Sometimes comedy ages like a fine wine… but other times, it sours like milk. For Jane Curtin, the earliest Saturday Night Live sketches do a bit of both.
The actress, who was one of the original SNL cast members, told PEOPLE that she recently revisited the show with her family, and was surprised by the lack of laughter.
“We were sent the five year compilation video of Saturday Night Live’s first five years a few years ago, and I gave one to my daughter,” Curtin explained. “We were out visiting her daughter one Christmas, and her husband said, 'Have you ever watched any of these? And I said, ‘God, I haven’t seen them in a long time.’”
Once a rewatch was suggested, the Jules star was happy to oblige: “He said, would you mind if we watch one? And I said, ‘No, great! Pick one!’”
But with the family settled around the TV and the video playing, things didn’t go as Curtin expected.
“I had that sort of anticipatory, open-mouth grin that people have when they’re waiting for something to happen, that they know is going to be really great,” she recalled. “And… it never happened.”
The compilation played on, but Curtin said, “It wasn’t funny. Not one thing was funny. There was not one utterance of a laugh or a giggle.”
you’re a Swiftie? one learns something new every day
I thought she just writes songs about her ex-es, which can be quite a dangerous or embarrassing role to take on
Intelligence doesn’t have anything to do with it. Aren’t Gen Z still teenagers? Not saying I was particularly intelligent at that age, but I don’t think I knew Dylan beyond his name until I was 16 or 17.
On a similar note, I’ve been a fan of 1950s American rock and roll all my life and I’m no longer surprised to find that most people in my generation (Millennial) have never heard of Buddy Holly or Chuck Berry (I have to point out he was the guy Marty McFly did the rendition of in Back to the Future). I used to be surprised and disappointed that so few people my age, even those who pride themselves on their good taste in music, haven’t heard of anyone before The Beatles, but I get it now and it is what it is.
He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. Do people not know?
Cate Blanchett also played him in a very cool biopic directed by Todd Haynes in 2007 called I’m Not There. Probably the best performance in her career.
"I could feel myself climbing a spiral walkway as I was talking to Dylan,” McCartney recalled in a promotional video for Pure McCartney, his compilation album of 2016. “I felt like I was figuring it all out, the meaning of life… I was going, ‘I’ve got it!’ and wrote down the key to it all on this piece of paper. I told [Beatles roadie Mal Evans], ‘You keep this piece of paper; make sure you don’t lose it because the meaning of life is on there.”
“Mal gave me the piece of paper the next day,” McCartney continued. “And on it was written," Don’t marry Heather!
