Milton Berle's Completely Fictionalized Presence in Saturday Night Gives Me an Excuse to Rerun This Piece on His Infamous 1979 Episode
Hippest man in the business!
Welcome, friends, to the first entry in Worst Hosts Week here at Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place. It’s an entire week (or two!) devoted to the gloriously awkward train wrecks that ensue when a misguided Saturday Night Live host tries, and fails, to recreate the show in their own image rather than diligently playing their role as a cog in Lorne Michaels’ well-oiled comedy machine.
I’ve covered entire seasons of Saturday Night Live for My World of Flops. More specifically I wrote up the notorious “Movie Star” 1986 season, the Lorne Michaels-less 1981 abomination and a 1994-1995 season considered an embarrassing nadir.
The 1994-1995 season was so bad that some modern day Oscar Wilde went so far as to re-christen the show Saturday Night DEAD! Can you even imagine how hurtful that must have been for Lorne Michaels? He only wants to entertain the nice people with skits and jokes and zaniness and a wonderfully witty sadist turned the name of the man’s own television show against him.
That’s an awfully silly face, Uncle Miltie!
In my book The Joy of Trash I wrote up my favorite embarrassing moment in the series’ gloriously checkered history when original rude boy Adrien Brody introduced musical guest Sean Paul in character as a Rastafarian goofball with a close-knit family, all worthy of respect.
But up until now I have never written up individual episodes. So I figure that it’s the perfect time to devote an entire week to those wonderfully terrible episodes where seemingly everything goes wrong.
In these infamous fiascos a terrifying element of spontaneity and improvisation enters an ecosystem unprepared for either. The result is water-cooler conversation the Monday after they air and scandals that are endlessly rehashed online in the years and decades to come.
Saturday Night Live sometimes takes chances. They would prefer not to, obviously, but in its original iteration at least it fancied itself dangerous and countercultural. It’s impossible to be dangerous if you never take chances.
In 1979, the final season for the original Not Ready For Prime Time Players, Lorne Michaels rolled the dice twice and twice came up empty when he chose notorious assholes Frank Zappa and Milton Berle as hosts.
Zappa and Berle are the kind of crazed narcissists who make for terrible Saturday Night Live hosts because they think that they’re too big for the show, and don’t need it, and also that it’s overrated and dumb.
Anyone familiar with Berle’s reputation as one of the biggest dicks in Hollywood, and also the proud owner of one of the biggest dicks in Hollywood, could have predicted that he would prove a bad fit for Saturday Night Live.
Berle’s ego is as big as his famously outsized phallus. He was, remarkably, the most popular man on television at one point. Why? How? Probably because people in the past were weird and had bad taste. Also, when Berle was the top dog on TV there were about six other shows even airing so there wasn’t much in the way of competition. Berle’s ego ballooned to a size that can be seen from space and stayed stagnant when he found his natural level as a corny ham doing cameos and working the nostalgia circuit.
Mr. Television was decades removed from his commercial peak when he hosted one of the most disastrous episodes in Saturday Night Live’s nearly half century history but if he was nowhere near as popular as he once was, and consequently also nowhere near as powerful, he did not seem to realize it.
Berle comes off as a mean-spirited SCTV parody of an out of touch has been entertainer convinced that he still has the world, and audiences, in the palm of his wrinkled hand.
Out of deference to Berle’s history the men of Saturday Night Live start things out by singing a randy version of Berle’s Texaco Comedy Hour theme song, complete with audience-friendly reference to marijuana. Drug references age terribly because they’re naughty and transgressive in a cheap, juvenile, instantly dated way. The same is true of smutty double entendres but we will get to that later.
The problems begin with the rapturous response Berle receives when he comes out. From the perspective of 2023 it sure feels like they’re humoring an old man or indulging someone who was very famous when they were children and less famous with each passing year.
Berle unfortunately seems to interpret the sustained applause as proof that the audience didn’t just like him—they loved him—so he can let her rip due to his close bond with his people.
A giddy Berle begins, “Oh boy, look at this! I love you. You love me. You love me…you want me. You love me.”
The crowd DOES in fact love Berle. Otherwise why would he assert no less than three times that the audience for a stoner show written and performed by brilliant twenty-somethings are losing their shit over being in the presence of someone their great grandparents might have been familiar with?
