Saturday Night Live's Notorious Mardi Gras Special Was a Glorious Goddamn Trainwreck
The original Saturday Night Live boasted confidence bordering on arrogance rooted in youth, success, and cocaine. Lorne Michaels’ deathless comic institution was a spectacular success. It might not have delivered boffo ratings initially, but it generated tremendous buzz and was revered as the hippest show on television.
Saturday Night Live was a show for hard-partying young people with a cast and crew of hard-partying youngsters. Most of the people who worked on it had never worked in television before, particularly the Not Ready For Prime Time Players.
So when Saturday Night Live had an opportunity to take the show on the road and tape a live special at Mardi Gras, its attitude was seemingly, “Why the hell not?”
If the cast and crew had been older or more experienced, they could have assembled a lengthy list of excellent reasons why a live Mardi Gras special was doomed to failure.
Alas, the cast and crew were too young, too successful, and too high on drugs such as cocaine and marijuana to know what they were in for.
A Mardi Gras episode of Saturday Night Live made sense in theory. Saturday Night Live was the biggest party on television. Audiences got drunk and high and watched it with their friends.
Mardi Gras was the biggest party in the whole damn country. Why not have the Not Ready For Prime Time Players crash it?
The special promised to be a logistical nightmare. The cast and special guests Penny Marshall, Cindy Williams, Eric Idle, Buck Henry, and Randy Newman were strategically located throughout the French Quarter.
Henry and Jane Curtin were slated to comment on the Bacchus Parade, a Dionysian celebration that was supposed to be the backbone of the episode. If something went wrong, they could just cut to Curtin and Henry and the wild spectacle of the parade.
The problem was that the Bacchus Parade did not happen while the episode was being taped. Instead of throwing to Henry and Curtin cracking wise about the parade, they had nothing to cut to during the many technical difficulties.
During this project, I have developed a massive crush on the young Jane Curtin as well as Gilda Radner, and Laraine Newman. I’ve consequently become a connoisseur of Curtin’s angry faces.
Curtin was an intelligent, sober, self-disciplined woman in a boy’s world who understandably found many aspects of being a Not Ready for Prime Time Player embarrassing, mainly all the stuff involving drugs and sex.
The rowdy crowd throws things at Curtin and Henry as they wait for a Bacchus parade that would never arrive because it had hit a pedestrian earlier. That was, unfortunately, part of being a female cast member of the show: drunken idiots throw crap at you while you’re just trying to do your damn job, and you can only smile and wait for the nightmare to end.
The future Kate & Allie star’s default expression here is barely suppressed rage. Curtin was a consummate professional, and venturing into the murky waters of Mardi Gras promised to be a decidedly non-professional endeavor.
At her most quietly enraged, Curtin looks like she would like to murder everyone in the crowd with her bare hands and then urinate lustily upon their open graves.
Things start promising with Dan Aykroyd’s dead-on Jimmy Carter delivering more excessively blunt straight talk to the American people. “We have a permanent energy crisis that is going to get worse, not better,” he tells the crowd before explaining that he will personally contribute to energy conservation by carrying his own garment bag when he travels, and his brother Billy is unable to walk by himself.
We then segue to Randy Newman performing “Louisiana 1927” with a full orchestra. It is an absolutely heartbreaking song about nature’s cruelty and mirrors the savagery of capitalism rooted in a real-life disaster.
“Louisiana 1927” experienced a robust second life during Hurricane Katrina, when its poignant lyrics about the powerful letting the poor drown and die en masse rather than risk losing their comfort and privilege gained a new resonance.
It is a gorgeous, melancholy song and performance. It is also an absolutely bewildering choice to open a raucous live comedy show.
When he’s not writing songs about friendship for Pixar Newman is famously an incisive and fearless satirist.
Michaels could have asked Newman to play “Short People” or “Rednecks.” Instead, he had him play three of the saddest songs ever written. It’s a testament to how inexplicably grim his set list is that far and away, the most crowd-friendly song is “Kingfish,” which is about Huey Long, a populist Democratic governor who died in 1935.
Newman performs the poignant ballad “Marie” and “Sail Away”, an evisceratingly dark song about slavery and the poisonous lie of the American dream. I teared up during each of these songs. That is good on one level and terrible on another.
When you’re a songwriter, you want your work to move listeners to tears. That is not, however, what you want on a live television comedy.
Newman seems perplexed. The prolific singer-songwriter and composer doesn’t seem to know exactly what he should be doing or why. He occupies a central but strange role in the special as a cross between a host and a musical guest.
A sketch with Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, and guest Penny Marshall as waitresses looking for men at Mardi Gras opens with an offscreen actress complaining that she can’t read the cue cards.
