Several correspondents wrote regarding the long-hidden episode of Saturday Night Live that recently (finally) reran, and which we discussed here before. All said it wasn't as awful as expected; that it was no worse, and maybe a notch above many other episodes of that season. Some of that, of course, was because we were watching an hour version of what was originally a 90-minute show. Every SNL gets a little better when its weakest moments are tossed, and we might have thought less of this one, had the trimmers not dumped Berle's closing rendition of "September Song" and a few other bits.
Certainly, his opening monologue of hoary one-liners bombed big, including the spot where they had someone off-stage make a noise so Berle could "ad-lib" that NBC had dropped another show. But you know what? That act was Milton Berle. He did the same routine for decades. I heard many of the same jokes in the Vegas appearance described in this column, and they went over big with that audience. To book Berle as your host and then be upset at ancient jokes is like hiring Tony Bennett and freaking out because he insists on singing, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco."
The funny thing is that the writers wrote a pretty broad show that week. One sketch was "The Widettes," which had everyone padded with huge buttocks. Odd how I'd forgotten that bit. Years ago, I worked with one of the former producers of the Sonny & Cher Show. One day, he read me a quote one day from an SNL writer about how they were advancing sketch comedy from the infantile level of what Sonny and Cher had done. Then he popped in a videotape and showed me, back-to-back, the Widettes sketch and an almost identical spot from Sonny & Cher. Anyway, it's inconceivable that anyone could be "too broad" for a Big Ass sketch, no pun intended. One wonders if one reason Berle made SNL uncomfortable is not because his style of comedy was so dated but because he reminded them of how much
they had in common.
But there are other theories. One fellow who wrote me said, "I think Uncle Miltie may have gotten a bum rap on this one. I wonder if he wasn't just so annoying during rehearsals that it colored everyone's view of the episode." Maybe. In the new Tom Shales book on Saturday Night Live, one of the writers is quoted as saying that Berle insisted on showing him his famously-huge penis. A thing like that could color anyone's views.