Inside the Show’s 40 Most Defining Moments (Photos) – The Hollywood Reporter
JOHN BELUSHI SLICES AND DICES, Dec. 13, 1975 (Season 1)
The original samurai sketch introduced Belushi and host Richard Pryor as a pair of katana-wielding, mock-Japanese-speaking bellhops arguing over who should carry a guest's luggage. But the gag — which became SNL's first recurring sketch — had been part of Belushi's repertoire long before he joined the Not Ready for Primetime Players. "He auditioned for SNL with the samurai character," says Alan Zweibel (who was on the show from 1975 to 1980 and wrote "Samurai Deli," "Samurai Stockbroker" and "Samurai Night Fever").
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CANDICE BERGEN BECOMES A BEE, Dec. 20, 1975 (Season 1)
NBC told Michaels to kill the "Killer Bees" sketch, but he put it in the show anyway … over and over again. "I loved when we did the 'Bee Capades' on the first Christmas show," says Bergen. "I had on this Sonja Henie skating outfit, red velvet with ermine, and [before the show], we all went down in the elevator — the elevator was filled with bees on skates. The elevator guy never looked at us."
JAKE AND ELWOOD SING THE BLUES, Jan. 17, 1976 (Season 1)
The Blues Brothers started as a warm-up act for SNL's live audience. "Danny [Aykroyd] wanted to play harmonica, and John [Belushi] wanted to sing, so I let them up onstage," says SNL's original music director, Howard Shore, who initially introduced them as "those brothers in blues." When the duo finally got airtime, they became an international sensation, spawning 14 albums and two feature films.
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LORNE OFFERS THE BEATLES A CHECK, April 24, 1976 (Season 1)
"Please allow me to address myself to just four very special people: John, Paul, George and Ringo," SNL's creator announced, looking into the camera, then offered The Beatles all of $3,000 to reunite on the show. "Divide it up any way you want. If you want to give less to Ringo, that's up to you." What Michaels didn't know was that McCartney and Lennon were watching the show in Lennon's New York apartment and briefly considered coming to the studio. "Paul told me what happened," says Michaels. "Just the idea that they were watching …"
CHEVY CHASE PEES BLOOD, Sept. 18, 1976 (Season 1)
His impression of Gerald Ford wasn't very good — he just blew his nose into his necktie and took pratfalls — but it sealed the 38th president's image as Oaf in Chief (and set the tone for SNL's political coverage). The bit nearly crippled Chase. "Willie Day was our prop guy — he was about 88," he recalls. "I was doing Ford in a debate against Danny [Aykroyd] as Carter. We were both at lecterns, and at the end, I just fell forward, which I was supposed to do. Willie was supposed to have lined it with a cushion. I was in the hospital for a week. I peed blood."
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ELVIS CHANGES HIS TUNE, Dec. 17, 1977 (Season 3)
Elvis Costello was seven seconds into the song "Less Than Zero" when he decided to make live-TV history by stopping his band, The Attractions, and launching into "Radio, Radio." "It was perfectly fine," insists Howard Shore. "I was standing with Lorne right at the camera line, and we both looked at each other and shrugged."
LORNE DEMANDS BLOOD, Dec. 9, 1978 (Season 4)
Dan Aykroyd's "The French Chef" originally was set to air on an earlier episode. "But Lorne wanted to hold the sketch because there wasn't enough blood," says early SNL writer Anne Beatts. "I heard somewhere that Julia Child thought it was hilarious. I really give her credit for that. Seeing a sketch on TV where you're being portrayed by a man bleeding to death — it takes a sense of humor."
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LORNE GOES ON HIATUS, May 24, 1980 (Season 5)
The fifth season finale concluded with a shot of the "on air" sign flickering off. Michaels would be leaving the show that night, and so would the remainder of the original cast. Michaels had hoped NBC brass would let the show go on hiatus so he could catch his breath. "I had just done five years at a very intense place, so the idea of pulling it all together with a brand-new group, I was just too exhausted and I didn't think I could do it." Associate producer Jean Doumanian was selected as Michaels' replacement.
