Saturday Night Live: Joe Montana (1987)

January 24, 1987.

The 9th episode of SNL's 12th season opened up with a skit that has been in my head ever since I saw it: We Are The Kickers.

Co-host Walter Payton introduces the song as part of "NFL Video Countdown."

"HUUANH!"

I can't find a link to the original sketch for you, but here's a link to a couple of wiseacres lip-synching along to the original audio in case anyone wants to see that. Anyway, chances are if we've ever watched football together, you've heard me sing this a few dozen times in a bad-Dracula accent. Or whenever any team is playing in Green Bay. ("No Green Bay!")

Both the 49ers and the Bears had been eliminated from the playoffs, so neither Joe Montana nor Walter Payton had anything better to do this weekend in '87. 

Payton appears in a few more skits than Montana does, but Joe gets the monologue.

Montana references his recent concussion and says he's fine. Then launches into the same monologue two more times. i.e. maybe he's not so fine. (Not the most original joke in the drawer, but hey.) This was before the days where the NFL's concussion policy wasn't quite the (stifled) conversation it is today. Later, Montana recalls this joke in another sketch, a NFL Today spoof with Brent Musberger (played by Kevin Nealon), Jimmy the Greek (played by Phil Hartman), and Dana Carvey as Neil Young.

From there we go to the episode's fake commercial: Adobe, the $179 car made out of clay.

This era of SNL's most popular skit comes next in the program:

"Tomorrow is the Super Bowl.
Harmless recreational event or vicious Satanic death ritual?"

It's an okay one. Jan Hooks plays Shirley Maclaine, who had recently published Out on a Limb and another book about reincarnation and other New Age topics, which made her a popular late-night-monologue target at the time. Perhaps unfairly. She's not the first or last Hollywood type with unconventional ideas that piggyback on her celebrity as an actor. As Coach Pantuso would say, "(shrugs) Showfolk."

The rest of the skit is mainly your basic football homoerotic innuendo jokes.

Next up is Sincere Guy Stu, an inner/outer voice skit, where Phil and Jan (Dan and Lesley) play a couple dancing around their desire to sleep with one another. A lot of "Sure you can stay over; it's cold out there" followed by "God I want to jump her bones" voiceover sort of stuff. Then Dan's roommate Stu (Montana) comes home, and his inner/ outer monologue is aligned. For example, in reply to their concern they'll be disturbing him, he says "Oh you won't disturb me; I'll be in my room masturbating." And then the inner-voiceover narration repeats the same.

Proving again the comedian's axiom: always end on masturbation.

The next skit is a great little spoof on movie/ cop show cliches. Phil Hartman plays an unhinged hood who is holding Kevin Nealon hostage. Phil keeps saying things like "You better wise up, buddy! Or I'll be tying you up with your guts." While Kevin keeps saying he's going to do whatever Phil wants, then reaching for the gun or trying to escape before rolling over and throwing his hands up."Whoah whoah whoah hey okay, you win! That was a stupid move on my part..." 

Repetitive, but the kind of repetition that lands with me.

This episode's Weekend Update references Blue Velvet at the beginning and a few other times. I watched this episode live - well, taped live, watched Sunday morning, and I do believe this was the first I ever heard of it. If only I knew then how much time I'd be spending in Uncle David's Black Lodge of Discomfort and Wonder in the years to come! ("For God's sake, Jeffries, where the hell have you been?!")

Jokes include: 

"We're breeding a generation of contemptuous young brats." - the White House Anti-Drug Program. Oh wait - that's an actual quote, my bad. (Can't say the White House was wrong on this one, though all that means is I'm now on the other side of 40.)

"Ted Turner Network to produce a black-and-white version of the Walt Disney classic Fantasia." Nice.

Some of the jokes don't land, such as Victoria Jackson's "Does my baby predict the future" skit, and the odd "Now get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich" quip about Corazon Aquino:

Was that a reference to something contemporaraneous? I can't remember. It's really kind of out of left field, and retrograde even for 1986, I think, though perhaps hindsight is blurring that for me who knows.

