Forget Steve Martin’s funky white-boy “King Tut” performance from 1978, Eddie Murphy’s 1981 Section 8 Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood parody, Chris Farley as demented inspirational speaker Matt Foley warning about the fate of living in a van down by the river, or Ana Gasteyer and Molly Shannon as the monotone-voiced hosts of NPR’s Delicious Dish salivating over Alec Baldwin’s “Schweddy Balls,” because the most brilliant Saturday Night Live sketch remains “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.”
Running from 1991 to 1996, “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer” featured Phil Hartman—among the greatest deadpan straight-men to ever grace the stage in Studio 8H—as the eponymous thawed Neanderthal of an imaginary legal drama. Sporting a shaggy mullet and prominent prosthetic brow, yet clothed in a bespoke suit, the cave man delivers a closing statement to the jury. Speaking in a stentorian Mid-Atlantic accent Hartman says, “I’m a caveman…your world frightens and confuses me,” telling the jury how the honking of horns on his commute makes him want to flee to the woods and wondering if small demons live in his fax machine—all while arguing that his client, who slipped on ice in front of a public library, is “entitled to no less than two million dollars in compensatory damages.”
Created by Jack Handy, the recluse who was also responsible for the brilliant absurdism of the “Deep Thoughts” series which consisted of Hartman reading bizarre observations over a maudlin video of moving clouds as New Age music played (“If God dwells inside us, like some people say, I sure hope he likes enchiladas, because that’s what he’s getting”), this Cro Magnon attorney is SNL at its enduring best, the strangeness of the bit still fresh three decades later.
When people remember SNL sketches, they often focus on the topical humor: Chevy Chase’s klutzy Gerald Ford, Dana Carvey’s nasal George H.W. Bush, Darrell Hammond’s smarmy Bill Clinton, Will Ferrell’s bumbling W., Tina Fey as Sarah Palin seeing Russia from her porch, and Alec Baldwin seeming to become Trump himself. Yet none of those famous impersonations matches “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.” Higher concept than it has any right to be, the sketch is both an irreverent pastiche mocking the self-importance of American drama (and the legal profession) and a joyfully goofy bit that takes to heart Vaclav Havel’s words about the need to “see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions.”
As exemplary as some of the humor from the vaguely libertarian SNL 1990s might be—the sterling impressions of Carvey, the discovery of talent like Chris Rock, Mike Myers, and Adam Sandler, as well as the acerbic Weekend Update correspondents Dennis Miller, Kevin Nealon, and the great Norm Macdonald—that era doesn’t hold up as much on second scrutiny, apart from serving as an incubator for contemporary anti-woke has-beens like Rob Schneider and Julia Sweeney. So it is not my own childhood affection for the earliest season of my beloved SNL that makes me love “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.” I am content to recognize Handy’s conceit as hilarious simply because it is.
Boomer hagiography tends to elevate the past at the expense of the present (in all things), and I would venture to say that “Samurai Deli” from 1976 is not as funny as those who saw it live might remember it. “Washington’s Dream” from 2023 is far more so, with guest Nate Bargatze playing the Revolutionary War general as a spaced-out weirdo concerned largely with weights and measures. While the original ’75 cast—Chevy Chase! Gilda Radner! Jane Curtin! Laraine Newman! Garrett Morris! Dan Aykroyd! John Belushi!—expressed a gritty rock ’n’ roll, downtown sensibility patently more rebellious than the drama club kids that have dominated the most recent seasons, the conceit of the show remains the same. Complain all that you want about punk rock being traded for Hamilton, creator Lorne Michaels’s show is ever regenerative. If a particular season flounders, you need only to wait until new talent rises to the top, proof that SNL is close to being a true meritocracy in a country with perilously few real ones. Besides, in our pre-recorded monoculture, SNL remains largely and therefore unpredictably live. So, the possibility of seeing something otherworldly like Klaus Nomi, Joey Arias, and David Bowie, the latter performing with a real head atop a puppet body, or Sinead O’Connor ripping up a photo of the pope is always present. Only the Super Bowl or the State of the Union address offers more chances to surprise.
Marking the fiftieth anniversary of its premier on October 11 of this year (though celebrated with a special SNL program on February 16), SNL has long been the target of armchair critiques from perennial nostalgists who idealize the programs they saw when they first started watching the show. Despite the carping, SNL endures as the quintessential expression of contemporary American comedy. Jim Whalley writes in Saturday Night Live, Hollywood Comedy, and American Culture that, in its earliest iteration, SNL was “based upon the premise that an increasingly widespread set of values and opinions were not being represented on American network television. In presenting material that broadly advocated a liberal social agenda, the show was seeking to reflect rather than alter trends in American life.” To see what was so revolutionary about Lorne Michaels’s show, all you need to do is compare the countercultural performances of the class of ’75 to popular variety shows of the era, from corny Hee Haw to the schmaltzy Dean Martin Show. Even Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, where Michaels got his start, commodified an ersatz counterculture ethos in a way that the earliest seasons of SNL did not. Instead, it made room for the ribald hippie prophet George Carlin and the avant-garde genius Andy Kaufmann (both in the premier no less).