CHARLES ROCKET DROPS THE F-BOMB, Feb. 21, 1981 (Season 6)
The infamous expletive — picked up by microphones during the closing segment while Rocket was riffing with host Charlene Tilton — not only got Rocket fired, but it also triggered a clean sweep of the whole show. Jean Doumanian was replaced by Dick Ebersol, who fired almost everyone after a day of watching rehearsals. "I met with Brandon [Tartikoff]," remembers Ebersol, "and I said: 'You know, there's not a lot there. But I'm crazy about that one guy who's not a castmember.' That was Eddie Murphy."
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SNL SAYS GOODBYE TO JOHN BELUSHI, March 20, 1982 (Season 7)
Belushi had left SNL three years earlier — along with Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd and the rest of the original cast — but his overdose on March 5, 1982, at the Chateau Marmont was a body blow to the show. Writer Brian Doyle Murray, Bill Murray's brother and a longtime friend of Belushi's, stepped before the cameras and recounted in a halting voice how he once witnessed Belushi getting hit by a bus and walking away unscratched. "I always thought he was indestructible," he told the live audience. Belushi's death was the first in what would be a long, sad series of cast tragedies: Gilda Radner's cancer, Charles Rocket's suicide, Phil Hartman's murder, Chris Farley's overdose.
STEVIE AND FRANK SING A DUET, May 22, 1982 (Season 7)
In the writers room, this spoof of the 1982 Paul McCartney–Stevie Wonder hit "Ebony and Ivory" — with Eddie Murphy doing Wonder and Joe Piscopo impersonating Frank Sinatra — was much edgier than what aired. But it wasn't NBC's censors who insisted on toning it down, it was Piscopo. "Sinatra was so important to Italian Americans," he says. "I didn't care if I was fired, I didn't care if it didn't work. I just didn't want to embarrass the Sinatra name."
THE SWIMSUIT EDITION, Oct. 6, 1984 (Season 10)
Watching the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Harry Shearer couldn't believe synchronized swimmers were "getting the same medals as real athletes," as he recalled in Live From New York. Shearer, Martin Short and Christopher Guest didn't use a choreographer to map out their underwater routine — they made it up themselves. The mockumentary was a big influence on "Lazy Sunday" co-writer Akiva Schaffer and the SNL Digital Shorts he'd create two decades later. He says he watched it "over and over" as a kid.
LORNE RETURNS, Nov. 9, 1985 (Season 11)
When Dick Ebersol departed after four seasons, NBC flirted with canceling the show. Instead, Michaels agreed to come back, but it wasn't a triumphant return. The season premiered with an off-key cold open in which NBC president Brandon Tartikoff joked about drug-testing the cast and an awkward Madonna as host. The cast, which featured 17-year-old Anthony Michael Hall, Robert Downey Jr. and Damon Wayans, didn't jell. By season's end, recalls writer Carol Leifer, "People didn't know whether it was going to get picked up or not."
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NANCY REAGAN IS PLAYED BY A GAY MAN, Feb. 8, 1986 (Season 11)
Terry Sweeney became the first openly gay SNL member, a casting milestone Carol Leifer remembers as being a "big deal" in a season that didn't go so well. Sweeney's nickname, "Terry Queeny," was a compliment, insists Anthony Michael Hall, "because he was really funny." Sweeney says the highlight of his stint was doing his Nancy Reagan impersonation opposite Reagan's son Ron, who told Sweeney that he was "more like his mother than his mother was."
THE CHURCH LADY GETS PUNCHED, Oct. 24, 1987 (Season 13)
Sean Penn could take only so many snide asides about his then-wife ("Oh, Madonna she's named after the mother of our Lord, but she doesn't quite live up to the same standards, does she?") before taking a (fake) swing at the Church Lady. The character, which Dana Carvey created "playing around at a Melrose Improv thing," generated some of SNL's snappiest catchphrases. Isn't that special?
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SNL SAYS GOODBYE TO GILDA RADNER, May 20, 1989 (Season 14)
Radner died, poignantly, on a Saturday just before showtime. Steve Martin announced the grim news on the air. Mike Myers, who was finishing up his first season on the show, had special reason to grieve. "Gilda had played my mom in a TV commercial," he says. "I fell in love with her immediately. And when I saw her on Saturday Night Live, I turned to everybody and said, 'I'm going to be on that show.' " Myers heard the news from a reporter right before the night's broadcast. "I started to cry in the lobby."