On a less retrograde level, at one point Miller looks into the camera and says "You know, I met Rob Lowe at a Lakers game, and he was really cool." That's right, kids - 30 years ago, the idea of casually dropping this sort of celebrity banality on a newscast was mockworthy enough simply to state and get a laugh. Picture delivering that line now - the reaction would be "Yeah? So?" Not that a contemporary audience is incapable of getting the joke, only that the context ("blurring the line between celebrities and news is obviously bimbo terrain injurious to our national discourse") was mainstreamed long ago. Then again, so has the line between stuff like "Weekend Update" and actual newscasts. 

Speaking of, A. Whitney Brown lays lays more groundwork for his future career as a Daily Kos staff writer or contributing editor or whatever he does over there when discussing double standards in police and race relations. 

"That's not racism; that's capitalism."

The big news is the Super Bowl, of course. Miller picked the Giants.

The Giants beat the Broncos 39-20 in Super Bowl XXI.

The best skit of the episode is probably the film noir send-up:

Starring Phil Hartman in the title role,

Nora Dunn as the Velda type, (looking a helluva lot like my maternal grandmother in this picture to boot - extra points for costume/era accuracy!)

and Jon Lovitz as the gangster ("I gotta go - I GOTTA GO!")

"Baby, you couldn't sing if you had Billie Holiday stuck in your throat."

Phil and Jon rattle off the film-noir narration perfectly. This was the second skit to feature an allusion to some kind of fish-sex fetish. This put me in mind of the classic Simpsons episode "A Fish Called Selma." ("Follow Me to the Springfield Aquarium!") Is there a writer's-room connection between one and the other?

It could be George Meyer that overlaps; his influence is felt even on Simpsons episodes that don't bear his credit,

The remaining skits include Great Moments in Super Bowl Gambling ("the Cowboys beat the spread!" Spreads made no sense to me until my twenties, so this went way over my head at the time), Jon Lovitz doing his yeah-that's-the-ticket character (Tommy Flanagan), and Michael Jackson's outer space workout camp.

Musicwise, Buster Poindexter does his featured performer schtick at ten-to-one with "Do I Feel High", and the episode's premier music guest is Debbie Harrt, who sings her perhaps-forgotten-classic "French Kissing in the USA" and the less-classic "In Love with Love."

What can you say? Debbie Harry, everyone. A classic.

And that's how it was... thirty years ago, tonight... live.

~

Watchmen at Thirty, Coda: Tales of the Black Freighter

WATCHMEN at THIRTY: 

CODA

"Tales of the Black Freighter," the pirate comic story that works its way through the Watchmen saga, doesn't quite mirror the larger story, but it's purposefully refractive: a lone survivor of a shattered paradigm/ shipwreck, hellbent on a plan to save the world he knows (his family in Davidstown), instead brings about their mutual destruction. Through a glass darkly, much the same way Misery's Return, the fake novel Paul Sheldon is writing for Annie Wilkes in Stephen King's Misery, or the fake play in Hamlet obliquely retell their larger respective story.

We get its (in-verse, i.e. fictional) backstory in the backpages of issue 5 ("A Man on Fifteen Dead Men's Chests.") In the alternate history of Watchmen, EC, instead of being forced at congressional gunpoint to drop its horror line, is virtually bankrolled by Uncle Sam to protect the image of certain comic-book inspired agents in their employ. EC flourishes, and their pirate line of comics is the most popular. 

Enter: Tales of the Black Freighter by Max Shea and Joe Orlando (later Walt Feinberg.) 

Of the three gentlemen just mentioned, only one (Joe Orlando, above right - well obviously not the above left I guess, though he did draw it) is real. And Orlando did indeed start at EC and migrate later to DC, where he stayed for decades. In the Watchmen world, it is DC that is reprinting the original Shea-penned "Freighter" stories along with new material from the author. 

"Problems set in for the book around issue twenty-five, when Shea began his controversial run of issues based around the contents of plundered books in the library of the Freighter's captain, including banned tomes supposedly originally headed for eternal suppression within the vaults of Vatican City when stolen en route by pirates. Described as 'blatantly pornographic' four of the projected five stories were rejected by DC which brought about the argument in which Shea quit the book and comics as well, going on the write such classic novels as the twice-filmed FOGDANCING."