James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales in Live from New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests note that the show was a “lone pioneer staking out virgin territory and finding its way in the night, its creative team determined to make it television’s antidote to television, to all the bad things—corrupt, artificial, plastic, facile—that TV had become.” If that sounds hyperbolic, it is largely because SNL’s contemporary standing as an established institution somewhat obscures its initial trailblazing daring. There have been, to be sure, instances of what many viewers saw as betrayals, from the shameful guest hosting of Donald Trump and Elon Musk to the otherwise brilliant Kate McKinnon’s cringey and self-serious turn as Hillary Clinton mournfully performing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” during the Saturday broadcast after the 2016 election. Even so, for a major network variety show with a five-decade history, SNL was integral in the revolutionizing of American comedy. The notoriety of the cocaine-fueled excess of the 1970s shouldn’t overshadow how SNL became—though imperfect—a launching pad for black and female comedians, who in turn reinvigorated the show and American humor. (After all, it was Eddie Murphy who saved SNL in the otherwise abysmal early 1980s.) From Saturday Night Live would come Murphy, Rock, Tracy Morgan, and Kenan Thompson as well as Radner, Curtin, Fey, Amy Pohler, Kristin Wiig, and Kate McKinnon. Today, Bowen Yang, the first openly gay and Asian American cast member, brings queer camp into the mix, showing that SNL still adopts and mainstreams those who have been excluded, shunned, or marginalized.
From the beginning, underground ingredients were integral to SNL’s success. Chicago provided the screen presence, Boston the writer’s room, Toronto the vision, and New York the set. From Chicago’s famed Second City improv troupe came a reliable set of alumni to perform, while the Harvard Lampoon and its successor National Lampoon filled the writers’ room with the dark and sometimes cruel sensibility of those publications. Michaels, for his part, brought his native Canada’s buttoned-down and dry sense of the absurd to 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
The fundamental recipe still holds. Aykroyd, Radner, and Bill Murray were all Second City alums (just to pick a few), while more recent graduates include Fey, Rachel Dratch, Aidy Bryant, and Cecily Strong. The writers’ room has always been a coven of Ivy League graduates, frequently associated with the various iterations of the Lampoon, many with distinctly Irish-Catholic sensibilities, from the first head writer Michael O’Donoghue to Conan O’Brien, John Mulaney, and the current occupant of that position, Colin Jost. Then there is the influence of Canadian humor, coming from a people much funnier than most Americans realize. SNL’s stage, with its bricks laid in imitation of Grand Central Station, has provided national recognition for Canadians coming up through Toronto’s comedy scene, including Aykroyd, Myers, Hartman, Macdonald, and of course Michaels himself (among dozens of others), with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s hilarious SCTV premiering only a year after SNL. (Martin Short has been a cast member of both.)
Merging satirical magazine writing with improv comedy—the disdained bastard child of humor—Saturday Night Live produced a fusion style that would come to replace the Borscht Belt in the American imagination. Milton Berle was out, Belushi was in. No more “Take my wife—please,” but rather, “We are two wild and crazy guys!” While rumors of the latest iteration of the show being moribund are grossly overstated, it is fair to say that the overwhelming influence of SNL, its profound success, has ironically dimmed some of its initial vitality, but only because of the ubiquity of the style of comedy it popularized. Without Michaels’s little variety revue, there would be little of the radicalism of Kids in the Hall (literally), Mr. Show, or Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! Only The Simpsons can compete in terms of longevity and influence, and the low quality of its past two decades should demonstrate the efficacy of Michael’s way of continually reinvigorating his otherwise unchanging format with new writers, performers, and sketches. Yet it is in the wackiest absurd sketches—Aykroyd as a bloodied Julia Child in “The French Chef,” McKinnon as a dejected white trash alien abductee, the drunken tales about Bill Brasky, “Toonces the Driving Cat,” and yes “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer”—that SNL most fully embodies the surreal American sensibility.
For me, there remains the rush of excitement in watching an episode, even a bad one—and the law of probability means that most are—precisely because of the conventions set fifty years ago. Like a sonnet, an episode of SNL is constrained by its own formal parameters, but the familiarity of the format still works. The anticipation of the cold open (rarely the best sketch), Don Pardo’s exuberant vibrato reading of the players’ names (Hammond has been doing it since 2014), the wail of the house band’s bluesy saxophone, the opening credit stills of the comedians enjoying the neon cacophony of the city from Grand Central Station to Union Square, Mulberry Street to the Highline, a signal of how even in the digital age New York remains our cultural lodestar. Even the closing credit, when the guest and cast join the visiting musical act as the band noodles the vaguely gospel-inflected ending song, strikes me as one of the more genuinely happy moments on TV, the young performers hugging one another and laughing as the show fades out and Saturday turns to Sunday.
In Jason Reitman’s 2024 fictionalization of SNL’s premier, Gabriel LaBelle, in the role of Lorne Michaels, is asked by an NBC executive if he even knows what he wants the show to be. Michaels responds, “It’s an all-nighter in the city; it’s catching Richard Pryor at a drop-in or finding Paul Simon strumming guitar in the back of a dive bar. It’s meeting a girl outside of a bodega and getting lucky in a phone booth; it’s everything you think is going to happen when you move to the city. That’s our show.” At its best, that is still what Saturday Night Live is.