Don't talk to me until I've had my morning chicken.

06.05 David Carradine/Joe Papp’s Pirates of Penzance Cast featuring Linda Ronstadt

December 20, 1980

Lines that made me laugh out loud:

“This (Magnum 44) can stop a rhino in its tracks; imagine what it can do to a mutha’ in the Bronx.” Proprietor of “Gun City” played by Joe Piscopo.

“President elect Ronald Reagan says he will do what he can to make America a better place. His first act is to resign.” Weekend Update anchor Charles Rocket.

Premptive defense: Netflix has every episode of Saturday Night Live, but strangely it is missing many skits and all of the musical guests. I’ve attempted to find the missing skits and musical guest performances on youtube, but haven’t had much luck...or initiative.

This is one of the first episodes of the post-Belushi era “Not Ready for Primetime Players.” The cold open of the episode show’s Joe Piscopo trying out his Don Pardo voice in the mirror of a dressing room. Pardo’s voice over starts to question Piscopo’s intentions of his practice routine and later chastises him for this. The original SNL cast were basically nobodies who became somebodies. Following the departure of that entire cast and producer Lorne Michaels, it’s time to “Rip it up and start again,” but with the pair of shoes on the dressing room floor, that are impossible to fill perfectly. A sketch comedy show like SNL had not been very successful on American television before the 75 season of SNL. This cast was trying to play psychedelic blues guitar two days after Hendrix died: a daunting task.

Mr Piscopo seems to be the great funny hope of the season. He was in nearly every sketch in the highly edited 27 minute version of the episode. Piscopo plays an in your face owner/barker/spokesperson in a “Gun City” advertisement offering up Magnum 45s as a viable Christmas gift for dad. The ad seems to be based on the “Crazy Eddie” advertisements of 70s and 80s NY television, an electronics warehouse that had the prices so low the owner must be crazy. He later is a chicken junkie morning the death of Col. Harlan Sanders with some other denizens of KFC-land, Eddie Murphy and Denny Dillon, who refuse to partake in extra crispy insisting that its original recipe or nothing!

Charles Rocket hosted the eponymous “Rocket Report” where he waxes philosophical about the wonders of Santa Claus and the beauty of the Christmas season in New York over a documentary styled montage of a department store Santa sifting through trash, mooching a cigaret and propositioning a lady of the night.

“Santa Claus, truly a heckuva guy, with a heckuva job, who really comes through in a heckuva way each year after yar, sees the whole world in just one night a guy definately as special as that needs a special kind of love and affection that only we can seem to conjure up at Christmastime. At least, we are capable of it.”

Like his much later WU successor, Rocket really can milk the loveable dirtbag that Dennis Miller mastered, babe. Later in the episode he hosts the Saturday Night News, the Ebersol era Weekend Update which was full of snark and had a great Do’s and Do Not Do’s for the holiday season offered up by Ann Risley. Rocket pulls a few good ones on Rupert Murdock, nearly thirty years ago Murdock was still a dirtbag, but then without his Asian pittbull/wife.

A brief advertisement begins with Piscopo and his wife, Gail Matthius, arguing: he’s cheating she’s a souse, etc. Then Rocket pops up to fix the situation with a DALLAS dress up set: a cowboy hat and sportcoat for him; a bouffant wig and slinky dress for her. Wow! Family dysfunction becomes prime time drama!

One of the very few skits featuring Season Six boy-genius, Eddie Murphy, in which two yuppie couples go up to Harlem for a real drug experience. Cocaine is so passé, implies husband Rocket, heroin is the new black. So, they venture up to Harlem for a real heroin experience. Murphy, the dealer/hustler, is asked to provide the heroin. Matthais asks, “Is this one hundred percent heroin? I dont want to put anything unnatural in my body.” This skit is followed by a few skits featuring guest host, David Carradine: Dopenhaged smokeless marihuana. Then Bob Dylan, Pat Weathers, visiting Woody Guthrie, Carradine. The two guitarslingers have a conversation peppered--er--permeated with self-referential lyrics, mostly said by Gutherie: Hey Woody, I wrote you a song. Don’t think twice, it’s alright. Oh well, I’m just blowing in the wind these days. Hell, I feel like I’m knocking on heaven’s door. Boooooooooooooring.

The highlight of these 80s episodes are these strange little short films, this one’s was Mitchell Kriegman’s Bill Irwin Dancing Man a nouvelle-vague inspired peice where actor Irwin does mundane activities that are interrupted with the funk classic, Peaches & Herb’s “Shake Your Groove Thing,” to which Irwin begins dancing like a maniac which causes his OJ to spill all over or for him to rhythmically fall down a flight of stairs. Great stuff.