Saturday Night Live

Frank Zappa in a title card for Saturday Night Live, during his second appearance, 1978.

Saturday Night Live is an American TV comedy and variety show based in New York City that has been broadcast by NBC on Saturday nights since October 11, 1975. It brought alternative comedy more into the mainstream on US television and launched the careers of several popular comedians. Various sketches on Saturday Night Live were also adapted into Hollywood comedy movies. Like the title implies, every sketch on Saturday Night Live is performed live, which gives the sketches a hit-or-miss atmosphere, with some being brilliant, with great improvisations, and others not getting the laughs the writers or comedians expected.

Saturday Night Live also offers room for musical performances by many pop and rock artists. Frank Zappa appeared in Saturday Night Live on two occasions, He performed music with his band, but also participated in some of the sketches.

• December 11th 1976
• October 21st 1978

The 1976 appearance

Zappa during a performance of I'm The Slime in Saturday Night Live.

In the 10th episode of the second season of Saturday Night Live, broadcast on 11 December 1976, Zappa performed I'm The Slime in the studio, with some of the lines written on a blackboard, while Don Pardo reads them. Through a special effect, actual slime oozed out of the TV monitor. During the same show, he and his band also performed The Purple Lagoon (with an appearance by John Belushi as his samurai character Futaba) and Peaches En Regalia.

Zappa during the Killer Trees sketch.

Zappa appeared again in The Killer Trees sketch, featuring Garrett Morris, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. When the police organize a line-up, Zappa appears among several Christmas Trees, suspected of having murdered people.

The 1978 appearance

Frank Zappa during the Coneheads sketch, 1978, with Jane Curtin, Dan Aykroyd and Laraine Newman.

In the third episode of the fourth season of Saturday Night Live, broadcast on 21 October 1978, Frank Zappa appeared as host, performing Dancin' Fool with The Mothers. During his announcement, he infamously improvised the line: "I'm reading this off these cards underneath this camera, here".

Zappa then appeared in a sketch starring the recurring characters The Coneheads, a family of extraterrestrial aliens from the planet Remulak stuck on planet Earth. The father (Beldar) is played by Dan Aykroyd, the mother (Prymaat) by Jane Curtin and the daughter (Connie) by Laraine Newman. The comedy came from the fact that the Coneheads are very obviously extraterrestrials, since they all have cone-shaped heads and speak in very bureaucratic terms about everyday Earthly phenomena. Nevertheless, none of the humans they meet catch on to this. In the sketch, The Coneheads At Home, Zappa plays Connie's boyfriend. The sketch concludes with Beldar showing his album Studio Tan, released without Zappa's permission by Warner Brothers. Zappa criticizes Warners and Beldar and Prymaat then eat the record. The Coneheads were also the subject of a 1993 live action comedy film called "Coneheads".

Frank Zappa on Saturday Night Live, during A Night On Freak Mountain sketch, with Laraine Newman and Dan Aykroyd.

Zappa's third appearance during this episode is A Night On Freak Mountain, a sketch where he meets some Hippies (Dan Aykroyd and Laraine Newman), after his car gets stuck in a mud slide. Paul Schaffer also turns up, playing the character Don Kirshner.

Frank Zappa and John Belushi.

Zappa then performed The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing and Rollo with The Mothers, while John Belushi made an appearance playing guitar as his samurai character, Futaba.