JULIA SWEENEY: TRANSGENDER BEFORE IT WAS BUZZY, Dec. 1, 1990 (Season 16)
The audience was ho-hum when Sweeney debuted the gender-mysterious Pat, inspired by two men (one fat, one skinny) with whom she'd worked when she was an accountant. "But a week or so later Roseanne Barr hosted, and she loved the character, so we wrote another sketch," says Sweeney. This time it killed, and Pat kept coming back another dozen times.
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‘WAYNE’S WORLD’ GOES TO WAR, Jan. 19, 1991 (Season 16)
Doing a "Wayne's World" special report as the cold open only 72 hours after the start of the first Gulf War (after spending days locked in the basement watching cable news, Garth and Wayne announced they'd become "experts in the field of military hardware") was an insane risk that easily could have gone horribly wrong — but it didn't. "We didn't know if it was going to be horrific casualties," recalls Mike Myers. "The sketch got rewritten 25 seconds until air. As I was talking, the [cue] cards were being written out."
STEVEN SEAGAL: WORST. HOST. EVER., April 20, 1991 (Season 16)
There are many contenders for the title of worst host: Charles Grodin, who skipped rehearsal; Frank Zappa, who deliberately kept breaking character; Milton Berle, who exposed himself to a writer. But SNL writer Bob Odenkirk swears Seagal should top the list: "I remember pitching [him] the monologue idea, and he kept saying over and over, 'I don't know; I've never seen this show. I don't know what you do here.' "
SINEAD’S SHOWSTOPPER, Oct. 3, 1992 (Season 18)
Suddenly her haircut no longer was the most controversial thing about her. When Irish singer Sinead O'Connor finished her haunting a cappella version of Bob Marley's "War," she took out a photo of Pope John Paul II and tore it up, urging the audience to "fight the real enemy." Jaws throughout NBC dropped to the floor. "She was difficult, which was no surprise," says Jim Pitt, SNL's music booker at the time. "Two years earlier we booked her to perform 'Nothing Compares 2 U,' but early that week she and castmember Nora Dunn announced that they were boycotting the show to protest the booking of Andrew Dice Clay as host."
SNL PREDICTS MONICA-GATE, Dec. 12, 1992 (Season 18)
Before Darrell Hammond's spot-on Bill Clinton, there was Phil Hartman's, which not only captured the cadence of the then-president-elect but also skewered his party-size appetites. Hartman's best sketch had Clinton jogging to McDonald's, where he alternated between making wonkish policy statements and greedily eating everyone else's food. When a Secret Service agent suggested not telling the first lady about the trip to McDonald's, Hartman's response foreshadowed the next eight years of scandal. "There's gonna be a whole bunch of things we don't tell Mrs. Clinton …"
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MIKE DITKA DOES ‘DA BEARS’, Jan. 9, 1993 (Season 18)
Four days after the Chicago Bears' legendary coach was fired from the job, he turned up on SNL's cold open with three of his biggest superfans: Todd O'Connor (Chris Farley), Pat Arnold (Mike Myers) and Bob Swerski (George Wendt). The recurring bit about sports nuts who worshiped Ditka was the brainchild of writer Robert Smigel, a dental school dropout who had moved to Chicago to do sketch comedy and discovered superfans while hanging out at Wrigley Field: "I looked around the stands at the fans — they all had those dark aviator glasses and mustaches."
CHRIS FARLEY BUSTS A GUT (AND A TABLE), May 8, 1993 (Season 18)
In the middle of the first "Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker" sketch, Farley accidentally fell on a table and crushed it. Huge laugh. From that moment on, Farley made body-slamming furniture a staple of his act. Says Bob Odenkirk, who wrote the sketch, "Matt Foley, as silly and as big and wonderful as it was played, had an element of truth and humanity that Chris brought to it."
