They say that the best era of Saturday Night Live is whatever era of the show you grew up with. That often means that the worst eras of the show tend to be pretty much everything else.
Insisting Saturday Night Live isn’t what it used to be is as much a part of the SNL experience as actually watching the sketch comedy show. The truth is that SNL has always been a show of extremes. The quality of the series varies wildly not just from season to season or episode to episode but from sketch to sketch. We have this way of only remembering the best of the show and forgetting the dreadful stuff around those moments. It’s a case of “getting back with your ex” syndrome that has played out on a global, multi-generational level.
That is what makes the 1985 season of Saturday Night Live so special. It’s a season so awful that nobody has been able to shine it up enough to call it SNL’s golden age. It is also the season that nearly led to the unthinkable: the cancellation of the seemingly immune show.
The only thing more remarkable than the story of the season that nearly got a cultural institution canceled is the unlikely sketch that helped rescue it the following year. It’s one of those silly sketches you’ve probably had stuck in your head for years and may even regularly repeat in your day-to-day life. However, to appreciate just how important it is, you first have to realize how badly the show needed that silly sketch that reminded everyone of the series’ identity.
Saturday Night Live’s Nightmare 1985 Season
Some argue that the 1985 season of Saturday Night Live is not the show’s worst season. They say it is a collection of episodes so chaotic and fundamentally weird that it is at least better than the many seasons of the show that felt like a great big nothing. These are not serious people.
From around 1980 to 1984, Saturday Night Live was in a nearly constant state of turmoil. The sheer talent of some of the cast members was able to buoy a ship rapidly taking on water thanks to backstage bickering, poor casting decisions, and the tragic realization that Eddie Murphy could not, in fact, be every character in every sketch.
NBC was considering canceling Saturday Night Live at that time unless series creator Lorne Micheals returned as a producer. So, Michaels walked back to SNL with the energy of Donald Glover walking into a fiery apartment with boxes of pizza in his hands.
Michaels decided to replace much of the old cast to give the show a fresh start. It was a good idea seemingly made better by the actual casting choices. Randy Quaid, Joan Cusack, Robert Downey Jr., Danitra Vance, Jon Lovitz, Damon Waynes, Dennis Miller, and Anthony Michael Hall formed what appeared to be the show’s most formidable cast since its inception. Even now, that feels like a pretty special collection of stars.
Soon, though, the name value of that cast proved to be one of its biggest problems. Performers like RDJ, Randy Quaid, and Joan Cusack were simply not ready/willing to be sketch comedians at that point in their careers. There was little chemistry between much of the cast, and the writers were constantly battling egos, insecurities, and the nearly impossible task of crafting sketches for such a strange collection of performers whose skills demanded such wildly different material.
The 1985 season of Saturday Night Live features comedians not only bombing in front of a live audience but being fully aware of just how hard they are bombing. At one point, Damon Wayans essentially quit the show in real-time during a painfully bad Mr. Monopoly sketch. I doubt you’ll make it much further than Waynes did if you try to watch this season filled with shockingly offensive material and actors failing so hard that they look like they’re about to cry.
Do you know about those videos where people remove the laugh track from The Big Bang Theory to show how few actual jokes there are? You can do something similar with the ‘85 season of Saturday Night Live if you try to watch it but skip all of the John Lovitz sketches.
Actually, Lovitz was the star of one of the season’s best sketches: a meta finale in which the cast is caught in a fire that only Lovitz was guaranteed to have survived. The joke was that audiences would have to tune into the next season to see which cast members would still be on the show. The reality was that there wasn’t much of an audience left, and NBC was finally ready to cancel Saturday Night Live and accept that it was just a relic from a moment in time that had clearly passed.
Yet, Michaels was able to use his all-time clout to convince the network to let him try one more reboot. Wisely, Michaels realized that he was too eager to woo big young names in the hopes of using their star power to quickly revive interest in the sagging show. This time around, he would keep the members of the cast with actual improv and stand-up experience (most notably Nora Dunn, Jon Lovitz, and Dennis Miller) and build around them with relative unknowns who had similar comedic styles. Said unknowns included Phil Hartman, Kevin Nealon, Jan Hooks, and, perhaps the most important of the early additions, Dana Carvey.
The Benefits of Broccoli
NBC’s renewal of Saturday Night Live came with a big catch. Lorne Michaels and his merry misfits were only given a smaller number of guaranteed episodes (about 13) to turn things around. It was as close to a death sentence as they could give the show without being too rude about it. For this experiment to work, the new SNL had to be a hit out of the gate.
