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Caloroga Shark Media. Hey there, I’m Johnny Mack, and I find myself on this Monday morning thinking a lot about SNL fifty and how much I liked it. This is a bonus episode. This is just me, you and clips. I know I said I would do a full recap on Tuesday.
That is still the plan. As the day goes on today, I’ll do my normal show prep and see what everyone else is saying and what happened backstage and on the red carpet. And I’ve already got some clips pulled for that, and there’s some other news I already see this morning. But this is just my reaction to last night’s show, which I liked a lot. A bunch of us were hanging out in the Facebook group Daily COmON News podcast group.
Early on the show was struggling a little bit. There were a couple sketches that fell flat. But once it got into the second half, really starting with maybe the News, maybe Adam Sandler, it really hit a groove and I feel really good about it. We open up with an interesting choice that personally I didn’t think the energy was there. I get it for the legacy of this show.
Paul Simon and Sabrina Carpenter opened up singing. Paul Simon mentioned he was about to play a song it performed on the show with George Harrison in nineteen seventy six. Sabrina got a laugh, saying I wasn’t born then, and neither were my parents. The song is fine. I don’t know what I was looking for for the open, maybe something a little more up tempo.
Anyway, we get into the monologue and Steve Martin comes out and reminds us you know I was I wrote in the group you forget that Steve Martin was one of the great stand up comedians. Here is a piece of Steve Martin’s monologue. Good evening and welcome to the fiftieth anniversary up Saturday Night Live. I’m Steve Martin, Saturday Night Lives, Newest, Diversity Higher, and what a thrill it is to be here. When I heard that SNL wanted to do an anniversary special, I literally wanted to leap into the air.
And the only reason I didn’t is because at the time I was wearing a short skirt with no underwear. Now I can’t believe, I can’t believe I even made it here In time. It was only a few days ago. The lorne told me I was doing the monologue, and I was actually vacationing on a friend’s boat down in the Gulf of Steve Martin, and I finally. Steve then brings out Mullaney, and boy, Mullaney had a killer night, which is just incredible when you think of the amount of talent in the room.
And mulaney was a writer for SNL but not a performer on SNL. But John crushed twice during the night. Here’s one of those times he crushed. John Mulaney. I didn’t know you were even gonna be here.
Oh you would if you’d ever come to rehearsal. By the way, congratulations on the Emmy win. Nope, Emmy nomination, Nope, Grammy win, no Grammy nomination, no Golden Globe win, no Golden Globe nomination. There you go, yes, sir, thank you. You know, we writers really appreciated that tribute.
But I believe that the heart and soul of this show is the celebrity hosts, many of whom are in this room tonight. You know, as I look around, I see some of the most difficult people I have ever met in my entire life. Over the course of fifty years, eight hundred and ninety four people have hosted Saturday Night Live, and it amazes me that only two of them have committed murder. We get into the sketches and they do Black Jeopardy, which reminds us just how strong Keenan Thompson just quietly goes about his business and is an MVP. But Eddie Murphy came out.
So on Black Jeopardy we had Leslie Jones, Tracy Morgan, and then Eddie Murphy in a character in let’s listen to what character Eddie Murphy did. He look at this Tracy Morgan gonna make some big money. Wow, Now wait a minute, Tracy, don’t you already have a lot of money. But you gotta have a lot of money if you’re gonna live like I live. I eat four cheese, Lasagnia.
I only got three cheeses. I ain’t eating it. Yes, okay, we hear you. Tracy Moore, I refuse to ingest three Jesus, you’re four Jesus. We got, Tracy Morgan.
Thank you. Absolute crush for Eddie. I’ll come back to Eddie in a bit. Then the show hit a bit of a lull with some sketches missing, a pretty early one. I’m trying to remember the particklers of it.
It was at a wedding and it just didn’t fly. Eventually, Amy Poehler and Tina Fay came out really fun segment and they got one of the biggest laughs of the night. Here, I have a question. Oh hey, right, how’s it going? Great?
Bhye, what do you heard? Excellent timing by Ryan Reynold. It’s really great. And for anyone who heard the earlier episode this morning and misconstrues that I don’t like Julia Louis Dreyfus, I love Julia Louis Dreyfus. What I was talking about this morning, it’s at the end of the show.
Variety did a list best TV performances of the twenty first century and they have Julia and Viepez number one. And I said, that’s crazy talk, and I stand by it. But she’s the MVP of Seinfeld. She’s fantastic. And here she is in the audience and she has a dog sitting next to her.
You really need that dog, right, Celia, Oh no, no, no, I’m here for him. He’s blind. So Ricky the Blonde woman who just talked. That’s Amy Poehler and the older woman next to hers team up very very funny, one of my favorite parts of the night. We were also keeping track at that point in the show.
They hadn’t gone really too far back in the cast, and at that point Julia was The Weekend Update was solid. Seth Meyers took a turn at the desk along with jo Justin Jay Seth seemed very very comfortable at the desk, and then Bill Murray showed up and he ranked the all time Weekend Update anchors jump in here at number two. Number two is Norm McDonald. He may have been the best. Ever, but more importantly, he made me, for one, ask the question of myself, could oj possibly have done it?
So that brings us to number one? Colin got a good feeling about this, Okay, Number one is funny, got a great smile, and he’s currently sleeping every kind of way with the lovely actress Scarlett Johanson. Of course I’m talking about my brother Bryan. At that point. It made me comment in the Facebook group that everybody was playing to the back of their baseball card.
