Podcast Corner: Five decades of Saturday Night Live
L-R: Chevy Chase, an SNL icon; and Marc Maron, a great what-if for the US comedy institution
From Talking Sopranos (The Sopranos) to Office Ladies (The US Office) to, closer to home, Talking Ted (Father Ted), many beloved TV series are well covered with rewatch podcasts featuring former stars.
Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone aka the Lonely Island, along with SNL’s former head writer, now late-night chat show host Seth Meyers, are taking that template and going through their history digital short by digital short (though considering there are over 100 such sketches, they might speed things along after the first couple of episodes, ‘Lettuce’ and ‘Lazy Sunday’, went in-depth on the sketches of the same name). It was a more quaint time online, almost 20 years ago, when the Lonely Island gained notoriety, culminating in their biggest hit, ‘I’m on a Boat’.
The podcast offers great titbits, like how hard it was just to get on the air on SNL; sometimes sketches were ‘cut on air’, which is when, between dress rehearsal and live show, they don’t run because the show went long long. “The saddest way to have something not air,” they philosophise. There are times during the podcast when the foursome themselves, perhaps like the listener, feel things are a bit TMI but fans of comedy and SNL will find something to enjoy, and laugh about, in this show.
Beginning in January 2022, SNL alumni Dana Carvey and David Spade began Fly on the Wall in January 2022, the covid times. Spade says they lived 15 minutes from each other “and we would talk and laugh and tell SNL stories”. Over the course of more than 100 episodes since, they’ve chatted to a whole host of cast, crew, guest hosts, musical guests and others, and have formed a great archive of material, more focused on shooting the breeze than telling any definitive story. The opening episode was with Chris Rock, there was a two-parter with “the great and powerful Oz”, SNL creator Lorne Michaels, and there’s even a 70-minute episode with the divisive Chevy Chase, the breakout star of SNL’s first cast in 1975.
Chase and Michaels have also been guests down the years of Maron’s long-running podcast. Maron did a roast of Chevy in 2002 (which you can watch on YouTube) that Maron calls “one of the worst nights of my life”, while a long-running bit of WTF was Maron ruminating on what might’ve been if he hadn’t been turned down after auditioning for SNL. He finally got to put that to Michaels directly on episode 653.
