Ask A Genius 1011: MAD-Jerking Off-Real World
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/16
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
Rick Rosner: Taboo. MAD was designed for kids. They weren’t going to show naked boobs or a dick. They weren’t going to do masturbation humor because they didn’t want to weird out 12-year-olds or get busted by the parents of 12-year-olds. National Lampoon, which started, I want to say, in 1973, but had probably been around for a year or two, was meant for adults.
And I liked it because I was 13 in 1973, and the humor was vicious. It had nudity. You could jerk off to parts of it. Why would you be jerking off to a humor magazine? Because there was a shortage of porn.
You couldn’t go on the internet. My friends and I would dumpster dive, as I’ve mentioned a million times. In May, when college started letting out for the summer, we’d climb into the dumpsters behind frats and look for Playboy magazines that the frat guys were throwing out. Porn was rare and precious. So, a comic strip in National Lampoon with a naked woman in it, you could jerk off to it. So you got vicious humor and you got a boner.
Almost directly from National Lampoon and from SCTV in Canada, you get the people who would make Saturday Night Live. Before Saturday Night Live, if you were at home on Saturday night, you were a loser. So you felt like shit anyway. Also, the entertainment on late Saturday night TV was Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, which was a cheaply produced, shitty proto music video show. They’d show Led Zeppelin playing a song or maybe several songs.
If you were at home on Saturday night, you probably didn’t even like Led Zeppelin very much because you were nerdy. It was miserable, non-entertainment. Don Kirshner talked like this. He introduced musical acts like this. He was some old Jew, which is fine, but it didn’t make it any hipper.
That time slot was a wasteland. Lorne Michaels convinced NBC that they could maybe have an hour and a half after the nightly news that might pull in more viewers and make the network some money in this dead period. So, SNL starts. National Lampoon goes from being a magazine to making Animal House and National Lampoon’s Vacation. They had the National Lampoon Radio Hour and a stage show called National Lampoon’s Lemmings. They were using people from SCTV and Second City in Chicago. I’m probably confusing SCTV and Second City. In fact, I know I am. I messed up here. So the pipeline is National Lampoon and Second City, which is an improv house out of Chicago.
That’s where all the talent comes from. Maybe some of the talent came from SCTV, but SCTV came along later. So I messed that whole section up. So anyway, all these people, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, Belushi, all these guys come out of an improv background, from these National Lampoon Productions. Lorne Michaels assembles a bunch of them.
In 1975, Saturday Night Live premieres. It is 90 minutes of sketch comedy and music, but only two songs. Maybe they played more music early on, but now it’s two songs. So it’s mostly sketches. Plus, in the middle, there’s a news report, Weekend Update, which is an excuse to tell jokes based on the news. This is the 50th season of Saturday Night Live.
Everyone is familiar with it now. It was completely unfamiliar in 1975. Nobody had seen anything like it on TV. The variety shows, like Carol Burnett, were funny, but they were gentle and avoided certain subjects. Primetime TV in the 60s and 70s was generally lazy.
A lot of the writing was slack. People probably went home at 6 pm on many productions in the 70s. They were willing to avoid taboo subjects because there was no competition. There were only three networks, and they all ran the same kinds of shows. There was nothing on TV that offered raunchier, more vicious fun until SNL.
SNL tackled satire and subject matter like nothing seen before. I saw the first or second episode and thought, you have to see this show. I told people in my journalism class in 10th grade. They said, no, you’re home on Saturday night, you’re a miserable dweeb, we don’t have to listen to you because we’re out maybe getting part of a hand job. But within a few months, people caught on. It’s been on now for 50 years, marking the beginning of Americans getting used to fairly vicious satire. The end.
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