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MARY KATHERINE GALLAGHER, ‘DISGUSTING LITTLE SCHOOLGIRL,’ Oct. 28, 1995 (Season 21)
Molly Shannon had done her accident-prone Catholic schoolgirl bit before coming to SNL — it was part of a comedy show with Adam Sandler when both attended NYU — but was advised to keep Mary Katherine Gallagher under wraps when she auditioned for SNL (she did). Says Shannon, "A recruiter told me, 'Whatever you do, don't do that disgusting little schoolgirl character — Lorne will hate it.' "
GO SPARTANS!, Nov. 11, 1995 (Season 21)
On her first day as an SNL castmember, former high school cheerleader Cheri Oteri was goofing around, doing some of her old cheers. New castmember Will Ferrell decided to join in. Thus was born the "Spartan Cheerleader" sketch. "I was in line at Bed Bath & Beyond and saw a magnet with our faces on it," says Oteri. "I couldn't believe it. I was looking at everybody in line with me, and I just wanted to say: 'That's me! On a refrigerator magnet! At Bed Bath & Beyond!' "
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CARELL AND COLBERT GET THEIR START, Sept. 28, 1996 (Season 22)
Before Steve Carell became a movie star and Stephen Colbert took over David Letterman's job — even before they had gigs on The Daily Show — they were the voices of Gary and Ace, the Ambiguously Gay Duo. Robert Smigel's animated series of shorts about a pair of possibly gay crimefighters became a hugely popular segment (there was even talk of a movie) — which was ironic, considering both Colbert and Carell had auditioned for SNL and been passed over.
‘NO ONE CAN RESIST MY SCHWEDDY BALLS,’ Dec. 12, 1998 (Season 24)
NBC wanted to move this skit, which had two NPR hosts (Ana Gasteyer and Molly Shannon) interviewing a local baker named Schweddy (Alec Baldwin) about his globe-shaped Christmas treats, to a slot after midnight, when SNL's raciest skits usually ran. But Lorne Michaels pushed back. “They weren’t going to let us air it [before midnight] because of the word 'balls' being in it over and over and over again,” says Gasteyer. "But Lorne argued, correctly, that the characters were naive, and that was the joke. Lorne gets behind a brave idea, always."
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WILL FERRELL ON THE COWBELL, April 8, 2000 (Season 25)
Ferrell was supposed to be a cowbell player during the recording of Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper." Host Christopher Walken was a music producer who kept demanding more of the clanging sound. The absurdist bit became a cultural meme before anyone knew what a meme was. Even Blue Oyster Cult enjoyed it. "My reaction was hilarity," says the Cult's Donald Roeser, who wrote the tune. "I have to be thankful: It really gave the song a different life."
THE POST-9/11 EPISODE, Sept. 29, 2001 (Season 27)
New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani appeared with fire fighters and other first responders for the cold open, assuring the city life would go on as normal (Lorne Michaels asked the mayor, "Can we be funny?" and Giuliani cracked, "Why start now?"). Paul Simon sang "The Boxer." Reese Witherspoon told a dirty joke. It struck the perfect tone to soothe a still-shaken nation. Tom Hanks remembers watching at home: “It was the granddaddy of all importantSNLs," he says. “Lorne has a heavy responsibility to somehow encapsulate the mood of the country. That's pretty easy to do when a new guy is elected president; it's tougher when you’re dealing with a national tragedy."
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RACHEL DRATCH KEEPS A STRAIGHT FACE, May 1, 2004 (Season 29)
The hardest part of doing Debbie Downer — Dratch's buzzkilling character who somehow managed to bring the subject of feline AIDS into every conversation — was not cracking up on camera. "I knew that every time I was about to say this horrible fact, the camera was going to come straight in on my face," she says. "Usually, if you laugh, you can hide or put your head down. But with Debbie Downer, there was no escape."
ASHLEE SIMPSON FALLS TO ‘PIECES,’ Oct. 23, 2004 (Season 30)
SNL writer Liz Cackowski had a front-row seat for the great Simpson lip-synching debacle, when a malfunction made it clear she hadn't sung "Pieces of Me" live. "It was pretty awesome," she recalls. "Everyone was freaking out. [Simpson] was in a panic when she passed us and went offstage. But it was so exciting. Like, 'What just happened?' " A year later, Simpson returned and sang without incident.
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“LAZY SUNDAY” GETS BUSY, Dec. 17, 2005 (Season 31)
The Lonely Island comedy troupe — pals since junior high Akiva Schaffer, Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone — struck comedy gold with their angry rap about cupcakes at Greenwich Village's Magnolia Bakery and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. "We love that tone," says Taccone. "Taking very mundane, lame characters and having them rap very aggressively about their lives." The video helped kick off SNL's Digital Shorts juggernaut and helped popularize YouTube.
