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After a half-century of comedy and music (and what at times felt like an equal amount of buildup and hype), how do you at last kick off a prime-time 50th anniversary special for “Saturday Night Live”? Calmly and serenely, it turns out.
The long-awaited “SNL50: The Anniversary Special” opened on Sunday with the musicians Paul Simon and Sabrina Carpenter sharing the stage at the show’s familiar home base at Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
They exchanged a simple joke, setting a theme that would recur for the rest of the night: Time passes, whether you like it or not. Simon said they were about to play a song that he had performed on the show with George Harrison in 1976. “I was not born then,” Carpenter said, “and neither were my parents.”
And who else could perform the opening monologue on this occasion but Steve Martin, a 16-time host whose own rising star in the 1970s imparted some needed credibility and momentum to “S.N.L.” when it was just starting out.
Introducing himself on Sunday night as the show’s “newest diversity hire,” Martin reminded the audience that “S.N.L.” turned 50 this year while he turned 79. “But I feel like I’m 65,” he said, “which is also not good.”
John Mulaney, a former “S.N.L.” writer turned frequent host, came onstage and offered his own reflections on the show’s longevity. “Over the course of 50 years, 894 people have hosted ‘Saturday Night Live,’” Mulaney said. “And it amazes me that only two of them have committed murder.”
And of course you can’t have a Steve Martin monologue without an appearance from his friend and co-star Martin Short (or “the only Canadian who wasn’t in ‘Schitt’s Creek,’” as Martin called him). Short said he had thought the two were meant to host together, and Martin asked him if he had his passport. When Short answered no, Martin shouted for two Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to pull him off the stage.
In an early sketch, he performed as a contestant on the long-running game show parody “Black Jeopardy.” But he wasn’t just any contestant: Murphy was playing Tracy Morgan, alongside the real-life Morgan, who was playing another contestant named Darius. And Murphy — as he tends to do — delighted in his alter-ego role, boasting as Morgan might in order to prove his wealth: “I eat four-cheese lasagna,” he declared. “If it only got three cheeses, I ain’t eating it.” (Not even Tom Hanks, reprising his “Black Jeopardy” role as a conservative voter named Doug, could steal the sketch away from him.)
Meryl Streep made her “S.N.L.” sketch debut, sitting alongside Kate McKinnon, Pedro Pascal, and Woody Harrelson as a fellow alien abductee in the show’s “Close Encounter” series.
John Mulaney’s mini-musical of the night was a tour de force, taking viewers through a musical history tour of the city from the scuzzy 1970s to the present day.
In other segments from the night, there was a new entry in the series “Domingo,” the virally popular series that began with the “Bridesmaids Speech” sketch in October, adding Pascal and Bad Bunny as his equally lascivious brothers. And although the series predates social media by several decades, Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts” was back, just in time for the era of bite-size TikTok consumption.
A re-airing of Tom Schiller’s 1978 short film “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” in which John Belushi, in old-age makeup, visits the gravesites of his deceased “S.N.L.” co-stars, now plays very differently: Belushi became the first “S.N.L.” performer to die just four years later, at the age of 33. But what still comes through in the film is the refusal by “S.N.L.” to get too sentimental about its own past.
Another entry in the series was Andy Samberg’s digital short “Anxiety,” in which he assures us that every single person who has ever worked on “S.N.L.” has anxiety. (And possibly I.B.S.)
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