Rose-colored glasses: Carlin and the first SNL.

Thanks to Lorne Michaels and NBC for re-running a seminal moment in TV history last Saturday: the first episode of SNL in its entirety (in its original running order, only missing, as far as I could tell, a "hosting next week" segment from Paul Simon). I'd only seen famous bits before ("Wolverines," Andy Kaufman/Mighty Mouse, "New Dad"), so it was highly cool to see them in their original context.

I know they meant it as a tribute/farewell to Carlin, but it's strange how (inevitably) tame the whole episode seems, 35 years on--especially Carlin's four separate monologues. I was dismayed and amused to learn that Carlin's baseball/football routine, which was new here, was already 6-7 years old the first time I heard it, and largely unchanged from the '75 version. The only semi-biting monologue was the last one, which aimed some deservedly low blows at organized religion. The rest felt very G-rated and "amusing."

You can tell it took the show a while to find its feet, and it's wild to see just how different a beast it was the first few weeks, and especially how much they crammed into the first episode. It's more like a weird revue than a sketch comedy show. Each of the two musical guests gets two songs. There's the Kaufman bit, the Valri Bromfield Lily-Tomlin-ish bit (was this funny in '75?), the Albert Brooks film (also not that funny), the three or four fake commercials (absurd more than funny), and the Muppets (trippy more than funny). What scant sketch comedy there is appears in short bursts--the longest, Aykroyd's home-security salesman thing, is probably about three minutes--and Carlin appears in none of the sketches. Chevy's Update is a little forced (and remarkably brief), and he and the camera are out of sync for at least three jokes; at least he has the presence of mind to poke fun at the awkwardness. A door audibly opens and shuts during Janis Ian's first song. Don Pardo announces the "Not for Ready Prime Time Players."

How funny was it in '75? There's a cynical part of me that says SNL was trying very hard to be cool: "Look, we're making fun of television pitchmen! Look, we're lampooning the evening news!" All I remember from the late-night TV of the mid-70s is old movies and Johnny Carson, so if one goal of SNL was to be different from anything else on TV at the time, it succeeded. Watching it from the comfort of my living room these many decades later, I didn't laugh, I'm sorry to say--but I did smile a lot, and I was transfixed. It's a piece of our culture. And all evening the Mighty Mouse theme has been in my head.