How the premiere of ‘Saturday Night Live’ was a great bar mitzvah present
For one self-professed comedy nerd, ‘SNL’ was its own rite of passage
The author on a particularly auspicious day in 1975. Courtesy of Gary Rudoren
Some might say that along with July 4, 1776, or June 6, 1944, Oct. 11, 1975, should be recorded as a moment of triumph.
As you might remember, that date was the launch of a brand-new late-night show experiment called Saturday Night – now known as Saturday Night Live or SNL. It was also four weeks before my bar mitzvah. Maybe because I was so close to official Jewish manhood, or maybe because they were distracted with party planning, my parents let me stay up late.
I can’t remember if I had heard about it from friends, or read about it in the paper, or seen some promos on television, but I begged my parents to let me watch this new comedy show. They didn’t know anything about it – nobody really did. But they were big fans of Johnny Carson and The Tonight Show and comedy in general. They were the ones who introduced me to The 2000 Year Old Man and Tom Lehrer. We had Woody Allen and Allan Sherman albums, a requisite for Jewish households on Long Island. My dad also bought a George Carlin album, which, I will brag, was advanced of him.
Hidden inside my Queens orthodontist dad was a comedian wannabe influenced by years of visits to the Catskills. He loved to tell the story about the time he was insulted by Myron Cohen in the lobby of Brown’s Hotel. So it wasn’t a big leap for my parents’ smart-alecky son to want to stay up late to watch a new comedy show. Amazingly, they said yes.
Perhaps they were distracted by the bar mitzvah paraphernalia spread out on our dining room table, where an assembly line of Jews had gathered a month earlier to stuff the powder-blue invitations and party instructions into envelopes from a list my uber-organized mom had meticulously reviewed. I can’t remember if we had yet procured my brownish-taupe suit from the husky boys’ section at Alexander’s. It was 1975, so it wasn’t the over-the-top event madness like we see today, but it felt important.
As did the SNL premiere. My memory is that my folks did not stay up with me, so there I was in our family den above the garage watching on what would now feel like a laughably small TV.
My little brother was asleep. My older sister was in college. It was just me – and John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, Chevy Chase, Larraine Newman, Garrett Morris and an actor named George Coe. For you trivia nuts, Coe was only credited in that first episode of SNL and was not one of the regular “Not Ready For Primetime Players.” He later went on to play the role of crusty old grandpa Senator Stackhouse in several episodes of The West Wing and this info has taken up space in my brain for far too long.
I was especially excited to see George Carlin hosting. I had heard his comedy and seen him on The Mike Douglas Show. George Carlin felt – it all felt – so subversive. The show hooked me. I wanted more.
I’ve since seen so many clips of old SNLs and read so many pieces about the original cast’s backstage antics, that it is hard for me to tell if I remember what I saw on that special night or have just seen Michael O’Donoghue feed his fingertips to the wolverines a gajillion times. (If you know, you know.)
I became a faithful fan that night and as more and more of my friends got to watch the show, the bits we saw on Saturday night became a source of bonding. That hasn’t changed in the 50 years since. Viral clips — including clips of sketches that didn’t even make it on the show — are legendary.
But we didn’t have TikTok back then, so you had to really watch and listen when it was live. Then you would repeat lines and laugh with each other. The catch phrases from early SNL shows were the lingua franca of junior high. If you don’t remember, well then, exxccuuuussse me.
Four weeks after that revolutionary night, I became a bar mitzvah at Temple Judea in Manhasset, Long Island. Much more humble than Vanessa Bayer’s brilliant “Jacob, the Bar Mitzvah Boy.” It was a magical day for me and my family, but it also felt like a sketch gone horribly wrong. I got sick the week before and had a sore throat, so I struggled through my haftorah, and then cried because I couldn’t finish it. Then my mom fainted in the front row. We all survived and I think of that event now as a tragically funny moment in life.
I grew up to be, among many things, a writer of comedic sketches and plays, and co-author of a book called Comedy by the Numbers. I’ve known people who’ve been on and written for SNL. Comedy is a huge part of my life — and I’m proud to say I’ve passed that down to my pretty funny kids.
Over 50 years, SNL has become part of my DNA. I guess you might say that on Nov. 8, 1975 I became a man, but it was one month before, on Oct. 11, when I became a fan. The show is so much better than a pen set.
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