In actuality 30 Rock was not Milton Berle’s audience. It belonged instead to John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, Garret Morris, Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman and Lorne Michaels. Incidentally, that is a VERY good cast. Why don’t people talk about it more? Was it influential? Good? Important? I would love to know but I literally cannot find ANY information about the original cast with the exception of the poorly received John Belushi biopic Wired.
Berle seems to take the live audience’s warm reception as a green light to ignore what’s on the cue cards and do twenty minutes of moderately racist stand-up. It also has the best kind of crowd work, the kind that makes it clear that the comedian hates the audience as well as himself.
Berle warms up by insulting the band in ways that barely made sense at the time and now seem completely nonsensical, referring to the house band as Lee Marvin and his Witnsesses (because of Paul Schaffer’s bald head?) and sarcastically praising an outfit that we do not actually get to see.
Instead of doing topical material or talking about his experiences rehearsing the show Berle immediately launches into the kind of one-liners that killed in vaudeville in 1924 and have remained in his act ever since.
“I’m so unlucky that if they sawed a woman in half I’d get the part that eats. Would you believe that?” Berle quips in a way that unintentionally fuses Cronenbergian body horror with old-school misogyny.
I’m not even sure what Berle is trying to say. Would he prefer to be with the bottom half of a woman, which cannot talk or reason and has no mind of its own but does have genitalia and an anus?
Also, I don’t believe that, Mr. Berle. I think you’re exaggerating your bad luck for comic effect. Also, you’re probably the single luckiest man in the history of show business. You truly made a little go a very long way.
When the band is insufficiently appreciative of Berle’s wisecrack he once again directs his sputtering rage in their direction, seething, “What show are you workin on back there?”
Then he segues into racism when he says, “It’s the black guy, huh! You’re lucky, pal. You can walk home alone at three o clock in the morning.”
When that gets an unfortunately positive reaction he taunts an audience that didn’t sufficiently appreciate the crack about ending up with the bottom half of a woman, “Will you laugh at the real joke?”
Berle jokes that he’s doing so badly that he dreamt that Dolly Parton was his mother but that he was a bottle body. If Parton was his mother I’d like to think that he wouldn’t unnecessarily sexualize her or her body and would instead see her as a parent and not a sex object.
I mean, obviously it’s a hilarious joke but it has kind of a creepy subtext.
Then Berle announces that he just received a news flash: forty four Puerto Ricans had a crash—the bed broke!
I’m not sure that even makes sense but it is racist and if the Sean Paul debacle has taught us anything it’s that Lorne Michaels gets very angry when guest hosts do their own racism instead of the show’s version.
Then Berle says that he has so much gas that he’s being followed around by Arabs. It’s like he’s an explorer scouring the globe for new races to insult and people to be racist towards.
Then comes some mildly risqué crowd work with Berle leering at the women in the audience. Berle’s material feels familiar because I’m fairly certain that I’ve heard Rodney Dangerfield do variations on some of the same gags, like when he asks an audience member if he has any nude pictures of his wife and when he says no asking him if he’d like to buy some.
Berle repeatedly references people, clothing and things that we do not see because Saturday Night Live is a rigidly rehearsed and intricately choreographed show, not a haphazardly assembled free for all.
He leeringly tells an audience member to pull up her dress because he can see too much of her naked breasts. “I can’t wait til she hiccups!” he continues, eagerly anticipating a glimpse of an unclothed nipple.
Berle continues insulting the audience for not giving his jokes the reception he feels they deserve in between gags about frigid wives and George Burns’ age.
This sketch will make you laugh: in the END!
Then he looks once again at someone that we can’t see and asks this phantom presence if he was being cut off.
You can FEEL the pain in Berle’s forced smile, the intense sense of injustice a show business heavyweight feels when they think they’re not being given their due.
“The monologue’s through? Good, I can catch Gilligan’s Island!” he improvises lamely.
“You mean I can’t do any more after this? It’s only five minutes” Berle seethes to some pot-smoking punk who wasn’t even born when he ruled the airwaves as Uncle Miltie.
