A little history about SNL sandbagging Republicans

a significant moment also occurred on April 17th, 1976, when Ron Nessen, President Ford’s press secretary, hosted an episode of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, during the show’s first season, to attempt to show that the Ford Administration had a sense of humor about itself, and the ribbing that SNL’s Chevy Chase gave Ford about his occasional stumbles.

Nessen’s appearance, along with a videotaped cameo of Ford saying, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night”, marked perhaps the last time that most Republicans in office would ever fully trust the mainstream media. And even then, Nessen was concerned about being set-up by the show. What he didn’t know was that the SNL production team had conceived a strategy of feinting left and running right, to paraphrase one of the show’s then-writers, so that the sketches that Nessen appeared in were relatively tame. It was the rest of the show that was deliberately raunchy and over the top, even for SNL. Because, as Rosie Shuster, another of the show’s writers, remarked, “The President’s watching. Let’s make him cringe and squirm.”

As Glenn Reynolds wrote earlier this week, “Personally, I think that Chevy Chase cost Ford the 1976 election. Well, part of it, anyway”. But to understand exactly how badly SNL head-faked Nessen and Ford, here’s the section devoted to Nessen’s appearance of Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s 1985 book on the early history of Saturday Night. (There’s a lot of material below, which I scanned from my copy of Hill and Weingrad’s book. I’m eschewing the usual block-texting so that it wouldn’t all be in blue italics. And apologies in advance for any typos or missing words created by the OCR process.)

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Despite its lack of real [political] commitment, with ninety minutes to fill every week and the opportunity to be topical, Saturday Night got in more than share of blows against the empire, and television served to make its reach, if not its impact, significant indeed. Senator Eugene McCarthy told [SNL producer/creator] Lorne [Michaels] at the correspondents’ dinner in Washington that the first topic of conversation on the Senate floor every Monday morning was Saturday Night–the senators loved to relate to one another the jokes the show had made at their colleague’s expense on Weekend Update. Maverick presidential candidates like Fred Harris, and, later, John Anderson directly approached Saturday Night hoping for, and getting, some mention on the show. It was, therefore, no surprise that Ron Nessen thought he could use Saturday Night to defuse the stumblebum issue, or that Saturday Night was determined not to let itself be used.

The first prerogative Nessen exercised as an especially important host was to arrive on the 17th floor on Thursday instead of Monday. That proved to be to his disadvantage: Saturday Night had several days to get ready for him, arid by the time Nessen came aboard, the momentum of the show made it that much harder for him to control what happened or to get his bearings. So it was that Saturday Night proceeded to fake the pants off the press secretary of the President of the United States.

Lorne will forever maintain that Saturday Night did not intentionally, as he put it, “take the President and shove his press secretary up his ass.” Nessen happened to host the show while NBC was in the midst of a strike by its technical union. Much of the studio equipment that week was manned by management personnel, so that the complexity the show might ordinarily have had was reduced. All week long Lorne was telling the writers to “simplify, simplify,” and by Saturday he was forced to use sketches that called for as little camera movement as possible. That ruled out, Lorne says, a lot of the more subtle political material that had been written for the show.

But many of the show’s writers say there was more to it than that. They say, without equivocation, that Saturday Night was out to get Nessen. The attitude, [writer] Rosie Shuster said, was: “The President’s watching. Let’s make him cringe and squirm.” The writers knew that Nessen would be on guard material that was politically dangerous. Thus, they went in a different direction–”feinted left and went right,” as one put it–by writing instead some of the raunchiest material ever presented on Saturday Night.

Most of that material was in sketches that did not feature Nessen, and Nessen, thrown into the whirlwind schedule after his late arrival, didn’t pay attention to them, But even if he had paid attention, he said later, “What could I do? Walk off in a huff on Thursday, two days before the show?” So Nessen didn’t object to a comma of what had been written.

NBC was in a similar bind. There was some concern at the network that Saturday Night was about to offend people it shouldn’t offend. [NBC censor] Herminio Traviesas came to the dress rehearsal that night to pass on some of the material himself. He resisted a few bits, but in the end he let almost everything by. It’s likely that NBC, with all the attention being focused on Nessen’s appearance, was more than usually interested in avoiding any confrontation over censorship that night. There was also a feeling among NBC’s brass that Nessen knew what he was doing and that he could take care of himself.

In his opening monologue and in the first sketch with Chevy, Nessen played along with the sort of Gerald Ford jokes he’d expected–explaining that among the things he’d learned as press secretary was how to remove the President’s tie from a helicopter blade (while the President was still wearing it), and watching as Chevy stumbled around the Oval Office talking to a stuffed dog, donning a leather football helmet, stapling his ear, and signing his hand, It was then that Saturday Night made its move in the other direction.