What I meant was Bill Murray was playing to the level you would expect of Hall of Famer Bill Murray and Marcelo Hernandez. That’s a pick on him specifically, But Marcelo does one thing over and over and over and over. I’d like to see what else he can do. But he does that one thing, and he played to the back of his baseball card when he was on the show. He did his one thing twice.
But if you look at everybody else, Eddie Murphy played to Eddie Murphy’s baseball card, Polar and Fay to theirs, Will did Will Ferrell things. Everybody else was just right in the zone. Around then, I started to think, Hey, no Sandler yet, he’s kind of a superstar. Whether or not I find him funny or not, he’s a superstar in this environment. Where is he?
And I thought, Oh, he’ll do some sort of name check song in that Sandler style looking at the fifty years, And sure enough he did it. Let me tell you, I’m a known not to like Adam Sandler comedy and I don’t really enjoy his songs. He nailed this here. I’ll pick it up in the back half. The names you don’t recognize are some of the crew members.
I gotta tell you he touched that emotional beats. You know, I might add something in my eye, Adam Sailor, you nailed this one. Five years of chan Hooks and Guild, the sixth of Victoria, eleven of jan three years of Melanie hud So, Michael mckeinn crushed it into one of Billie Crystal, six of Dennis Miller, eight of harm. In the Blue, seven years of Tratching Way, five years though Terry and Quinn, four of Kazzariski clague on eleven of a Harmcide, fourteen years of Davis and Hanny Chiller is spinal Like twenty five eighteen Lodi and Damie Wilson, plus among and disc going buny Man, thirty years of down Here. Forty five years of Lord, six years of our boy Farley, five of our Body No, fifty years of one of us getting to say live from New York, it’s Saturday night.
Fifty years of standing on home base waiting the night, and the. Fifty years of the best times of our life. Great job, Adam Sandler. Something you won’t hear me say, two offered. All right, we’ll take the break here, we’ll come back.
So at this point the show is rocking when Tom Hanks came out and gave this speech. As we celebrate the achievements of the past fifty years, we must also take a moment to honor those who we’ve lost, countless members of the SNL family taking from us too soon. I’m speaking, of course, about SNL characters and sketches that have aged horribly. But even though these characters, accents and let’s just call them ethnic whigs were unquestionably in poor taste, you all laughed at them. So if anyone should be canceled, shouldn’t it be you the audience.
Fantastic montage there looking back at all the things that yeah, didn’t age so well. I think I have the sequence here right. I think it was. After that, there was a John Maliney musical sketch. Mullenie’s done a few of those over the past few years.
This one was really strong, the theme of it New York City throughout the decades. A Giuliani appearance, a really hilarious line by Mulani I didn’t pull it that I think was ad libbed. Sarah Sherman went into a Bloomberg impression and it wasn’t good, and m’laney said something along the lines of yeah, hey, great impression and got a good left there again for somebody who’s not part of the cast. Mullaney had one of the greatest nights. Very late in the show.
The last proper sketch, if I’m remembering correctly, was a scared straight sketch Eddie Murphy, once again proving he is the franchise MVP. You know, that’s a discussion for the other day. But I think Eddie is number one. Will might be number two, and I don’t want to discount Phil Hartman. Phil might be three.
You could probably convince me that he’s two over Will. But anyway, you have here in this sketch Eddie Murphy and Will Ferrell. This is a little naughty, so if you’re listening with kids, they probably won’t get the joke anyway, but consider yourself warned. I am surprised they went this dirty on over the air national television, but I think this aired even after eleven PM, so even if we want to get into the FCC of it all, we’re in safe harbor that late. Anyway, here’s Eddie Murphy.
That’s right, that’s right. And forget about your north pole. What you’re gonna need to be worried about is your south Pole, because. You’ll be yelling sort of a knockcracker. All right, it won’t be no Santna coming to town, and it’d be Santo’s coming in your brown No.
Garrett Morris came out and introduced the nineteen seventy eight short film Don’t Look Back in Anger Boy. This really hit the spot. I’ve seen this before, but last night it hit the spot. What Don’t Look Back in Anger is? It’s from nineteen seventy eight and it’s John Belushi, an old age makeup visiting the grave sites of everybody else from the initial cast.
They are all dead. Belushi talks about how he was always perceived as the one who would live fast and die young, and he has outlived all the other cast members. It was poignant and what a great way to address the original cast. I did feel the original cast was underrepresented. It was kind of a and it makes sense just because of how old everybody is, but it was sort of like the Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Victory Lap show, like that generation more than the older folks.
But the film really hit the spot. And that was late and then as we discussed in the group, there was nowhere to go from there. It was only gonna be down from there. So let’s bring out Paul McCartney and go home. And Paul McCartney came out and did Golden Slumbers and he’s Paul McCartney and even in his eighties, crushed it.
What a great way to go another commercial. We come back, we do the goodbyes. I’m sure someone else has analyzed the goodbyes. I was looking at it. I noticed McCartney was looking for someone to talk to.
I noticed Chris Rock was looking for someone to talk to. But it was eleven thirty at night and I wanted to go to bed. So nice job SNL fifty. You know, there were a couple of things that didn’t work. There was one thing with Lorain Newman and Pete Davidson that I honestly can’t believe made it to air other than they probably wanted to honor Lorain Newman.
But Pete was awful in it. You know, a couple of flat sketches early on, but once you got into the second half, it was really strong. And like I said, I’m feeling really good about it and thinking about it a lot today and I wanted to get this out pretty early in the day before the news gets moldy. Back in the morning with a normal episode, and again, this is Monday. If you missed Monday’s normal episode, that’s down in the feed, so check that out.
All right, let me know what you think of the Facebook group Daily Comedy News Podcast Group. Catch you later.