Anniversaries: The New Yorker and SNL

 

Two American cultural icons celebrate impressive anniversaries this spring. Congratulations to The New Yorker magazine on its one hundredth year of publication and to Saturday Night Live on fifty years of lively and timely TV comedy.

Widely considered the best English language magazine, The New Yorker was founded in 1925 by Harold Ross, a Colorado native and journalist in the Mark Twain tradition. (Its first cover, pictured, featured a 19^th century dandy.) Ross envisioned a weekly humor magazine like Britain’s popular Punch, featuring “gaiety, wit, and satire,” though these were scarce in early issues. So were sales. Failure was in the cards.

What saved the magazine was sending a respected journalist to Dayton, Tennessee, to cover the Scopes “monkey trial.” The elegant article about an event of intense national interest was a hit, followed shortly by a sparkling society piece, “Why We Go to Cabarets—A Post-Debutante Explains.” Sales soared. Ross hired E. B. White, who, for nearly six decades, wrote essays and short commentaries for the magazine in addition to editing Strunk and White’s Elements of Style (familiar to millions of college students) and writing a series of popular children’s books including Charlotte’s Web. White eventually won a Pulitzer and a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and his stepson Roger Angell became the magazine’s fiction editor and award-winning sportswriter. His pen made baseball high drama.

As Ross began publishing short fiction by John Updike and other top American writers, the magazine’s literary reputation grew, balanced by its famous cartoons. Nonfiction and global coverage expanded with World War II including Mollie Panter-Downes’s vivid reports from London during the Blitz and John Hersey’s account of Lt. John F. Kennedy’s PT boat heroics and Hersey’s horrific Hiroshima, published in a single issue and later as a book. Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring, which energized the environmental movement, was serialized.

The New Yorker had matured into what the current editor calls “a blend of humor, art, deep reporting, criticism, poetry, and fiction [with a devotion to] accuracy and clarity.” Famed for its legendary fact-checking, they called me twice to verify facts before publishing a letter to the editor I wrote about education. In our age of mis- and dis- information, The New Yorker is a trusted source of truths. 

Not a trusted source of truths but a reliable source of laughs is Saturday Night Live. Created in 1975 to replace Johnny Carson reruns in NBC’s Saturday night slot, SNL was the brainchild of producer Lorne Michaels, who made key decisions in the beginning: rotating hosts every week, hiring comedian Chevy Chase to report news in a satirical “Weekend Update” segment, and broadcasting live—a risky choice.

Michaels, who is still the producer, had an eye for comic talent, hiring little-known cast members able to have fun with society’s foibles and changing the cast as society changed. For those of us who watched from the beginning, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd, and the rest were beyond funny. They were hilarious like nothing seen on the tube before. A recurring sketch, “The Coneheads,” had Ackroyd,  Jane Curtin, and Laraine Newman as bald, pointy-headed aliens trying to pass as humans. Asked where they were from, Curtain always replied in a rapid monotone, “We are from France.”

Over fifty years, SNL’s changing cast has included dozens of stars who have shaped comedy on TV and beyond: Belushi and Ackroyd in The Blues Brothers; Tina Fey’s impersonation of clueless VP candidate Sarah Palin saying, “I can see Russia from my house;” frequent host Steve Martin’s satirical “What I Want for Christmas.” What I want for Saturdays is for SNL to continue for years to come.