The Short Stuff Before SNL

In retrospect, I'm more of a 'Second City' type of person. 'Saturday Night Live' doesn't hold up in reruns, taken out of the context of current events. It's nostalgia and a few good actors and actresses, but SNL started the trend of milking a joke well beyond its expiration date. 'Second City TV' has a self-contained framing device and while it helps to get some of the current references, it's mostly show biz tropes turned on their heads with hilarious results.

Before SNL, there were a rash of what, for better want of a title, could be counter-culture comedies. While some were taking a genre and mocking it, like 'The First Nudie Musical' and 'Flesh Gordon', and in those two cases doing it with a good degree of success, there were also sketch comedy movies, a genre that had gone out of style with 'Teaserama' back in the 1950s. And unlike that movie, this was not simply putting vaudeville acts in front of a stationary camera, but attempts at doing a new form of comedy.

I'll focus on three movies here, all in production before the first season of SNL. The first one is 'The Boob Tube', and without a doubt it is the worse of the lot and one of the worse movies that I have ever seen. While coming close to being a situation movie, since it mocks the soap opera format (right down to the cheesy organ), it also contains a number of commercial parodies. And there is hardly a chuckle to be found in the 78 minute length. This one is painful.

This is the type of movie that thinks that just saying the word 'boob' will get a laugh. It uses the new explicitness in early 1970s films to say something, but what that might be is completely muddled. The whole thing plays as if it was done live at a regional dinner theater, except much of the acting doesn't even make it to that level. And the jokes about rape, especially about raping a sixteen year old, are painful. The only good news is that the director and writer, Christopher Odin, doesn't have another credit to his name.

The entire production seems to have been shot of videotape quite cheaply and then transferred to film, and the 4 x 5 framing of my copy seems to be correct. This appears to be produced right at the cusp of the X rated industry, and a couple of the actors actually appear to be professionals, although the point of the movie is to act badly. Suffice to say, all fulfill that requirement, some worse than others. The commercials are horrible and the soap plot is an excess for innuendos that wouldn't make a grade school boy blush. It is simply grim from start to finish. as this excerpt (there doesn't seem to ba a trailer online) will aptly demonstrate.

How I even acquired this movie is a mystery to me. I had no previous knowledge of it, so showing up in my collection is puzzling. I must have confused it with a movie that I did see when it first came out, the infinitely more interesting and better 'Groove Tube'. Colleen Brennan, here billed as Sharron Kelly, shows no acting talent at all but is wholesomely corn fed, later going to a long career in hard core. John Alderman is a character actor who did everything from television episodes to 'Cleopatra Jones' to the occasional hard core non-sex role. He may give the closest to an actual performance, along with Marcie Barkin, who at least understands how she needs to make her character funny. No one else does.

'The Groove Tube' holds up much better, a short 72 minutes that flies from skit to skit while providing a lot of genuine laughs. It was the solo creation of Ken Shapiro, who had been a child star, especially noted for his performances on the 1950s Milton Berle show. Ken wrote, directed, and starred in many of the skits, but put it together (over a period of years, I would guess from the look of things)  in such a clever way that it doesn't appear at all to be a vanity project. Ken and Chevy Chase (who appeared in four minutes of the finished film but 'starred' in it after his SNL fame) were alumni of the short-lived 'Great American Dream Machine', a very early PBS comedy sketch show that had its funding pulled for insulting Nixon too many times.

'The Groove Tube' is equally as raunchy as 'The Boob Tube' (even more, with many full frontal shots) but uses the new freedom to lampoon television across the spectrum to often devastating effect. When this came out, the word among my friends that this was a movie to catch. It was a complete a very welcome shock during the first viewing and it was obviously the template from which they built 'Saturday Night Life'. The third sketch is finished by thirteen minutes into the running time, and very little time is wasted. This film still remains funny and subversive even to this day.

I have to bring the last film that I want to discuss in this group, 'Kentucky Friend Movie', equally enjoyable but significantly different in tone. Technically, KFM came out after SNL, but it was largely produced in individual segments, many done before the late night comedy program. A joint creation of the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker writing team and director John Landis, this movie was a huge hit and launched quite a number of Hollywood careers. Landis meeting the writers happened at the precise moment needed to get the best out of all their talents.

KFM is the more accomplished movie; Landis had a long track record, first as a go-fer,then as a stunt man, finally getting his first ultra-low budget movie 'Schlock' done when he was only 21 years old. The movie broadens the scope of satire to include Hollywood itself as well as industrial movies. In fact, the best parts are those not aimed strictly at television, including the funniest five minutes in all 1970s cinema, the trailer for 'Catholic High School Girls in Trouble', which always leaves me in stitches.

While any sketch movie it is going to be hit and miss, KFM has good pacing that lasts for the entire 83 minutes. There are three listed writers, but I would bet that a few more, including John Landis and his leftover gorilla suit, offered even more gags. It follows the Z-A-Z formula of rattling off jokes as rapidly as Henny Youngman, barely setting them up and moving on to hide any that might fall flat. The longest segment, 'A Fistful of Yen', is a really funny send-up of the Bruce Lee craze, with an excellent performance by Evan C. Kim.

Both movies are about the same quality, but with the exception of Chevy Chase, 'The Groove Tube' launched no careers despite earning 200 times its production cost, even that of the very talented Ken Shapiro. The difference, I feel, is that of East Coast versus West Coast sensibilities. The longest segment in that movie is a television parody called 'The Dealers', and it captures perhaps all too perfectly the ghetto existence of the Lower East Side of that period, right down to the heroin addict breaking in and robbing the two helpless schmucks trying to push grass.

The Vaguely intellectual Jewish sensibilities of 'The Groove Tube' worked against Ken Shapiro, despite having created a blockbuster. He only managed one other credit in his career, a Chevy Chase vehicle called 'Modern Problems' which gets very mixed reviews. After that, he seems to have beat a retreat from Tinseltown. I suspect that he was a true East Village hippie, slightly radical. "The Groove Tube' is one of the rare glimpses into that milieu. 'Kentucky Fried Movie', on the other hand, was the comedy equivalent of Spielberg and Lucas taking over Hollywood; the square guys who never partied figuring out the formula first and getting the opportunity to take over the business while the hipper guys floundered and eventually failed.