The Women on My Television
When my parents went off to their freshman year of college, Saturday Night Live began its second season. My mother tells me about how my dad’s frat house would all but close down between eleven-thirty and one in the morning on Saturday nights as everyone gathered in front of the TV to watch the latest escapades of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. They became a generation who could toss off a nasal never mind or crack into cheezborger, cheezborger! When placing a food order and people of a similar age would know exactly what they meant.
And then, like my mother’s awful taste in music, like my father’s questionable Republican values, my parents wanted to pass on this love of Saturday Night Live to their children, though they never quite saw the same joy my sister and I did later when we watched Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri as the Spartan cheerleaders. My parents wanted us to know the Saturday Night Live they knew, even if they maybe didn’t want their small children to be able to say, “Jane, you ignorant slut.” (As adults, my friend Andrew and I use this as shorthand to let the other know we’ve been thinking about them and that they are missed.)
Something about loving Saturday Night Live seems to be about reveling in the later parts of adolescence — when you can first stay up late, when you first start to understand politics — a feeling that can’t be new once you’ve grown out of it. So, while I can love the cast my parents loved as teenagers, they can’t entirely love the cast I loved as a teenager, just as I can’t entirely love the current cast.
I was six in May of 1989, and I was sitting on the brown-flowered couch in the living room of our townhouse with my parents when I noticed what was happening on TV. I saw Jane Curtin, who I knew as Allie from Kate and Allie, a sitcom I watched with my mother. Next to her was someone I was sure I had never seen before. I can’t remember a time in my life without Lucille Ball, without Mary Tyler Moore, or the characters Laverne and Shirley — all of whom I knew from ubiquitous reruns that I also watched with my mother. Though, by age six, I loved watching David the Gnome, Mr. Wizard, and Murphy Brown, I don’t know, can’t remember, the first moment they caught my attention, the first image that drew me to the screen and demanded that I keep watching. But this I know.
Next to a well-dressed Jane Curtin at a news anchor desk, the kind of set I knew from nightly news viewings with my parents and grandparents, from episodes of Murphy Brown, sat a svelte, angular woman. Her black hair poofed into a triangle around her face, which looked similar to an unfortunate perm my mother had had a few years before. She hunched herself over the desk, her makeup as garish as her grating New York accent. I could tell she was trying to contain the joy that hid somewhere behind her eyes.
“Who is that?”
“Gilda Radner,” my dad said.
My mother added, “She just died from cancer. It’s very sad.”
“Does she really look like that?”
“It’s a character,” my dad said. “Roseanne Roseannadanna.” He went on to describe this gregarious character and her interactions with the stoic Jane Curtin on “Weekend Update,” about letters from a New Jersey man named Richard Feder, and then the line that I would soon love: “It’s always something.”
In that brief moment, I felt smitten for Gilda Radner in a way I had reserved only for the pratfalls of Lucille Ball, who, incidentally, died the month before Radner did.
As I grew up and learned more about Radner’s life, I realized that she did what I longed to do — she took her faults, her shortcomings, her insecurities and exploited them for laughs. Most comedians do this, of course, but there was something so inspiringly fearless in her performances. John Belushi and Chris Farley are usually the two names that come to mind for physical comedy on Saturday Night Live, but Radner was up there with them (and, later, Molly Shannon). Radner was the type of woman who broke a rib in dress rehearsal for a Judy Miller skit and didn’t change a thing about her performance when the show went live later that night. On stage, she was just as emotionally tough.
In a segment called “What Gilda Ate” in the third episode of the first season, Radner and episode-host Rob Reiner have the following exchange after Reiner asks Gilda what she’s eaten so far that day.
Radner: Okay, I started the day with one piece of dry toast and two egg whites scrambled in a no-stick Teflon pan; and then I had a little piece of chicken from some leftover Chinese food that I had in the refrigerator, and one breaded sweet-and-sour shrimp, but I picked all the breading off. And then, at lunch, I had a half of a club sandwich, but I took out the middle piece of bread and I left the crust, but I traded the other half for a half of Western omelet with cheese; and then I finished before everyone else, so I had a roll with butter and three French fries off of somebody else’s plate, and a Tab. But I didn’t order dessert. But on the way back to the office, I had a Fig Newton and an Almond Joy candy bar. And then, when I got back to the office, I told everyone I was going to the bathroom, but I really went to a coffee shop and had apple pie a la mode, and I ate the whole thing. And on the way back up, in the elevator, I found a Milk Dud covered in tobacco at the bottom of my purse, and I ate it. And, then on the way back to work, I went to the drugstore and bought an M&M Peanut Munch Bar…
Reiner: Thank you very much, Gilda, that’s enough!
Radner: But I’m not finished yet…
Reiner: I know, but we have to go on with the show, I’m sorry.
Series creator Lorne Michaels had wanted all of the Players to do a bit like this, one that showed the personalities behind the characters on the show. Radner didn’t keep her binging / purging a secret from her coworkers and even went so far as to tell a reporter she had thrown up in every bathroom in 30 Rock. Still, though, I wonder what it must have been like for her to be up on the stage of what was fast becoming television’s hottest comedy, reciting a list that wasn’t so much a joke.
