I had just gotten out of work and decided to throw on SNL so I’d have something to listen to in the background. It’s like a sad, comedy-obsessed nerd’s version of jamming out to “Espresso” while I do problem sets — “I’m working late, cuz I’m an idiot / this homework’s hard, for an idiot.” I felt like a kid again, turning on the janky monitor I recovered from one of my many moves, finagling with buttons because the remote broke back in the flood of 2023, and sitting back to watch SNL. Today’s episode is a rerun. Rats.
I flipped through some of their old episodes, sat back, and decided to take another crack at SNL50. I turned it on, settled back on the ratty, broken bed that the Greek Quad so graciously provides me, turned the volume down so my next-door neighbor wouldn’t wake up, set my rapidly overheating laptop next to me, and just started watching.
And then, about an hour in, something happened.
***
There are a lot of emotions I expect to feel when watching SNL.
Confusion is one — what the hell just happened? Why is Kenan dressed like that? Who let Marcello say that? What’s going on man, my Saturdays are crazy enough as it is.
Disgust is absolutely another — some of those sketches are so bad they make me regret caring about comedy altogether. Why do I let myself have a sense of humor when the best comedians in America think this is worth laughing at?
Of course, laughter is a third — I am unfortunately the type to giggle at the umpteenth “I hardly know ‘er” joke I hear (my good friend Benner “I hardly know ‘er” Rogers can attest to that one), and SNL is just funny enough to get me in stitches with the frequency necessary to tune in. At least, tune in on the weeks I’m not out partying hard like everyone else at Carnegie Mellon.
The emotion I never once expected to feel, the one I put in the box of things SNL is not allowed to touch is sadness.
SNL has had its sad moments, it’s many, many goodbyes, farewells, tributes, and the like. Those have given me pause, and some have affected me, but SNL50 was a different kind of sadness.
About halfway through the bloated nearly three-hour-but-it’s-really-two-and-change-without-ads monstrosity that is SNL50, Adam Sandler starts singing.
Sandler is known for singing on SNL. It’s one of his best skills, besides casting Rob Schneider in strange ethnic clothing for every race known to man in various films, and the occasional great joke. He’s a charismatic guy with a great voice. Give him a guitar and let him at it — same formula for a good chunk of mediocre bars in the Midwest.
The song isn’t funny. Well, it’s a little funny, it’s got a few gags and a few silly moments and a few bits that make me chuckle but fundamentally it’s not funny. It’s just a tribute, to the people and the times and the silliness and the inherent insanity that is Saturday Night Live.
And then, he starts talking about how much time we have with people, and he keeps going and going and the music crescendos and you feel like you’re in this room with so many others watching this man talk about legends, genuine, actual legends, people whose names you’ve seen pepper Hollywood posters and binge-able sitcoms, and their names start filling up your mind’s eye as you imagine them, their greatest achievements, because they’re people you’ve spent your life watching and for a moment you feel like they’re there with you and in the midst of it all, Adam Sandler slows down.
I do this a lot. I write a long, drawn-out paragraph, I cut out the periods and the punctuation to try to tell you, the reader, that you should get caught up in the moment just like I did. You should forget what it’s like to think in structured thoughts and just let your mind wander. When I was taught writing, someone told me to give the audience a moment to recover. That’s what this paragraph is, fundamentally. To give you a second to take your breath.
But Adam Sandler does not give us time to recover. After belting a lyric to show producer Lorne Michaels, he does not pause, and sings in a soft quaver that quiets a cheering audience, “six years of our boy Farley… five of our buddy Norm.”
You don’t have time to recover from that peak. You don’t have time to shake those faces from your mind’s eye, and instead, you’re forced to keep them all there.
And their absences feel so much more raw.
Chris Farley died in 1998, due to complications from his health and a combination of heroin and cocaine that the autopsy found. He spent six years with SNL, leaving in 1995 to work on his independent film career.
He only made it a few more years. He was only 33.
Adam Sandler has been carrying the torch for Farley since then. He loved that man. I think many of us did too.
I have fond memories of Farley’s characters. The man was so much before my time and yet such a big part of my enjoyment of SNL. When I went back and rewatched the entire show (I was bored), I have so many memories of giggling uncontrollably over his performances. I cackle with the audience and break with the cast as he does his Matt Foley, and I decided the Bears ain’t that bad after seeing him on Bill Swerski’s Superfans.
I got interested in comedy because of Norm Macdonald’s penchant for telling jokes whose punchline felt so completely inevitable and yet torturously slow every time. They were the first jokes I read, copied down, and then read to my dad with twice the bravado and none of the delivery — my first failed set! The guy’s autobiography is something I keep on my shelf after finding it in a small Pittsburgh used bookstore.
He died in 2021 after a life of bringing so much joy and so many jokes to so vast an audience.
SNL50 was a celebration of those two men, but not a celebration of them alone. It was a celebration of everything, every moment, every act, every performance, the parts of these crazy, stupid, Saturday nights that have kept people tuning in for years and years. It brought back Dooneese, the fourth Maharelle sister. It cast Pedro Pascal and Bad Bunny as Domingo’s brothers in another installment of the Latin Casanova’s terror — this time with Sabrina Carpenter singing “Espresso” (see, it was foreshadowing, not a random joke!) and a lot more bisexuality.
It had Kate McKinnon and Meryl Streep in an alien abduction sketch that had me somewhere between horrified and in stitches, because who else could perform with more bravado than those two?
It had Jon Hamm beg SNL to tell him he’s funny (he’s just like me) and Peyton Manning rant about retirement and angry Canadian friends of Lorne and a 10-minute musical about the history of New York.
SNL50 felt like SNL was falling in love with itself, and taking us for a ride. It felt reverent and irreverent — it poked simultaneously at how poor some of their past sketches were while staying proud of what they did that worked. SNL50 was the cast and crew and the lifeblood of the show having fun for three hours on a Sunday evening because it’s been 50 goddamned years that they’ve been in this business.
It’s monologue after monologue, musical guest after musical guest, it’s Paul McCartney performing something special and Miley Cyrus giving Sinead the flowers she deserved so long ago.
SNL50 was a love song to the years of work, and Adam Sandler’s song was the message driven home.
So I sit here, watching SNL50 on a pixelated TV, on my bed, getting no work done and no articles written, at nearly five in the morning. I watch a show that has a success rate that’s barely impressive in baseball go on for a half-century. I watch people I grew up watching put on one more performance because, by God, these people have still got it, and they refuse to let you forget that. I watch one more time as the cast waves good night.
I watch the culmination of 50 years of late-night comedy taking one great, outstanding bow.
“Fifty years of one of us saying Live from New York It’s Saturday Night.
Fifty years of standing on home base, waving goodnight and goodbye.
Fifty years… of the best time of our lives.”
— Adam Sandler, 2/16/1975+50!!
Leave a Reply