Of the many achievements George Carlin had in his long career, one that gets underplayed a bit is that he was the guest host on the first-ever episode of Saturday Night Live -- then called NBC's Saturday Night, thanks to Howard Cosell -- in 1975. Not a bad choice, I'd have to say; since the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players" were only a part of that first episode (there was a lot of music and odd Muppets about ... the show took some time to find itself), they needed Carlin to carry a lot of the comedic load. And that he did, giving the audience a number of his best routines from that time period.As a tribute to the recently-deceased comedy legend, NBC will air the entire premiere episode of SNL this Saturday night. For those who have never seen the premiere before (it's on a DVD set of the complete first season), it'll be interesting to see how different the first episode is from the SNL format they know and hate-love today. I'll be DVRing it; will you?
To give you a taste, the opening monologue -- an early version of Carlin's classic "Baseball and Football" routine -- is after the jump.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
6-25-2008 @ 6:13PM
e said...
One of the things I like about this site is that it gives me the opportunity to bitch about things that are not really important but that, for some reason, I have an opinion about. The other is that it lets me know which new shows are going to air or which shows I might be interested in, where and when they will be airing.
Would it have killed you to note that air date for this is Saturday, June 28th at 11:30? Did I have to click on the link to find out? What, are you being passive aggressive here, hmmmmn?
By the way, though the news release notes the air date as June 28th, the cable listing information does not mention Carlin at all. I hope they don't mess it up and make me record SNL for a few weeks.
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