick bow. He didn't need to say or do more. SNL is a comedy show born out of the irreverence and alienation of the 1970s that still matters four decades later.
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