For 50 years, the show has been a political almanac, predicting American debates in coming decades.
For 50 years, the show has been a political almanac, predicting American debates in coming decades.
J ust past midnight on the evening of November 8, 1975, Gilda Radner, star of a new show called Saturday Night, and actress Candice Bergen sat together onstage for a televised conversation about the Equal Rights Amendment. The proposed constitutional amendment had passed Congress and was now subject to ratification by the states, and Bergen said she happily voted for it.
Radner, however, said she didn’t vote because she was too busy working. And she said she had concerns that the ERA would allow men to use women’s restrooms.
“Could you really go to the bathroom with a guy in the stall next to you?” she asked Bergen. “Psychologically, someone would have to run the water or sing ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head’ or something for me to do . . . I’m being stupid now, right?”
Bergen responded that of course nobody wanted men in women’s bathrooms. “You’re being stupid like thousands of other voters,” she told Radner. “Gilda, that was not what ERA was about — this was a misconception on the part of the media. Equality does not mean the same, we can be equal and different.”
The writers and performers back then couldn’t possibly have known that this would become such a hot-button issue in the 2020s, yet look what’s happened.
When the 49th season of what was soon renamed Saturday Night Live commences this weekend, there will be no cast members expressing honest thoughts about how it might be weird for men and women to go to the bathroom together.
But while it is first and foremost a comedy show, SNL is also a record of American politics and culture. Its nearly half century on the air is perhaps the best reflection of the past half century of American life. Scarcely a news item or public preoccupation has escaped mention or mockery on the show.
The show is thus an incredible time capsule that has not only preserved the issues of the past but demonstrates that the controversies we deal with today are nothing new.
For instance, later in the same episode mentioned above, Garrett Morris (the only black original cast member) and Jane Curtin (perhaps the whitest of the original cast members) starred in a talk-show sketch called “Black Perspective.” The riotous sketch features Morris interviewing “Soul Sister Curtin” about a book she had recently written on the African-American experience, as if she was an expert on black culture. (Her character had written books titled Sharecropper ’75, Charcoal City, and Shadows.)
“I feel that the conscience of my writing has been strongly influenced by the plight of my brothers and sisters in the ghetto areas you speak of,” she tells Morris.
Of course, in recent years, many woke white women have pushed themselves to the forefront of movements such as Black Lives Matter. It is almost as if white author Robin DiAngelo saw this sketch and decided to make a career out of explaining the black experience to gullible human-resources associations.
Oftentimes, you will hear people say, “I liked SNL before it was political.” I have bad news for these people — the show has always been thoroughly doused in (typically liberal) politics. And its progressive blinders also caused the show to get a lot wrong. After the election of Ronald Reagan, for instance, the show trafficked in jokes that Reagan was gay, a dunce, and too old. He was 68 years old at the time. Joe Biden is now 80.
Nonetheless, there were plenty of political observations from the early years that have returned. In recurring sketches, Chevy Chase played a hapless, stumbling President Gerald Ford. In a sketch called “Operation Stumblebum,” Ford’s handlers hand him index cards to guide him to do the most rudimentary tasks: One card says, “You walk down the hall,” another, “You enter the room.”
Last year, photographers snapped pictures of index cards used by Biden that included such bullet points as “Enter the Roosevelt Room and say hello to participants” and “YOU take YOUR seat.”
At the beginning of season 2, shortly before he left the show, Chase played Ford taking part in a debate with then-candidate Jimmy Carter (played by Dan Aykroyd). Ford, who in real life was attempting to push swine-flu vaccinations, was played by Chase with a syringe sticking out of his arm. A lot of Americans were complaining about the side effects of the vaccine, including Guillain-Barré syndrome.
Sound familiar?
In the meantime, Dan Aykroyd carried on as Carter, appearing in one third-season sketch to calm Americans’ fears about runaway inflation. Speaking to the camera, he asked Americans to burn 8 percent of their money in order to take cash out of the economy. He was flanked by a sign that said “The Buck Burns Here.”
The show was even prescient on political matters that developed quickly. In 2000, new “Weekend Update” host Jimmy Fallon joked that a candidate could conceivably win a presidential election by losing the popular vote and winning the Electoral College — which is exactly what happened when George W. Bush edged out Al Gore. That same year, Tina Fey joked that for his son’s birthday, Osama bin Laden had blown up a Crate and Barrel store. We all know what happened the following September.
That same year, Fey also made a joke about a group of U.S. Marines who were complaining about the color of beret they were being forced to wear. “These guys need a war,” she joked. They would soon get one.
Or who can forget the famous Adam Sandler/Chris Farley “Schmitts Gay” commercial that marketed beer to gay drinkers? What was just a silly joke in the early 1990s became a reality this year when Bud Light made an earnest play for the transgender demographic.
The show got a lot of nonpolitical developments right, too. In one episode in season 6, cast member Denny Dillon stars in a fake ad for a device that allows one to listen to sped-up audio books to save time. In 2023, this is how many people actually listen to podcasts.
In 1976, the show introduced the “Triple Trac,” a shaving razor with three blades. (Tagline: “Because you’ll believe anything.”) Now, it is common to see razors with five blades.
And in season 8, the show introduced the “Ronco Biological Watch,” a device that alerted women trying to get pregnant as to when they were ovulating. (Much to the delight of cast member Mary Gross, who kicks off a fake ad for the device by saying, “Oh my gosh, I forgot to have children!”) Four decades later, the new Apple watches do exactly that.
After nearly 1,000 shows (all of which I and my co-host Scot Bertram are watching for our podcast Wasn’t That Special), SNL is basically an almanac of American political and cultural history. Want to know what issues Americans will be fighting about decades from now? Watch SNL this season to find out.