Background and backlash

During his second appearance on Saturday Night Live, Frank Zappa broke an unwritten rule on the show by breaking character. It started during his performance of Dancin' Fool, when he mentioned he was reading cue cards. In the other sketches, he also frequently mugged the camera. This was not appreciated by the show's creators. They and Zappa also had creative differences, with Zappa trying to dictate the comedy and the style. He also had no appreciation for the actors easy-going approach in terms of drugs. It resulted in him being banned from ever reappearing again:

"It's a very difficult thing to do; they never make it easy on anyone who hosts the show. All the direction and attention goes to the sketches. They're not called skits--they become 'incensed' if you call them skits--and it's all designed to accommodate the people who are regulars on the show, so anybody who goes on there to hosts is at a severe disadvantage. Because they never tell you what camera is on, and you're not supposed to memorize your script because they're rewriting right up to show time. And so you're looking at the cue cards, and unless you're used to acting live on TV, you haven't got a prayer; you'll be looking at the wrong camera. It was really hard. And the other thing that happened was--and I didn't find out about it until the day after the show--that the first day I went there for the meetings with them they didn't like me and wanted to get rid of me. But no one said anything to my face while I was working on the thing. So they had written dialogue for me to say that I wouldn't normally say; they wouldn't let me write any of my own stuff. I think I'd be a fantastic television personality. I think I'd be a real good interviewer if I had a talk show, or a variety show. I'd be really good at it. But just to get up there and be the dumbbell in 'A Night On Freak Mountain'... I mean, sure, I'll do that for a laugh, but I'm not gonna build a life on it."

— Frank Zappa, interviewed by Stereo Review, April 1979.

"(...) We were doing the Coneheads scene, which Frank loved. We were all in position to do it when Frank, said, 'What am I supposed to do? Read these cards?' It totally broke the reality; it was awful. (...) Maybe he thought he was above the whole thing or he was nervous or he didn't like the script. Maybe he thought he was being funny. But in fact the audience sort of gasped."

— Dan Aykroyd, interviewed by Playboy, August 1993.

Interviewed by Steven Rosen for Record Review (June 1982), Zappa reflected on Saturday Night Live that he used to be a fan: "The last time I did their show, the only thing they cared about was the ratings and not offending people. I actually sat there and heard a conversation in one of the planning rooms where they said 'We can't put this skit on because it's going to offend women's groups.' I mean if you have to worry about who you're going to offend when you're doing something funny, then . . . see what I mean? It's that same America"

Zappa kept a copy of his Saturday Night Live script for decades, until it was auctioned, after Zappa's house in 7885 Woodrow Wilson Drive was sold in 2016.

Records Of This Show

• DVD Frank Zappa At SNL 1976–78

Legacy

Don Pardo can be heard providing narration on Zappa's Punky's Whips, I'm The Slime and Legend Of The Illinois Enema Bandit on his album Zappa In New York. Zappa also wrote a song, Conehead, making references to the Saturday Night Live sketch characters.

Dana Carvey appeared as Zappa in a Saturday Night Live sketch on the May 12, 1990 edition. (This was the episode hosted by then-controversial comedian Andrew Dice Clay. The cold open was a parody of It's A Wonderful Life, with Dice looking to jump off a bridge and his guardian devil {played by Jon Lovitz} shows Dice what happened because he didn't host, which included Frank Zappa hosting instead and him going on a long rant about censorship, and Nora Dunn being crushed by one of Sinéad O'Connor's amplifiers. [Dunn and O'Connor, the originally scheduled musical guest, both refused to appear on the show because of Clay.])

Joel Hodgson credited the "homemade aesthetic" of the deliberately low-budget special effects of his own co-created show Mystery Science Theater 3000 partially to the A Night On Freak Mountain sketch: "The example that comes to mind is an SNL sketch from the seventies, when Frank Zappa was the musical guest. It was called “Night on Freak Mountain” and at a certain point they cut to a pretty crude model – which was supposed to be an exterior shot of Freak Mountain – and right away everyone in the studio audience laughed. I found it so charming, funny and real.".

Gary Panter (who illustrated the cover of Studio Tan without Warners executives telling him that they released the record without Zappa's permission) remebered feeling quite ashamed when he saw Zappa in the Coneheads sketch destroy a copy of Studio Tan on the air, making a statement against Warners.

External links

• Wikipedia Article
• Article on Globalia about the Saturday Night Live sketches with Zappa.