How do you kick off the longest run­ning live sketch com­e­dy show in tele­vi­sion his­to­ry? If you’re in the cast and crew for the first episode of Sat­ur­day Night Live, you have no idea you’re doing any­thing of the kind. Still the pressure’s on, and the new­ly hired “Not Ready for Prime­time Play­ers” had a lot of com­pe­ti­tion on their own show that night. When Sat­ur­day Night, the orig­i­nal title for SNL, made its debut on Octo­ber 11, 1975, doing live com­e­dy on tele­vi­sion was an extreme­ly risky propo­si­tion.

So, what do you do if you’re pro­duc­ers Dick Eber­sol and Lorne Michaels? Put your riski­est foot for­ward — John Belushi, the “first rock & roll star of com­e­dy” writes Rolling Stone, and “the ‘live’ in Sat­ur­day Night Live.” The man who would be comedy’s king, for a time, before he left the stage too soon. His first sketch, and the first on-air for SNL, reveals “a ten­den­cy toward the time­less­ly pecu­liar,” Time mag­a­zine writes, that made the show an instant cult hit.

Rather than skew­er­ing top­i­cal issues or imper­son­at­ing celebri­ties, the first sketch, “The Wolver­ines” goes after the ripe tar­gets of an immi­grant (Belushi) learn­ing Eng­lish and his teacher, played by head writer Michael O’Donoghue, who insists on mak­ing Belushi repeat the tit­u­lar word in non­sen­si­cal phras­es like “I would like to feed your fin­ger­tips to the wolver­ines.”

Belushi’s accent has shades of Andy Kaufman’s “for­eign man” from Caspi­ar, and he gets a brief moment to dis­play his phys­i­cal com­e­dy skills when he keels over in imi­ta­tion of his teacher hav­ing a heart attack. “The Wolver­ines” is short, non­sen­si­cal, and weird­ly sweet. “No one would know what kind of show this was from see­ing that,” Michaels remem­bered. We can still look back at that wild­ly uneven first sea­son and won­der what kind of show SNL would be now if it had held on to the anar­chic spir­it of the ear­ly years. But that’s a lot to ask of a 45-year-old live com­e­dy show.

The night’s guest was George Car­lin, who did not appear in any sketch­es, but who did get three sep­a­rate mono­logues. The show also fea­tured two musi­cal guests, Bil­ly Pre­ston and Janis Ian. Andy Kauf­man made an appear­ance doing his famous Mighty Mouse bit, and the Mup­pets were there (not the fun Mup­pets, but a “dark and grumpy ver­sion” Jim Hen­son dis­owned after the first sea­son.)

The first episode was also the first to fea­ture the icon­ic intro, “Live from New York, it’s Sat­ur­day Night!” — deliv­ered by Chevy Chase. Though it has become a cel­e­bra­to­ry announce­ment, at the time “it’s Sat­ur­day Night!” was a dark reminder of the live com­e­dy vari­ety show, Sat­ur­day Night Live with Howard Cosell, then fail­ing through its first and only sea­son before its 18-episode run came to an end the fol­low­ing year.

See more from that weird first night above, includ­ing Carlin’s Foot­ball and Base­ball mono­logue and the for­got­ten SNL Mup­pets, just above.

via Ulti­mate Clas­sic Rock

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Cre­at­ing Sat­ur­day Night Live: Behind-the Scenes Videos Reveal How the Icon­ic Com­e­dy Show Gets Made

Lorne Michaels Intro­duces Sat­ur­day Night Live and Its Bril­liant First Cast for the Very First Time (1975)

Clas­sic Punk Rock Sketch­es from Sat­ur­day Night Live, Cour­tesy of Fred Armisen

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Asked by Time mag­a­zine to name his favorite sketch­es among all those he has writ­ten or per­formed in, John Cleese delib­er­ate­ly exclud­ed most of his Mon­ty Python work. Instead he turned deep­er into his back pages, all the way to At Last the 1948 Show, which orig­i­nal­ly aired on ITV in 1967. (Its title ref­er­enced the long delays inflict­ed by tele­vi­sion’s exec­u­tive deci­sion-mak­ing process­es.) The pro­gram was con­ceived at the behest of broad­cast­er David Frost, who’d pre­vi­ous­ly engaged Cleese and fel­low Cam­bridge Foot­lights alum­nus (and future Python) Gra­ham Chap­man to write and per­form on The Frost Report, one of the major fruits of the “satire boom” in mid-1960s Britain.

“We would come up with crazy ideas, and all the writ­ers would roar with laugh­ter at the table,” Cleese remem­bered of his Frost Report expe­ri­ence in a 2014 Q&A at the British Film Insti­tute. But how­ev­er hilar­i­ous, these ideas would inevitably be reject­ed for the rea­son that “they won’t get it in Brad­ford.”

The late-night 1948 Show let Cleese and his col­lab­o­ra­tors, includ­ing come­di­an Mar­ty Feld­man, take a few more chances: “We knew that not every­one in Brad­ford would get it, so were tak­ing a lit­tle bit of a bet that enough peo­ple would get it.” This result­ed in sketch­es like “The Book­shop,” in which Feld­man’s cus­tomer makes a series of impos­si­ble demands of Cleese’s shop­keep­er, allow­ing the lat­ter to show­case his already well-honed abil­i­ty to per­form frus­tra­tion boil­ing over into derange­ment.

Cleese, who still gets comedic mileage out of his upright “estab­lish­ment” appear­ance, seems to have spe­cial­ized in play­ing such absurd­ly bur­dened busi­ness­men. His most icon­ic role must be the clenched, boor­ish hote­lier Basil Fawl­ty, played in the post-Python series Fawl­ty Tow­ers, but he was essay­ing such fig­ures long before. Take the far­ci­cal sketch about a hard-of-hear­ing eye­wear deal­er, which lat­er evolved into a seg­ment of the Ger­man spe­cial Mon­ty Python’s Fliegen­der Zirkus from 1972. Ear­li­er that year, Mon­ty Python’s Fly­ing Cir­cus put Cleese on the cus­tomer’s side of the counter, oppo­site Michael Pal­in’s cheese shop own­er who evi­dent­ly refus­es to stock all known vari­eties of cheese. Though it did­n’t orig­i­nate on the 1948 Show, the now-immor­tal “cheese shop sketch” was writ­ten as anoth­er Cleese-Chap­man col­lab­o­ra­tion — and one that dis­plays a firm com­mit­ment to cus­tomer ser­vice, or the lack there­of, as com­ic mate­r­i­al.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Cleese Plays the Dev­il, Makes a Spe­cial Appeal for Hell, 1966

John Cleese’s Advice to Young Artists: “Steal Any­thing You Think Is Real­ly Good”

Mon­ty Python’s John Cleese Cre­ates Ads for the Amer­i­can Philo­soph­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.