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SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE
NBC 1975-present


FRIDAYS
ABC 1980-1982


SATURDAYS
National Lampoon #147, June 1982
w: Al Jean, Ted Mann, Michael Reiss

Done during the time when there were two late-night comedy shows on the air, Saturday Night Live, which still exists today, and Fridays, a short-lived imitation out of the West Coast. I don't count SCTV in the same category. It was not performed in front of a live audience, everything they did existed in one single reality, and some seasons didn't have laughtracks.

National Lampoon was always dissing it for being just another TV comedy show, but they were really jealous that their writers and cast members from their records and radio shows were being poached.

MAD had a few references to the show. This is from The Lighter Side of The Idiot Box in #215, June 1980 by who else—Dave Berg.

From MAD's Plan to Make the Congressional TV Show More Entertaining in #216, July 1980, by Lou Silverstone and Jack Davis. One of the correspondents on SNL was Roseanne Roseannadanna (Gilda Radner).

Marvel Team-Up was their showcase title, teaming Spider-Man with new or secondary Marvel characters. This particular issue, that didn't team him up with Marvel characters, is never used in reprint collections for licensing reasons.

LIVE FROM NEW YORK, IT'S SATURDAY NIGHT
Marvel Team-Up #74, October 1978
w: Chris Claremont
a: Bob Hall & Marie Severin

John Belushi's Samurai was one of the recurring characters.

The general public would never have heard of most of the Marvel characters then, though many were used in a superhero sketch (see below).

George Carlin hosted the first Saturday Night Live and Chevy Chase was one of the original cast members. College used to be where most comedians did their act because students were more socially conscious, but now the social conscience of students is the reason they won't.

Here's a cover Jack Davis did for TV Guide.

SCTV did their parody Thursday Night Live. If you look at the other sketches, you can see why I feel the two shows are different.

NITEHEAT

NIGHTBEAT
1956-1960 ABC, SYNDICATED

Before Sixty Minutes, Mike Wallace did a bunch of his own interview shows with the alternating titles Night Beat and The Mike Wallace Imterviews, sponsored by Philip Morris cigarettes and known for its tough in-depth reporting.
MIKE MALICE INTERVIEWS MOTHER GOOSE
MAD #38, March 1958
w: Dave Berg
a: Mort Drucker

The joke here is, of course, that Wallace's hard-hitting interviews are always with the most prominent figures of the day, and this is with the most innocuous person you could think of, but as evidenced after this, many nursery rhymes were in fact the equivalent of issues like communism and poverty two hundred years earlier.

from Go West, Old Format in MAD #41, September 1958, by Albert Meglin and George Woodbridge.

MAX WALLISS INTERVIEWS JAYNE WOMANSFIELD
Cracked #1, February/March 1958
a: Russ Heath

Jayne Mansfield was a sex symbol of the fifties and sixties who many say was a parody of a sex symbol. Elsa Maxwell was a gossip columnist who looked nothing like her. She collaborated often with her husband, bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay.

A character from Harvey Kurtzman's Hey Look! makes an appearance in the lower left, and readers probably didn't know that even then.

Natalie Wood was mostly a child star at that point, Mae Busch did silents and was long dead, and Etta Kett was a comic strip character, and I don't know what they would have in common. Marjorie Main was a character actress around that time. Most known as Ma Kettle.

NITE-HEAT
Sick #2, October 1960
w: Dee Caruso & Bill Levine
a: unknown

THE HIPPIE MAN

THE MUSIC MAN (1962)
dir: Morton DaCosta

The Music Man was a famous Broadway musical made into a movie about Harold Hill (Robert Preston), a conman who sells the idea of a marching band to a small town with the intention of taking everyone's money and leaving, but has a change of heart when he falls in love. Probably the most Well-known number in the movie is 'Ya Got Trouble', about Hill giving his pitch, convincing them they need the marching band to prevent children from giving in to the temptation of pool.

THE HIPPIE MAN
MAD #122, October 1968
w: Connie Del Vento
a: George Woodbridge

But I fooled you. This isn't really about The Music Man. This is about how in the sixties, comedy made fun of hippies, usually about how they were dirty and smelled bad, and how you couldn't tell the boys from the girls. This was the cover of MAD a few issues earlier.

And a few issues before that Don Martin did this comic based on the hoax that you could get high from smoking the innards of banana peels. I don't know if they believed it or not.

To some at MAD, hippies continued to exist well into the 70s, like here in The Lighter Side of Gardening from #178, October 1975.

Cracked did it too, like in this article in #73, November 1968.

Sick was probably the most notorious of all. They even excerpted a hippie joke book.

Media was basically obsessed with the hippie phenomenon.

Look how Frank Zappa was used for reference, and probably John Lennon.

Even cartoons made fun of them, like in Woody's Magic Touch, where Woody Woodpecker is hired to find the king's son, who has been turned into a dragon, and make him human again. But once in human form, he's a hippie, singing lyrics like “I have long hair” and “I don't work”. So the king has Woody change him back.

I could go on. Before the hippie era it was beatniks and after that it was punks. I could do a whole blog about youth lifestyles comedians get wrong or don't understand.

But back to The Music Man, the episode of The Simpsons entitled “Marge and the Monorail” is a parody of the musical.