Saturday Night Live – Edited by Anne Beatts & John Head, 1977 ★★★★

Still Funny After All These Years

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 feels 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.

Big Screen, Little Screen – Rex Reed, 1971 ★★★

Pen as Sword

Harshness is no virtue, but sometimes it comes in handy for an entertainment critic. In that line of work, you make a stronger impression by throwing jabs now and again. Making friends is not the objective. Critics who get that can be fun to read.

Back when he was young and bratty, Rex Reed was an expert jabber. Often this worked to the detriment of his craft, a lack of restraint that made him come off more nasty than honest. Yet spiciness did make him colorfully readable, especially when traversing a broad array of culture.

Big Screen, Little Screen is a series of essays and capsule reviews that first appeared in journals like Women’s Wear Daily, Holiday, and The New York Times. Mostly about movies, with some television reviews, Big Screen, Little Screen is an incisive, unabashedly opinionated round-up of cinema as it entered the golden auteur era of the late 1960s-1970s.

Bob And Ray: Keener Than Most Persons – David Pollack, 2013 ★★★

Two for the Show

These days, surrealism is well-established as a basis for comedy. You don’t even have to get laughs if you can twist what passes for reality in a uniquely enjoyable way. It wasn’t always so.

In the 1940s and 1950s, comedic premises were fairly square and straightforward. People did jokes and sketches and then played music or sold war bonds or whatever. There were cartoons and the Three Stooges, but those were widely seen as being for kids.

Then in 1946, two announcers found themselves on the radio together in Boston, Massachusetts, and American comedy began to change.

Saturday Night: A Backstage History Of Saturday Night Live – Doug Hill & Jeff Weingrad, 1986 ★★★★

When The Kids Broke Free

It was the show that launched a thousand catch-phrases, dozens of comedy legends, and hype so outsized it engendered feelings of inadequacy long before its original cast left the premises.

How does one get a handle on Saturday Night Live?

If you are Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, you start at the beginning, with an aging talk show host who wanted to rest his show on weekends, a declining broadcasting network left with a large hole in their programming, and a hungry young producer named Lorne Michaels who wanted to make TV for Baby Boomers like himself.

The Murder Of Bob Crane – Robert Graysmith, 1993 ★★★

Too Much Sex Can Be Hazardous to your Health

He played the lead role in one of television’s strangest sitcoms, a farce about Allied soldiers imprisoned by the Third Reich. A few years later, Bob Crane was a prisoner himself, of a swinger’s lifestyle that was not only pathetic and ruinous, but as Robert Graysmith posits in his book The Murder Of Bob Crane, ultimately fatal.

A sleeping Crane was bludgeoned to death in a Scottsdale, Arizona apartment one June morning in 1978. This brought into sharp focus how he had lived, using the dregs of a once-flourishing career to hook up with all the women he could find. Suspicion quickly centered on John Henry Carpenter, Crane’s wingman during his sexcapades, yet the case was circumstantial and the horizon of others with motives too vast.

All The Words, Vol. Two – Monty Python's Flying Circus, 1989 ★★★

Monty Python: The Spam Years

Genius is hard to capture, and hard to sustain. The impulse to keep doing what works often misleads; so too can the desire to change things up. If you do something that makes a large portion of your audience uncomfortable, the challenge can be that much greater, particularly if you are dependent on government sponsorship while honing your craft.

All this comes into play when reviewing this second, final volume of one of television comedy’s most legendary achievements, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” Vol. Two collects transcripts for the last 22 episodes of the famous series, those airing from December 1970 to December 1974.

In All His Glory: The Life And Times Of William S. Paley And The Birth Of Modern Broadcasting – Sally Bedell Smith, 1990 ★★★★★

Ozymandias of the Airwaves

Ephemerality is the very nature of mass media. In that way at least, William S. Paley proved its perfect embodiment.

Paley built a radio and television empire with CBS, “the Tiffany Network,” known for a much-touted, sometimes honored commitment to quality broadcasting. While acquiring new markets and talents was Paley’s defining contribution to CBS’s glory, it was secondary to his baser passions for lucre, women, and fame. Paley got most of what he wanted, but as we watch him on his deathbed, it’s hard not to feel a Calvinistic twinge of regret for his limited vision.

All The Words, Vol. One – Monty Python's Flying Circus, 1989 ★★★★

Python... Before the Big Screen

Loving good old Monty Python comes easy, but it’s a sign of age when you hear what it is about Python people love. For many, debate centers around cinema. Arthur? Brian? Perhaps some wafer-thin love for Mr. Creosote?

Here's Johnny! – Ed McMahon, 2005 ½★

A Sidekick's Lot Is Not an Easy One

Whenever I tuck into a celebrity memoir, great expectations are not an issue. Maybe I’ll learn something. Maybe I’ll be entertained. But it’s unlikely I’ll be blown away, or even remember much about the book a year later. Grant me pleasant diversion, and I’m satisfied.

Johnny Carson – Henry Bushkin, 2013 ★★½

Keeping Uneasy Company with America's Host

One day, while being interviewed by a British journalist for an article that would appear in a February, 1978 issue of The New Yorker, the celebrated talk-show host Johnny Carson gave a strange answer to a routine question. Asked whom he regarded as his best friend, Carson named his lawyer, Henry Bushkin.

This must have come as a surprise to many readers, accustomed as they were to Carson’s smooth repartee with a wide range of guests on NBC-TV’s “The Tonight Show.” It certainly surprised Bushkin. 

But it won’t surprise anyone reading Bushkin’s memoir of life with Carson. By the time the anecdote occurs, almost halfway through the book, one senses Carson was a man without much in the way of friends or sentiment.

Those Guys Have All The Fun – James Andrew Miller & Tom Shales, 2011 ★★★

Those Guys Play Rough

ESPN started out a good idea, but quickly became subsumed by ego, hubris, and testosterone.

To figure that out, you don’t need Those Guys Have All The Fun – an hour of their live coverage of any sports event reveals this well enough – but it certainly helps connect the dots. To succeed at ESPN takes a certain kind of mentality, James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales reveal in this 2011 book, where cutthroat tactics and crass individualism hold sway.