The late-night TV show “Saturday Night Live” is officially 50 now, as it debuted on October 11, 1975. Its legend as a comedy-culture dynamo is almost as old, captured for the first time in book form in this collection of sketch scripts from Seasons 1 and 2.
Today, it reads like an old family album, a hodgepodge of stray jokes and scrawled banter by its original cast, writers and other creatives. The website Vulture called it a “samizdat scrapbook.” Amusing it is, cohesive it isn’t. What it captures is the afterglow of brilliance that made the show such a must-see for Boomers and Gen Xers back in the day.
How does it read in retrospect? Depending on your age, either very poignant or rather dated. This was a show that took pride in its ability to be offensive back when the price for such line-stepping was minimal.