Sixteen years after I first saw Radner on TV, my friends and I sat in my apartment watching The Best of Gilda Radner on DVD. My former roommate could do a stunning impersonation of Roseanne Roseannadanna. She never had to get very far, though, only had to pretend to flick an invisible ball of sweat from the tip of her nose, and I’d already be crossing my arms over my stomach in laughter.
On that DVD, amidst the familiar characters of Roseanne Roseannadanna and Emily Litella, was also a sketch I didn’t remember from reruns. The scene, set in a Laundromat, features Gilda Radner and John Belushi. She is thin, wearing a red sweater and a long gray skirt. Her curly brown hair is pulled back at the sides. He wears a blue plaid shirt with a brown vest over it; his hair is shaggy. They stand against a washing machine and take turns placing in items — first socks and pantyhose, then shirts, pants for Belushi, a skirt for Gilda. Belushi tempts Gilda with a pink rose; she reticently tosses in a bra. She looks coyly to the side, smelling the rose, when he flicks in his underwear. Before she puts in her days of the week underwear, he pours her a glass of wine, which she sips, smiles, and then gives in with a backward toss. He jams the coins in the machine, and she closes the lid before he lights them both cigarettes.
During the entire sketch, they never say a word.
Two other sketches on the same DVD revel in Radner’s silence. One, “La Dolce Gilda,” is a send-up of Federico Fellini. It was filmed prior to the night’s show, in black and white, rather than as a live bit. “Gilda,” the zombie-sounding fans drone. “Gilda.” The happiness and excitement of so many of her characters is completely gone. Just sadness. The film ends as she finally speaks: “Go away, leave me alone.”
The second was acted in happiness in 1978, but later replayed in sadness. Gilda and episode-host Steve Martin are dressed in white, chatting with others in a bar when they catch sight of each other from across the room. Without speaking, they dance in dips and spins all around the room to “Dancing in the Dark.” At the end of the song, Martin returns Gilda to her seat and then himself to his, where the scene resumes the chatty atmosphere.
The day of Radner’s death coincided with the fourteenth season finale, which Martin hosted. While introducing the sketch they shared together, he very visibly chokes up. “I wasn’t expecting it but, you know, I was just of that period,” he later said. “When we first did the dance, that was another period in our careers, where we were so young, so confident.”
“Gilda was so lovable in person as a person,” he added. “And so it was easy to get sentimental about her, because in looking back over her life, I know she had trials and tribulations, but knowing her, it was never expressed. It was just joy and happiness and funniness and comedy.”
And then Saturday nights like this:
It started in January of 2010 when one guy started “Betty White to Host SNL (Please?)!” Betty White, of Golden Girls and Mary Tyler Moore fame, eighty-eight years old. She’s been on TV since there was such a thing as TV. (Seriously, she participated in one of the very first broadcasts — from what part of a building to another.) One part in a movie the summer before, one Snickers commercial during the most recent Super Bowl, and all of a sudden she was hot all over again. Was it ironic hipster love? Was it the genuine love of a lifetime of fans? Maybe a little bit of both.
Hundreds of thousands of people joined the campaign to get White on Saturday Night Live. And then it happened. It happened big. Mothers’ Day weekend, just five months after the start of the petition. They made it a ladies comeback show with Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch, and Maya Rudolph of more recent seasons. Molly Shannon and Ana Gasteyer from those Saturday nights during my high school days. All these women of great comedic talent who remind us that women can be funny and smart and beautiful all at the same time.
Watching that episode and loving TV the way I do sent me off on some kind of Saturday Night Live high. Old characters came back, comfortable on the screen as if they’d never left. Generations crossed in almost all the right ways. (Moments of failed big sisterhood: I completely neglected to both a) show my baby sister the original NPR-spoof “Delicious Dish” skit with Shannon, Gasteyer, and Alec Baldwin and, since I hadn’t done that, b) texted her to leave the room when Shannon and Gasteyer once again sat behind those mics. I now must pay for my sister’s therapy because she sat there with our parents while Betty White talked about her velvety muffin.) Most of the sketches were actually funny — even the very last one, which is usually where mediocre-at-best sketches go to die since everyone stops watching the show after “Weekend Update” around twelve-thirty.
And then there was a moment. It couldn’t have been more than a microsecond. During “Weekend Update,” Molly Shannon brought back Sally O’Malley, an energetic fifty-year-old woman, decked out in red spandex and speaking on behalf of AARP. This time she’s duking it out with White’s ninety-year-old character. “I’m fifty!” Sally O’Malley yells, kicking a leg up toward her face. It was right there. Maybe this had been in Shannon’s performance back in the ‘90s and I never noticed it; maybe it was just in this moment. But the sound of her voice was so incredibly close to that of Roseanne Roseannadanna, Shannon’s physical movements as fearless as Radner’s. In that space between a thought appearing and its immediate dismissal, I asked myself if that could be Gilda on my television screen. And then I laughed at myself because thoughts like that are ridiculous. How great, I thought then. How great that she could be there, if only through the talents of Molly Shannon and whether Shannon meant to do so or not. And then I cried.
Originally published at amywhipple.tumblr.com.
