Good stuff:
Robert DeNiro and Kermit the Frog singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” was great.
The Woomba: “It cleans my business. My lady business.”
DeNiro on “Pranksters”.
Smigel’s TV Fun House.
DeNiro as the crazy cat lady.
Kermit, Fozzy, Animal, and Gonzo singing Horatio Sans’ Christmas song.
I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I have to say that this one seemed pretty unfunny to me. Maybve the most unfunny of the season. DeNiro never learns his lines and sits and reads. Part of it seems to be that they think “Hey its Deniro dressed as a Lady” is going to carry a sketch and he himself doesn’t need to be funny or to learn his lines. There is an element of insulting the audience to it.
I guess the smigel Santa was amusing in that I laughed. Although it, along with the Weekend update guests (Preacher and Movie moguls) were all more along the lines of leaving me saying how “clever and hip, wow that is neat” rather than they actually made me laugh uproariously.
HSanz as the informant was the only thing that I thought even vaguely worked and it was kind of dumb – there seemed to be no exit to it so they made a silly one.
DeNiro just read his lines off cue cards the last time he was on, too. How lazy. He has as much rehearsal time as the other actors in the skits, and they bother to learn their lines. It looked like he was even reading his closing thank-yous off a cue card.
The return of the Muppets was interesting. Those familiar with the first season of SNL (1975-76) will remember that Muppets were a regular part of the show; they were dropped because their good-natured humor didn’t mesh with the cynical irony of the show’s writers.
The best part of the show was Robert Smigel’s parody of the Rudolph Christmas special, with a Team America twist.
Dumbf**kistan made me laugh. And “we played stickball behind the Olive Garden.” It was pretty crappy though.
You should go back and watch those shows again. There was not much ‘good-natured’ about those muppets. Scred, the Mighty Favog… They were GREAT.
And there was nothing cuddly about them…
As I understand what happened, the cast didn’t like the Muppets. Maybe it cut into their time too much or something (SNL was cutthroat back then). Then the Muppet Show came along, Henson got busy, and eventually they were just pulled. Which was a shame.
I rarely catch SNL in its live form these days. I had heard I wasn’t missing much, but that Woomba spot is on par with my favorite “commercial” skits from the past, like “Little Chocolate Donuts” and “Cookie Dough Gatorade.”
According to a book I read on SNL (not the recent one of interviews compiled by Tom Shales), the cast and writers were divided about the presence of the Muppets. Gilda Radner, for example, didn’t seem to have too much of a problem with them (in fact, she eventually guested on “The Muppet Show”) but others, namely John Belushi and Michael ("I do not write for felt.) O’ Donoghue, detested them. Cutting into cast sketch time might’ve had something to do with it but I think another factor was jealousy. There’s an old quote attributed to W.C. Fields saying you should never perform with dogs or children. You can probably add puppets to that list. Early reviews of SNL in 1975 often pointed to the Muppets as being one of the show’s best features and that, no doubt, didn’t go over too well with some of the more insecure performers who, after finally getting a big break, were now apparently being upstaged by pieces of “felt” every week. So, the anti-Muppet contingent won out and they were gone by the end of the first season.