The overnight edition of Saturday Night Live that airs early Sunday AM on NBC (3 AM in most timezones) seems to switch back and forth between recent shows and very old ones. This coming Sunday, they're running an episode hosted by Jay Leno — with musical guests, The Neville Brothers — that originally aired February 22, 1986. This was the season when the cast consisted of Joan Cusack, Robert Downey Jr, Nora Dunn, Anthony Michael Hall, Jon Lovitz, Dennis Miller, Randy Quaid, Terry Sweeney and Danitra Vance, with "featured players" Al Franken, A. Whitney Brown and Damon Wayans. It was one of the periods in the show's history that is generally forgotten…but when you see them now, there's occasionally some real good stuff in there. At the very least, a lot of it is interesting in a historical sense.
What I recall of this episode is that Leno did a very strong monologue at the outset and then they stuck him in a lot of sketches that seemed calculated to show what he couldn't do: Accents, singing, playing characters, etc. I have a hunch Jay will not be plugging this on The Tonight Show but the opening spot is a good example of how good a standup he was at the time.
This was also the period during which A. Whitney Brown was doing very sharp commentaries during the Weekend Update segment — material that often sailed way over the heads of the studio audience. If this is the episode I think it is, his commentary was about Iran and Iraq, and is still sadly relevant.