Tasteless, From New York
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television TASTELESS, FROM NEW YORK BY MARVIN KITMAN The first episode of the new Saturday Night Live on NBC this season (November 15, 11:30 p.m. EST) was a total disaster, the worst thing to...
...The initial episode this season was really offensive...
...She booked the rock acts...
...Not a goofy-looking comedienne like Rad-ner...
...The worst of both worlds...
...Michaels shunned them vigorously...
...That's the first rule of comedy...
...Some cut-ups...
...The reason is that she is the opposite of Michaels, who had an adversary relationship with the network brass...
...Panicky NBC executives have been breaking fire alarm boxes all over the RCA Building...
...What a mess Tartikoff has made...
...Hers was the last word...
...But the real problem is Jean Doumanian...
...And she actually hired a Mike Douglas jokesmith...
...Surely one of the Three Stooges would have at least poked Moe in the eye...
...Skits are changed continually, so the cast never has time to rehearse anything...
...I don't mind monkeys throwing up on the screen...
...Her other important contribution in the past was securing rooms for the guest hosts at the Sherry Netherland and Marriott's Essex House...
...His hold on her is fiendish, and further cemented by the presence of Letty Aron-son, associate producer, who happens to be Allen's sister...
...EST) was a total disaster, the worst thing to visit the tube since the invention of the laugh track...
...They don't call her Jean Doberman-Pinscher for nothing...
...The writing staff is not the best ever assembled before God...
...We're trying to have a radical point of view," one of her hench-persons said...
...That was the secret ingredient of the original SNL...
...The time slot should be given to Dave Let-terman...
...The second week got worse, and if that strikes you as remarkable, you would have been absolutely amazed by the third outing...
...It was either make her producer of TV's biggest comedy show, or give it to the guy who fixes the water cooler...
...The first show, for example, opened with host Elliot Gould smelling his underwear...
...He had a trunk filled with his diapers, boys' jockey shorts and boxer shorts that he wanted to share with us...
...The class act of the night, "The Leather Weather Report," was so appallingly tasteless and dumb that host Malcolm MacDowell and two cast members refused to play the climactic scene: MacDowell hanging from a map of the U.S...
...But no...
...A legitimate request...
...while being sprayed with shaving cream and whipped by cherubic cast member Denny Dillon...
...That was a big clue about this crew...
...And did you see the "kill-the-Commie" skit...
...Without SNL Carter's Administration would have fallen...
...They were squeaky clean California types (e\en if some of them hail from the East), beautiful enough to appear in a soap opera cast...
...You can't imagine the significance of that "Live, from New York" to the young...
...She is referred to as having been "associate producer" of the show in the newspaper stories-all written by her, 1 suspect...
...Then there were sketches about breast cancer, homosexuals and Jews...
...The decline of SNL is sad because it has been a very important phenomenon in American culture...
...it was stupid Left-wing comedy...
...Prior to her arrival at SNL, she scheduled music acts for the short-lived Howard Cosell Saturday Night Live on ABC a-classic in the annals of ludicrous programs-and before that she was a secretary at Daphne Productions, or Dick Cavett's talk show...
...She is the producer who this year has replaced SNL's cantankerous founding father, Lome Michaels, a tough act to follow...
...She is more interested in whether her scribes talk to the press than in the jokes they come up with...
...They even had a psychiatrist with a Yiddish accent...
...Not a snaggle-tooth in the group...
...It's their Camelot, not to mention the only haven for experimentation in TV humor...
...And you can't get humor out of Amy, although on SNL they tried and tried...
...The new Saturday Night Live is the Hinden-burg of air disasters...
...Joe Piscopo was the most traditional improv club standup comic...
...Sickening...
...The cast is disappointing...
...Or Steve Allen...
...Ironically, everything she knows about comedy is whispered into her tin ear by Woody Allen...
...Not a fat madman like Belushi...
...Gilly Gottfried turned out to be a piece of cardboard...
...When the series began, they took the writers' admittedly awful lines and did nothing with them...
...I thought 1 was looking at a bunch of Fridays clones...
...The cast is definitely not ready for the Not Ready for Prime Time Players...
...and so was Ann Risley, whose other claim to fame is being a good friend of Woody Allen's and appearing in his last three movies...
...As readers of this column know, anything in questionable taste is OK with me, especially if it's satirical...
...What went wrong...
...And what a chance this would have been for a gifted black woman...
...Doumanian hasn't even pretended to be an adversary...
...Since she hasn't figured out how to pace the shows yet, they always run out of time...
...The second week SNL actually stooped to a sketch called "In Search of a Negro Republican," a parody of Wild Kingdom that was incredibly disgusting and racist...
...Since she doesn't know what she is doing, she gives the execs the full run of the show...
...Under Jean Doumanian SAX has turned to leering prime time fare, Three's Company with no holds barred...
