The New York-Centric Glamour and Romance of Saturday Night Live
I have no aspirations to be a comedian, actor or sketch performer yet I have spent a lot of time daydreaming about what it would be like to be on Saturday Night Live. I’m not alone.
I know that a lot of other folks fantasize about what it would be like to be young and talented and attractive and ambitious and successful and working in one of the most esteemed and important places in all of comedy.
I know you guys are going to accuse me of being hyperbolic or sycophantic but to me, the studio where Saturday Night Live is filmed is nothing less than the Paris Opera House of comedy, a place where some of the best minds in comedy come together and put on a national television show that’s watched and talked about by millions of people.
Compared to Saturday Night Live’s important satire, other sketch comedy shows, like the fictional Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, are nothing more than glorified versions of high school skits where football players dress up as the cheerleaders and think it’s wit.
There is tremendous romance and glamour to Saturday Night Live and its ever-revolving cast of talented, hungry youngsters. That romance and glamour is in no small part the romance and glamour of New York and, more specifically, Manhattan.
Saturday Night Live isn’t just a show taped in New York. It is New York. It certainly adds to the idea, particularly popular with denizens of the city, that New York is the epicenter of the universe, where important things happen and stars are made.
Lorne Michaels can get seemingly anyone to come to Manhattan for his show of shows. Part of the reason Michaels’ offer to pay The Beatles three thousand dollars to reunite on the show and play three songs became instant comedy legend is because if anyone could get the Beatles to reunite for an American television show it would be Lorne Michaels at the height of his hipness and cultural relevance.
The biggest music stars in the world play Saturday Night Live at the apex of their fame and infamy. Impossibly famous people spend a surreal week goofing around with talented young performers in an impossibly stressful, competitive, high stakes environment, a famous and fertile breeding ground for the biggest comedy stars of the past century.
When I think about the romance and glamour of Saturday Night Live I think about the opening photo montage, where Don Pardo and other, lesser announcers, read out the names of the cast in a big, booming, theatrical voice against images of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players in arty New York locales.
These gorgeous, evocative and iconic photographs serve two purposes: they capture something ineffable about a cast-member’s personality and persona and they make the Big Apple seem like the sexiest, most exciting and important place in the world.
At first the Not Ready for Prime Time Players were billed as a group but in the first season they figured out that the opening photo montage allowed each cast-member to get a stylish miniature showcase that worked for the Insufficiently Prepared for Evening Television Players and the audience alike.
Then there are the equally arty and bohemian pictures of the host. I know that I am similarly not alone in fantasizing about having some of those taken of me during my fantasy week on Saturday Night Live as a host or cast-member.
There’s something about Saturday Night Live’s grand gestalt that seems disarmingly achievable. Maybe it’s the fact that the cast is ostensibly playing themselves as well as an any number of wacky characters. That makes them seem realer and more accessible than fictional television characters or the actors playing them.
Maybe it’s the fact that so many performers have passed through the show’s distinguished halls, so it seems like folks have multiple chances to make it onto the show.
I may be a forty seven year old autistic husband and father in suburban Atlanta but for much of the next two years my mind will be in the Paris Opera House of American comedy, a humble yet mighty stage in Manhattan where the magic has been happening for going on fifty years and I’m going to experience ALL of it.
That’s romantic and exciting and glamorous, and also incredibly daunting.
I know the odds are against me but I hope they do #SaveNateASeat for the big fiftieth anniversary special so that I can experience the magic in person for at least one night.
THAT would be enough for me.
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