But that new era got off to a…mixed start. The opening saw Madonna read a disclaimer explaining that the show’s last season was just a dream. It was funny, but the show was still wrestling with the ghosts of the past. Subsequent sketches slowly introduced the new cast while host Sigourney Weaver and the returning players carried much of the weight. There were highlights (Phil Hartman’s “tough on crime” segment, the first “Church Lady” sketch, and Dennis Miller’s Weekend Update return), but the new cast was still waiting for those big laughs that would drown out the memories of what the show had become.
Those laughs came during a sketch that almost didn’t make it to air and was ultimately dumped into the dead zone of the average Saturday Night Live episode. In it, Carvey plays a fading musician named Derek Stevens who is called in by the record studio executives to prove he’s making progress on his new album. It soon becomes clear that Stevens has nothing prepared, so he makes up a song called “The Lady I Know.” You probably know it better as the words Carvey dramatically repeats in the middle of the song: “Choppin’ broccoli.”
Conceptually, it’s probably the most bare-bones sketch on that episode. It’s just Carvey at a piano singing a silly song about a lady buying and preparing broccoli. Even the dialog around the song is awkward and light on actual jokes. There’s also something ironic about a Dark Ages Saturday Night Live sketch that sees a fading star desperately trying to hold on to their spot by making up some nonsense, throwing it against the wall, and hoping it sticks.
Yet, you can probably recite that song if you’ve heard it before, and there’s a good chance it just got stuck in your brain for the hundredth time. Maybe you even remember Phil Hartman singing along to the music with ecstasy in his eyes or Dana Carvey becoming increasingly unhinged as he accidentally stumbles upon the vitamin-rich hook of his desperate tune. It’s one of those sketches that feels like it was born from the thick of one of the show’s golden eras. Hilariously, you will often see people comment that the sketch is from the time when “SNL was good” as they are seemingly unaware of, or indifferent to, just how bad things were at that time.
In its day, though, the sketch was exactly what the show needed: a big laugh featuring the new cast members. More than just one of the first big laughs of the new era, Carvey later described it as “one of the first laughs I ever remember getting in my life.” Unlike the previous years’ sketches which slowly died as they went along, you can see Carvey’s spirits being lifted when, much like the character he’s playing, he starts to realize that this whole crazy thing might work.
Yet, Carvey wasn’t very confident in the sketch when it aired. In a recent interview with fellow Saturday Night Live alumni David Spade, Carvey says he still doesn’t understand why the sketch remains one of those true, undeniable SNL classics nearly 40 years later.
Spade, like so many of us, loves the sketch, though. When he explains its appeal to Carvey, he does so succinctly and in a way that establishes why that sketch paved the way for a glorious revival of the entire Saturday Night Live concept.
“It’s so dumb and stupid, Dana,” Spade explains. “It’s not funny at all, so it’s funny.”
Choppin’ Broccoli Is The Heart of SNL
Saturday Night Live was saved from cancellation, in part, when Lorne Michaels remembered that the show exists to give the best young comedians a global platform they would probably never otherwise get to enjoy. Those comedians are elevated by the show, but the show isn’t so big that it works regardless of the performers. There’s only room for one guest star a night. Trying to load SNL with big names who do not have a talent for that brand of group sketch comedy will expose those names and diminish the value of the show in the long run.
The Choppin’ Broccoli sketch reminded everyone of that other Saturday Night Live golden rule: you can’t force comedy.
Coming off the most try-hard season in the show’s history, there is a casualness to that sketch that immediately resonated with nearly everyone. There isn’t much of a gimmick, it’s fundamentally silly, but it lets you feel like you’re in the room with these performers who are just trying to make each other laugh even if they don’t entirely know where any of this is going.
Saturday Night Live has long benefited from the feeling that you’re just hanging out with old friends sharing inside jokes that would seem alien to most but make you laugh uncontrollably. Those jokes often work not because they make sense on paper but because they come from a place of genuine enjoyment that is practically infectious. The difference is that, with SNL, your friends are some of the funniest people in the world and the joke can then be shared with millions.
And that’s what happened with Choppin’ Broccoli. That earworm of a gag worked its way into every bad water cooler and kitchen recreation for the next week until people tuned into the next Saturday Night Live episode to see what the new bit would be. The fear of missing out on the next great bit has long been powerful enough to keep people coming back week after week or at least keeping a loose eye on the show in search of the next hit.
Granted, Saturday Night Live hasn’t exactly enjoyed a perpetual golden age since Choppin’ Broccoli aired. The show is often a grab bag of hits that occasionally rises above an often painful series of misses. But through those ups and downs, we’ve never seen anything as bad as that ‘85 season that almost got one of the last TV institutions kicked off the air with cause.
You may not always love it, but it’s sad to think that we almost lost Saturday Night Live when SNL almost lost its identity. As it turns out, that identity is Dana Carvey at a piano singing about preparing vegetables while Phil Hartman looks on like he’s hearing The Beatles for the first time.
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