I guess it might have.
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I’d guess 1982 or a year or two later. “Nuclear Freeze*” was the buzzword then. In 1982 there was the World Peace March to the UN for the second special sessiin on nuclear disarmament, and the big rally on June 12.
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I started watching the skit and immediately wondered, “Holy shit, did they do a skit about the Greensboro massacre?!” And apparently they did. Given the awfulness of that situation, it makes the skit even worse.
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1982, it looks like.
http://platypuscomix.com/otherpeople/halfof8212.html
It’s in the “Deleted material from loose tails” section
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They don’t even set up a joke.
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That whole 1980 season is just full of terrible. They Malcolm McDowell episode being the absolute bottom of the barrel.
Followed by a Halloween themed one with Donald Pleasance.
So much “who write this crap!!!”
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That was the next season, number seven. I’ve seen the hour long edit, but can only remember the John Belushi cameo, he was allegedly too fried to do anything but smile mischievously for the camera, and Fear’s performance, who, along with their slam dancing fans, scared the suits so much that the control room cut away to an old film piece rather than show their whole set.
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That was pretty cringy.
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Holy cow the Captain and his band are on fire here. Pretty amazing.
Do you think an SNL audience 40 years later would have any better idea what to make of Beefheart?
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I saw that one. As I recall it was quite shocking AND quite daring given the context. It certainly harshed everybody’s buzz who was watching & gave us something to talk about.
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I had to look, because I was thinking this was the season with Randy Quaid and Michael Anthony Hall. But that was season 11. I thought they’d decided it was a bad decision to bring those two in from the movies. They were certainly gone the next season.
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Isn’t it supposed to be a dark satire/critique of that worldview? That’s not supposed to be funny, and trying to get laughs out of such a critique would seem to be much worse. “not a laughing matter”. Criticising a skit like this for not being funny…seems to kinda miss the mark. If it seems angry and unfunny, that is what is called for. I’m sure Americans at the time didn’t appreciate it harshing their jolly SNL vibe. See some of the contemporary Malcolm McDowell movies of the time: “If” and “O lucky man”, or Terry Gillian’s unfunny “Brasil” for dark satires.
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I wouldn’t call it funny, but I’ll stand here as maybe a lone dissenter in appreciating the bit. Maybe it’s because of the resonance with today’s politics, but it reminds me of the dryer tone The Onion adopts when they’re commenting on things too horrible to be silly about. I read a lot of anger in it. They’re just like, laying out the awfulness without holding back – the shocking racism and antisemitism is effective to me because that’s like as not a literal quote.
I don’t know what the intent was, maybe in context in the season the writers come across as abusing shock humor. This is just my impression seeing it out of context, decades later.
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Contemporary? 1968 and 1973?
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You’re right. My bad. Season 7 actually had some promising moments. Tim Curry’s appearance was a high point.
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He did Time After Time in 1979.
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compared to 2020, those would be, respectively, 52 (if), 47 (o lucky), 40 (SNL) and 35 (Brasil) years ago. Guess it depends how you define “contemporary”
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there was this:
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I see it as one of SNL’s few attempted forays into reality TV.
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