...Doumanian's search for new writers last summer was also a joke...
...Even before the show started she had the stars and writers terrorized, ruling them through paranoia, turning them against one another...
...Under Lome Michaels the show was an enclave for young writers out of the mainstream, much the way the New School for Social Research was a berth for exiled professors before World War II...
...They were exhibited to the press two days before the premiere in the Belvedere Room, high atop the RCA Building, NBC headquarters in New York City...
...Only Denny Dillon seemed to have some verve underneath all that baby fat...
...If that weren't enough, she is also an incompetent producer...
...Charley Rocket was not a comedian or an actor, but a TV newsman who would do well on some local news show...
...She personally encouraged the gags about Jews, homosexuals and smelly underwear...
...I have dubbed her style of comedy the 1 Don't Believe It School...
...No," the producer said...
...She has managed to turn SNL, once the summer resort of TV comedy, into a concentration camp...
...That's why you never see the credits...
...Or the Marx Brothers...
...Doumanian's notion of political satire is to have Jimmy Carter urinating, or to depict Rosalyn taking off her blouse, sprawling on the desk in the Oval Office and telling Jimmy that elections are not as important as erections...
...Tomorrow's comedy superstars sat there mute, doing their impressions of the Sphinx...
...The fourth show was so bad in rehearsal that Linda Ron-stadt walked out three days before it went on the air (although she finally came back...
...Gail Matthius was a piece of white bread...
...Brandon Tarti-kof f, the vice president who hired Doumanian, can't be too happy right now, and you have to ask why this superstar executive, Freddy Silverman's top man for entertainment, a supposed expert, would give such a difficult job to a rock group booker...
...After the team was introduced, a reporter asked, "Could each of them stand up and say something about themselves, not necessarily funny...
...It was Your Show of Shows compared to this dog of dogs...
...That's because you don't believe what your own eyes are seeing...
...In fact, none of the early shows have been up to last season's standard, which left much to be desired...
...I remember the first time I saw these six people, bagged by Jean Doumanian herself during a coast-to-coast talent hunt...
...Her bite is definitely worse than her bark...
...It just pops out...
...The ratings for SNL have been falling dramatically since the premiere (though recently they have recovered somewhat...
...At least half of the replacements came from the land of silk and money, Hollyweird...
...Certainly that laugh riot alone qualified her to pro-duce a comedy show...
...NBC should stop horsing around and dump the whole project...
...Or the Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner from Your Show of Shows...
...Michaels spent five seasons winning artistic freedom for his pet project, and here in the sixth year Doumanian is abusing it...
...This wasn't reactionary wit, anticipating a Reagan climate...
...What's a Jean Doumanian anyway...
...Indeed, her career is a perfect demonstration of the Peter Principle at work in broadcasting...
...Can you imagine what Alan Alda and his gang from M*A*S*H would have done in similar circumstances...
...Radical to whom-the Zimbabwe public TV system...
...Call her what they will (and 1 heard some interesting adjectives even before the season started), her first job at SNL was musical coordinator...
...Almost immediately she fired her best gagman, Sean Kelly, an old pro from the National Lampoon...
...The producer doesn't seem to understand that-unlike Nixon or Ford-there is nothing intrinsically hilarious about a lame-duck Carter...
...Under Jean Doumanian it is unsalvageable...
...No multi-talented ones like Ack-royd or Morris...
...Not only has it served as a farm system for Hollywood, it has also meant the difference between contented young people and restless revolutionaries...
...Jean Doumanian, I'm told, thinks this is up-front counterculture comedy...
...One wonders why she went to LA to find the cast and writers for a New York-based show, since everybody else knows LA is the booby hatch that has ruined TV...
...But these are six dutiful kids, waiting for permission to speak...
...The woman has no flair for comedy...
...If not Letterman, then Robert Klein or Peter Cookanybody funny...
...If the show caves in, Ronald Reagan could be in for a rough four years...
...But Doumanian'snew SNL was not only revolting, it was also not mirth-provoking...
...She always goes for the cheapest, most banal and safest gag...
...Limited though the writers and cast are, it is Doumanian's failure to put all the feeble elements together that really hurts Saturday Night Live...
...He is the power behind the throne, a regular Rasputin, spreading the theories about comedy he exhibited in Stardust Memories...
...Humorous people tend to be funny...
...Letterman is the logical choice as SAX's replacement for at least two other reasons: He knows where 30 Rockefeller Plaza is already, and the late-night Saturday crowd is his natural audience (he was 18 hours ahead of his time last summer, with the morning show for women...
...I don't believe it, my notes read...
...But whatever Tsarina Doumanian lacks in comic talent is exceeded by her shortcomings as a human engineer...
...At least his early morning disaster (another Tartikoff-supervised production) had its funny moments...
Vol. 64 • January 1981 • No. 1