“Are you kidding? I usually BOW for twenty minutes! Well, that’s the monologue. We’ll be right back.” Berle mumbles with palpable sadness and disappointment.
We can’t see most of the people that Berle references in his monologue but we can see and hear Berle in darkness when he asks a silent God, “Five minutes? I’ve never heard of such a thing in my whole life.”
Incidentally I’m pretty sure that Berle has heard of such things. I’m guessing that on Monday someone told Berle that the monologue should be exactly five minutes long and that he should shape and mold his material accordingly so that he doesn’t come as an unprofessional douchebag but he ignored them.
Berle thinks that it reflects poorly on Saturday Night Live rather than himself that he had to perform an abbreviated monologue instead of rambling on and on for twenty minutes. He’s wrong.
This is followed by a sketch where Dan Aykroyd plays a typical suburban dad and husband. The twist? He has a large posterior. His butt is HUGE. Comically so, even! He bends over so that the audience can see just how big his posterior is and they roar with laughter and approval. They’ve been waiting for this moment their entire lives. They don’t wan’t to blow it.
RuPaul with a man whose schlong was not small
Then his wife, played by Jane Curtin, comes out and I hope you’re sitting down and ready to laugh because her butt is also huge! What? What’s going on with this family? They look crazy.
Then Milton Berle enters the frame as Uncle Wayne and HIS rear end is similarly voluminous. He’s got a huge ass. Just like his relatives. What were they smoking when they dreamed this up? Probably marijuana.
As you might imagine, the audience loses their shit when Gilda Radner enters the proceedings playing a young woman whose plus-sized caboose is wildly disproportionate to her modest frame.
What were they smoking? Probably also marijuana. The capper for this no-joke sketch is that the family watches home movies projected onto the enormous ass of Uncle Miltie.
This sketch would have been funnier if it contained any jokes or gags or humor but it is a dry, barren wasteland.
I did not like this big butt sketch and I cannot lie but the worst is yet to come. Berle must have really been into butt stuff because the sketch about the family with the big butts is followed by a Village People parody whose humor comes from the singer singing, in not particularly coded ways, about his desire to anally penetrate a DJ or be sodomized himself.
It’s a vulgar goof on the Village People’s bifurcated identity as a popular sing-along party band for families and sports crowds AND a group whose aesthetic was shaped by gay conceptions of camp and kitsch.
Belushi is the Native American. Aykroyd, predictably, is the biker/leather man, Bill Murray is the construction worker and Morris is the military man frontman. I’m no prude but I nevertheless found it jarring that a song and sketch so overtly about anal sex and sodomy aired on network television in 1979.
Berle isn’t in the sketch, thank god, but since hosts choose which sketches will air I’m going to blame it on him all the same. There is one legitimately great sketch in what is otherwise a train wreck of an episode.
It’s fake talk show involving Dan Aykroyd’s recurring character Irwin Mainway, the exquisitely sleazy, shameless proprietor of a series of deadly businesses, including Irwin Mainway’s Kiddie Fun World, a theme park so dangerous that surviving it is an accomplishment in itself.
Jane Curtin is typecast to perfection as his angry, indignant inquisitor. Curtin and Aykroyd have tremendous chemistry and no one was better at playing unabashed sleaze balls in sunglasses with child molester pencil mustaches than Aykroyd.
Berle is not in this sketch, thankfully but he has another opportunity to alienate a live and home audience that he mistakenly thinks that he’s charming.
So Berle sings, after a fashion, with his very own accompanist and rambles in a seemingly free associative fashion about getting goose pimples from hearing “There’s No Business Like Show Business” as a child and devoting his entire life to the business of show.
Berle talks about how great it is that he has the freedom to ad-lib, that he can cavalierly toss aside the script and substitute his own prehistoric style of comedy. Of course you DON’T have the freedom to ad-lib on Saturday Night Live. That’s pretty much one of its defining characteristics. You cannot get too live on Saturday Night or you get into trouble and you get the boss into trouble as well.
Damon Wayans literally got fired for improvising once yet Berle monologues as if he has all the time and all of the freedom in the world and the audience will be enraptured by anything that he has to say.
Early in the episode, when the applause is at its loudest, Berle quips, “I think I’ll quit right now.”
He should have followed his instincts. It was all downhill from there.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
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