Not sure what the FOGDANCING allusion is, but it's funny Moore so accurately foresaw his own departure from DC.

These backpages also bolster the story of Max Shea's disappearance in the whole Veidt Island Conspiracy. Beyond the ways it plays counterpoint to the other aspects of Watchmen, though, it's also a fantastic little gruesome tale for its own sake.  

The Motion Picture Comic that I've utilized for the past twelve posts came with the short animated film based on "Freighter," as adapted by Zack Snyder and Alex Tse, and directed by Daniel Delpurgatorio (what a name!) and Mike Smith.

As narrated by Gerard Butler

with some fiendish help from Jared Harris.

It's straight-up animation, not a Motion Picture Comic. I'm not sure if it's a Special Feature on the Watchmen DVD or not.

Okay I just checked Amazon. It appears to only be for sale as paired with the MPC.

It's a great little adaptation. Opinions remain divided on Snyder's overall stewardship of Watchmen, but I give him credit for extending the experience to this animated short and the MPC. I hate when someone gets carte blanche with a project and spends his or her time twatting off on Twitter or whatever. Coordinate a multi-front mass media / Easter Eggs offensive if you've got so much time, twitter-man!

For what it's worth, I give Snyder's Watchmen an A-.

There are phrases in "Tales from the Black Freighter" that embedded themselves instantly in my thirteen year old mind and have been recalled fondly - and sometimes with chills - ever since. Chiefly among them:

I wish I could tell you that everytime I head east - and living in a city-on-a-grid like Chicago, I know exactly when I'm heading east so theoretically I could do this everytime I leave the apartment - I mutter "east... borne on the naked backs of murdered men..." but I'm not that cool. Or creepy. Maybe I'm that creepy, I don't know. I'm not headed-to-Davidstown-creepy, though, thank Christ, so I'm not sweating it. Anyway, this lovely bit of Moore-penned hysteria is my own personal marker for purple prose: if you aspire to gothic horror, you have to hit around or above this line.

Other turns of "Freighter" phrase that have stayed with me over the years:

Amongst horrors must I dwell.

I don't find occasion to say this one as often as I'd like. And finally:

"Whoever we are, wherever we reside,
we exist on the whim of murderers."

Alan Moore, ladies and gentlemen. Whatever the occasion calls for, whatever the genre demands, when he casts his Saturnalian eye upon it he reveals the horrible, pulpy truth.

I mentioned some of the parallels to the larger story. I didn't want to get bogged down with spelling them all out, and I figure most of you reading this know all of this stuff already. Here then are some moments that struck me along the way of this reread that I saved for this end of the line aperitif:

So yeah, just a great, grisly piece of writing, and admirably brought to life by Snyder, Butler, Harris (particularly Harris - his voice is so perfectly suited to the oozy death and despair on the raft), Delpurgatorio and the gang. It even ends with the "Black Freighter" song ("Pirate Jenny") from Brecht's "Threepenny Opera," a work to which Moore returns time and again in his subsequent work.

Also on the DVD is a 45-minute-ish 20/20 pastiche entitled "Under the Hood," which is drawn mostly from the Hollis-penned memoir excerpted in Chapters 1 through 3 and from Chapter 9's personal-effects of Sally Jupiter. 

With a sprinkling of backpages material from other chapters, as well.

Not bad. The lesser of the two efforts, compared to the "Freighter" cartoon, but it's a blast for me to see all the levels of Watchmen's world given their due. 

The levels of verisimilitude and worldbuilding in Watchmen were unprecedented at the time and remain so over-the-top and wonderful thirty years on. This was a fun series to start almost-a-year-to-the-day ago, and it'll be an unpleasant adjustment to not engage with it on a monthly basis in 2017. 

I mean, not that I still couldn't, but along with y'all, I mean. 

Final Verdict: "The classic of comic book literature" still lives up to its rep, thirty years on. It's a shame the situation surrounding it became what it did and we'll never have Dave Gibbons, Alan Moore, John Higgins, Len Wein, and Zack Snyder (and whomever else) chairing a panel on it at some convention, or a commentary track on the DVD, or a new HBO show with all of them weighing on it, etc. 

All we have is the art itself, still as rewarding, challenging, and satisfying as ever.

~