In December 2019, when my children were in third and fifth grade, I decided to show them a “Saturday Night Live” sketch that, decades before, my three siblings and I had loved: Jan Hooks and Nora Dunn as the Sweeney Sisters singing a Christmas medley at a party. I had trouble finding this particular sketch, but as my kids and I inhaled, via YouTube, a random assortment of other ones from over the years — among them such classics as “NPR’s Delicious Dish: Schweddy Balls” and “The Love Toilet” — I inadvertently yet happily created what would become our 2020 hobby, while quarantined in our Minneapolis home. I also welcomed my offspring into a time-honored tradition: watching “S.N.L.” when you’re a little too young for it.
I myself began doing this in the mid-80s, in my friend Annie’s attic, when her older brothers introduced us to “Choppin’ Broccoli,” “A Couple of White Guys” and “The Church Lady.” As it happens, “S.N.L.” and I are the same age. I arrived in August 1975, and “S.N.L.” debuted in October. It’s therefore a little brain-scrambling to me that “S.N.L.” is now, with deserved fanfare, celebrating 50 years while I’m not quite 49 and a half, but apparently a TV show’s first season starts immediately, while a human’s first season starts when she turns 1.
In any case, when I think of being too young for “S.N.L.” and enjoying it anyway, I don’t exactly mean because of the risqué content. Admittedly, as my family started watching entire episodes in reverse order of their airing — we especially enjoyed the golden age of Kate McKinnon and Aidy Bryant — my husband and I occasionally fast-forwarded through sketches not because they were crude (bring on “Undercover Office Potty”) but because they were innocence-destroying (the intentionally misogynistic “Guy Who Just Bought a Boat”).
But I suspect that for a child watching “S.N.L.,” the joke itself doesn’t necessarily matter. If you’re 8 or 10, you might never even have heard of the politician or cultural trend being mocked. But you still know that you’re watching something funny; the magic of “S.N.L.” is that with its costumes and collaboration and the cast members regularly cracking up themselves and one another, it makes adulthood itself seem fun.
My parents had friends and attended and threw parties, but even so, there was something about adulthood that struck me as serious when I was a kid — adults spent their days getting their oil changed, filling out paperwork, going to funerals — and the sheer silliness of “S.N.L.” seemed charmingly, enticingly at odds with that. If you were lucky, perhaps you could build a life around silliness. As it turned out, I did and I didn’t: I’m not a comedian, but as a novelist, I did build a life around making stuff up, reconstituting what the culture offers.
Back in Minneapolis, the pandemic dragged on, and eventually my family was joined on our TV-watching couch by a rescue Chihuahua named Weenie. As we all watched episode after episode, it dawned on me that in addition to being a kid’s festive idea of adulthood, “S.N.L.” embodies several other elusive and aspirational ideas: an idea of New York for people who, like me, have never lived there; an idea of having hilarious friends or co-workers instead of annoying ones; an idea of being able to metabolize political instability into biting jokes instead of feeling helpless about it; an idea of glamorous after-parties that we want to want to attend when most of us don’t really want to stay up that late. (Though here I might just mean me. My kids are now teenagers and go to bed after I do. But my family has never watched “S.N.L.” live; we usually watch it on Sunday around 7 p.m.)
Many of us feel to varying degrees like outsiders — we’re not beautiful or famous or funny or coastal — and “S.N.L.” gives us access to beauty, fame, humor and New York. “S.N.L.” both mirrors and defines all these things; sometimes when I’m in New York, it feels New Yorky to me because I’m seeing imagery I’ve seen on the show, like the Prometheus statue outside Rockefeller Center, the 30 Rock marquee or the ostensible grit of the subway. A few years ago, a jaded magazine editor asked if it annoyed me that my publisher puts me up in hotels in Midtown, where it’s congested with tourists. At the risk of sounding like a Midwestern stereotype, it had never occurred to me that Midtown could be undesirable; I still can’t believe a publisher pays for me to stay at a nice hotel, and then I get to go for walks in Central Park.
As the months passed, the pandemic still didn’t go away, and I, like many people, experienced personal challenges in addition to the global ones. I decided that the novel I was trying to write was too depressing and set it aside. Desperate to cheer myself up, I started a novel set at a show a lot like “S.N.L.”
I did an enormous amount of research that was so delightful it didn’t feel like work, including reading the nearly 800-page oral history “Live From New York,” watching the documentary “Saturday Night” and listening to about a million comedian podcasts. By the time I finagled a ticket to watch a dress rehearsal of the show in March 2022, only two aspects of seeing it in person surprised me. The first was how often two or more cast members in the same sketch were on different stages (for instance, the cast member playing a mayor at a news conference and the cast members playing reporters).
The second surprise was that cast members’ deliveries were more subdued than I’d anticipated. They seemed to be playing to the cameras and the people at home rather than to the in-studio audience. This was disorienting but made a profound kind of sense. Because it turns out those insiders need us, too; it’s our eyeballs on them, our admiration and guffaws and references to sketches from years ago, that confers their insider status.
Seeing the celebrities I’d seen on TV was a thrill. To warm up the audience before dress rehearsal that night, Michael Che did standup and Kenan Thompson sang, with Chloe Fineman, Heidi Gardner and Ego Nwodim doing backup in sparkly dresses. I glimpsed Lorne Michaels, dapper in a suit. The host was Zoë Kravitz, and the musical guest was Rosalía, performing in a cape that resembled a glamorous down comforter.
And yet I was there by myself, without anyone I knew with whom to exchange muttered opinions or laugh beside. Two-thirds of the way through the rehearsal, I had a strange realization: I kind of wanted to be back with my family in Minnesota, watching the hilarity on a screen.
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