JUSTIN AND ANDY FIND A DICK IN THE BOX, Dec. 16, 2006 (Season 32)
Another digital short by the Lonely Island guys, this had Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg delighting an array of beautiful women by having them open gift boxes in the guys' laps. It practically broke the Internet, racking up 35 million views. "We wanted to do that classic Diner bit of putting your penis into a box to trick a woman into grabbing your penis," says writer Jorma Taccone, explaining the Noel Coward-esque subtlety of the gag. Says Timberlake, "You can make political statements or you can choose to say nothing about nothing and come up with 'Dick in a Box,' which may or may not have been drug-induced."
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THE SHOW YOU NEVER SAW, Nov. 17, 2007 (Season 33)
During the 2007-08 WGA strike, an invitation-only crowd gathered at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater in Chelsea to watch the SNL cast perform a live show and help Lorne Michaels celebrate his 63rd birthday. Rachel Dratch did Debbie Downer, Darrell Hammond did Clinton, and proceeds went to the out-of-work backstage staff. Michael Cera hosted — the only time he's ever done so. "It's kind of a silent honor," he says, "what I imagine it would be like to be appreciated posthumously."
THURSDAY NIGHT LIVE, Oct. 9, 2008 (Season 34)
The Not Ready for Primetime Players finally got a primetime spot, with three 30-minute "Weekend Update" Thursday specials during the 2008 elections. But adding a second live show to the week almost pushed the writing staff over the edge. "I remember thinking this one sketch is totally not going to make it on the air, there's no way the cards department could write it in time," says writer John Mulaney. "What they did was they started writing the first batch of cards, so the actors could start, while they kept writing more cards."
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SARAH PALIN DOES NEW YORK, Oct. 18, 2008 (Season 34)
Tina Fey's dead-on impression (Fey barely changed a word of Palin's hilarious answers in her Sept. 24, 2008, Katie Couric interview) may have helped swing the election for the Democrats. But John McCain's running mate at least had the guts to show up a month later to Studio 8H and face her impersonator in the show's cold open ("You are way hotter in person," Alec Baldwin told her). "She was guarded and polite," says Seth Meyers, who helped Fey write her Palin parodies. "But most importantly, she was game."
STEFON FINALLY ARRIVES, April 24, 2010 (Season 35)
Image Credit: Photo Credit: Other ‘Saturday Night Live’
BETTY WHITE GETS 1.7 MILLION ‘LIKES,’ May 8, 2010 (Season 35)
The unlikely Internet sensation became SNL's oldest host — she was 88 at the time — thanks to a Facebook campaign to get her on the show. She didn't disappoint. "I didn't even know what Facebook was," she joked in her monologue. "And, now that I do know what it is, I have to say, it sounds like a huge waste of time." Before the show, White was "panic stricken," she says. "You walk out in front of a big live audience, and all of the sudden the decades that you've been in television fade away, and you think, 'What am I doing here?' "
LIVE FROM NEW YORK, THE CALIFORNIANS, April 14, 2012 (Season 37)
The soap opera parody skewering the banality of L.A. life — sooner or later, every conversation devolves into explications of the freeway system — started out as a casual, improv bit around the weekly table read while the cast and crew waited for Lorne Michaels to show up. "Lorne was always late," says Bill Hader. "So while we were waiting, we would do this bit where Fred [Armisen] would go, 'How was L.A.?' And you would say, 'Great, man,' and then just explain how you got places."
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KENAN THOMPSON SPEAKS OUT, Nov. 2, 2013 (Season 39)
Shortly after black castmembers Thompson and Jay Pharoah criticized the show's lack of African-American females, SNL lampooned itself with a sketch featuring host Kerry Washington, who was run ragged playing Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Beyonce in rapid succession. Two showcases with the goal of casting African-American women led to the hiring of castmember Sasheer Zamata in January 2014; next came Leslie Jones on the recommendation of ex-castmember Chris Rock, who says: "I told [Lorne], 'She's 20 years older than everybody in the cast and she hasn't been in improv or whatever, but she's really freakin' funny and you should look at her.' "
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