One of the sketches Nessen wasn’t in and hadn’t paid attention to during rehearsals was written by Michael O’Donoghue. It was based on the name Smucker’s Jam, which O’Donoghue renamed Flucker’s. The idea–not one of O’Donoghue’s more sophisticated–was that obscene-sounding names must sell jam. The cast members stood onstage (without any tricky camera movements) and recited the most offensive names for jams they could think of, including Nose Hair, Death Camp, Mangled Baby Ducks, Dog Vomit, Monkey Pus, and Painful Rectal Itch.

On Weekend Update, Emily Litella, misunderstanding all the talk about the presidential elections, editorialized on “presidential erections.” Gilda [Radner] and [writer] Alan Zweibel had originally written this piece as it sounded-as a commentary on presidential penises-but Lorne made them tone it down by switching the subject to buildings and monuments dedicated to Presidents. The point came across anyway.

Another sketch written by Zweibel and Gilda was a parody commercial for a douche called Autumn Fizz. Gilda pitched the product with her boyfriend, played by Chevy, sitting beside her. (Again, no tricky camera work, and again, no Ron Nessen.) The joke was that. Autumn Fizz was the carbonated douche-”the douche with the effervescence of uncola.” It came in several different flavors, including strawberry, lemon, and egg cream. As if signaling her approval, Gilda burped. The line that even those on the 17th floor thought too cheap–although the censors let it by–was Gilda’s exhortation, “Don’t leave him holding the bag.”

Then there was the sketch that brought the Supreme Court into bedroom of Chevy and Jane, the one that Herminio Traviesas had come to studio to see performed in dress rehearsal. The justices, in their judicial robes, stood around the bed while the couple made love, watching to see that didn’t do anything kinky. “You’ll have to lose those high heels,” one of justices said to Jane. As the couple writhed under the covers, one of the justices remarked, “I’m a little nervous about where that mouth is heading.” Another justice declared a moratorium on the “butterfly flick”.

Even the Home Movie–a regular feature in which viewers sent in short films–and the music were more controversial than usual. The Home Movie was set in a men’s room. One by one, several men walked in to relieve them selves, each adding a different harmony to a vocal chorale as they stood at urinals. At the end they all zipped up and walked out. The musical guest was punk rocker Patti Smith, whose ragged look alone probably affronted more conservative viewers. Smith sang her version of “Gloria”, which included line “Jesus died for somebody’s sins/but not mine.” By the time Smith came on, it was past midnight, so she was singing on Easter Sunday.

This was all a lot different from Richard Nixon’s appearance on Laugh-In, although Ron Nessen may have been the last to realize how different. It was obvious to NBC chairman Julian Goodman, for one. The Nessen show was first time that the NBC brass had ever attended Saturday Night en masse. They sat in the front row of the balcony, and although he tried his best not show it, Goodman was shocked by what he saw. “You don’t become chairman of a major broadcasting company,” he said later, “without learning to grit your teeth and smile.”

After the show, NBC threw a huge party at the Rockefeller Center skating rink. Julian Goodman, who had known Nessen in the days when they were both at NBC News, danced with Nessen’s wife, and she, too, seemed to her doubts about what she had seen. Ron, she told Goodman, sometimes had a tendency to overextend himself. Nessen himself was in a celebratory mood, roundly toasting his performance. He seemed to be having a wonderful time. So were the people from the show, some of whom, despite the presence of the NBC brass, Nessen, and other dignitaries, were smoking pot at the party. They did, however, take the initial precaution of lighting up their joints all at the same time to minimize the possibility of anyone’s trying to stop them.

It wasn’t until a post-party party at [musician] Paul Simon’s apartment later that night that Nessen let his true feelings about the show be known. By then he may have gotten the drift that the show made him look bad, and he’d also had quite a bit to drink. [SNL writer] Herb Sargent, who was there, says everyone was in a boisterous mood, Nessen no more than others. Michael O’Donoghue, who was also there, saw it differently, describing Nessen’s tone as almost belligerent. O’Donoghue and Sargent agree that Nessen was arguing he had “co-opted Saturday Night. Nessen’s basic message, O’Donoghue said, was: “You thought you’d get me, but I got you.”

Nesson learned otherwise back in Washington. The wire services quoted senior White House aides as saying that President Ford was “not pleased” by the show. The staffers themselves were said to have found it “vulgar” and “tasteless”. Some thought it made Ford “look stupid.” There were reports that some of the aides wanted Nessen relieved of his job.

CanadianGuy on October 18, 2008 at 11:17 PM

Weird

CanadianGuy on October 18, 2008 at 11:35 PM