‘S.N.L.’ Weekend Update: 50 Seasons of Mocking News and Minting Stars
The New York Times
The news parody has launched comedy careers and courted controversy. Here, Lorne Michaels, Chevy Chase, Tina Fey, Michael Che and others recount its influential history.
Roughly midway through the first “Saturday Night Live” broadcast, in October 1975, Chevy Chase, dressed in a suit and seated behind a simple desk with a telephone, read a joke about the new Detroit headquarters for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
The union’s president, Chase said, had remarked that Jimmy Hoffa would “always be a cornerstone in the organization.”
Thus was born Weekend Update, the satirical news segment and institution-within-an-institution at “S.N.L.,” a fundamental part of the series for virtually all of its 50 years.
While hardly the first TV news parody, Weekend Update is the most enduring franchise of its kind, giving “S.N.L.” its most direct platform to make fun of politics, presidents, global crises and daily oddities.
Like “S.N.L.” itself, Weekend Update has been a launchpad for comedy careers. It has also been a crucible of controversy, particularly when its iconoclastic performers have come into conflict with NBC executives who weren’t laughing at their pointed routines.
Weekend Update was designed to a satisfy a young audience that was craving topical commentary. “We were following Watergate, the end of the Vietnam War,” said Lorne Michaels, the “S.N.L.” creator and longtime executive producer. “There was a lot going on.”
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*Well, maybe only to me. “S.N.L.” fans all have their own idea of the show’s peak, and this is mine.
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