It would not be the last time offscreen business made it onto the air. Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi spent much of their week in New Orleans partying with bikers rather than rehearsing or memorizing the script.
They wrote a sketch involving the Bees as an outlaw motorcycle gang solely as an excuse to ride Harley-Davidsons that ends with Murray’s bee-biker telling Radner’s character, “Are you dating someone right now? Because if you aren’t, I’d like to take you home and beat you up” and Belushi promising to urinate on Newman’s space cadet if she comes home with them.
Henry and Curtin throw to Laverne & Shirley’s Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams, but only Marshall appears, and she does not seem to realize that she’s on live television for a good fifteen seconds.
Marshall looks miserable. She looks defeated. The sitcom star looks like she’s on a lot of drugs that are doing the opposite of what they’re supposed to do. The future director of Big looks like she’s in the middle of the worst acid trip of her life.
What could be worse than having a bad trip on live television, with seemingly the whole world watching? Marshall and, later, Williams deliver commentary on a drag ball.
I couldn’t figure out whether the point of the segment was to mock men dressed as women because that is supposed to be inherently funny or whether they’re taking in the ball because it’s a funky and outrageous part of life in New Orleans.
Marshall doesn’t seem to know either, but she sports an expression suggesting that she needs to drink some orange juice and then lie down until she feels better.
In her memoir, Marshall wrote that she did not appear again on Saturday Night Live until 1996 because it took her twenty years to get over the trauma of the Mardi Gras episode.
Some of the segments go off relatively smoothly, like a bit with Dan Aykroyd’s demented Tom Snyder interviewing a barker player by Bill Murray in what would become his Caddyshack voice or John Belushi as trumpeter Al Hirt getting hit in the head with foam bricks as part of a “Hit Al Hirt in the mouth with a brick” contest. Even at its most confident and professional, however, there’s still a sense that everything had gone fascinatingly and horrifyingly awry.
A live taping at Mardi Gras was full of weird variables seemingly impossible to predict. In a crowd shot setting up, John Belushi recreating a Mussolini speech, for example, is a man who is in blackface, complete with cherry red lips. If an audience member showed up in blackface at 30 Rock, they would be kicked out immediately for stealing Billy Crystal’s shtick, but the show understandably could not control a rowdy, out-of-control audience of thousands.
In perhaps the most egregious technical snafus in a special that is positively lousy with them, Eric Idle is supposed to report on the raucous crowds of Mardi Gras while sitting outside a bar accompanied only by a single sleepy soul.
It’s a half-baked bit at best that grows fascinatingly awkward when Idle attempts to throw to another segment and is informed that he will need to perform for several more minutes due to yet another glitch.
I’ve written about the looks of soul-consuming mortification and terror hosts get when a show ends early and they’re called upon to fill a minute or two with ad-libs and improvisations. It doesn’t matter that the hosts are often quick-witted funnymen or women skilled in improvisation. For some reason, no one seems to know what to do with that time.
A similar dynamic is at play while poor Eric Idle deals with the decidedly unwelcome surprise of discovering that he’ll need to fill a not-insubstantial amount of airtime with words, jokes, and ideas created spontaneously in the moment.
Idle sports a deer-in-the-headlight expression throughout the doomed segment, making it impossible not to feel for him and his unfortunate predicament. Idle does a bang-up job of making comedy out of nothing because he’s Eric fucking Idle. He was in Monty Python and has not destroyed his reputation over the past decade like John Cleese and Terry Gilliam.
Late in the episode, Paul Schaffer and the Saturday Night Live band perform “The Antler Dance”, a Michael O’Donoghue-composed ditty that sends up musical fads by proposing the single stupidest dance in human history. It’s archetypal O’Donoghue: pioneering anti-comedy that dares audiences not to laugh.
O’Donaughue performed the dance with the crowd, and I could not help but feel happy for him. I can’t imagine how exhilarating and subversive it must have felt to convince a popular, important television show to feature the stupidest song about the stupidest dance ever in a live special because you find it amusing.
The timeless allure of Saturday Night Live is that it is ostensibly a televisual Wild West where anything could happen. In actuality, it’s a rigidly programmed show designed to be as safe and predictable as possible.
But the Mardi Gras special really WAS wild. It was dangerous. It was unpredictable. It was a goddamn, glorious mess, is what it was.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
If you enjoyed this piece, check out Every Episode Ever, the project where I am writing about every episode of Saturday Night Live in order over at https://everyepisodeever.substack.com
Nathan needs teeth that work, and his dental plan doesn't cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
Did you enjoy this article? Then consider becoming a patron here
AND you can buy my books, signed, from me, at the site’s shop here