Sometimes with comedy, you just had to be there. Original Saturday Night Live cast member Jane Curtin revealed that she recently tried rewatching the first few seasons of the primetime sketch show, only to find that show was a lot worse than she remembered. In fact, she said, it was “terrible.”
Curtin made a name for herself as one of the original cast members of Lorne Michaels’s SNL, starring as a Not Ready for Primetime player alongside other future comedy greats like Gilda Radnor, Dan Akroyd, John Belushi, and Chevy Chase. In an interview with People, Curtin shared that she revisited their early work on Saturday Night Live after being sent a compilation video. “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.’”
The funny-woman and her family gathered around the television to watch an episode of the series. “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 said. That grin, however, soon turned into a frown. “And… it never happened. It wasn’t funny. Not one thing was funny. There was not one utterance of a laugh or a giggle.”
Curtin remained on Saturday Night Live for five seasons, leaving in 1980. She was also the show’s first female “Weekend Update” host on. But while the punchlines didn’t land when Curtin rewatched the series with her family, she told People she believed early SNL was “just one of those ‘you had to be there in the moment’ things.”
“That’s what happens with live TV, and with topical TV,” she explained. “It gets dated after a while. Remember, this was almost 50 years ago.”
Even though early SNL was of a different era, however, Curtin reiterated that she was less than impressed with the show’s final product. “After we rewatched, I was like, ‘That really wasn’t a very good show. It was terrible.’”
Curtin didn’t find every sketch to be terrible. “The Bassomatic, I still think it’s funny,” she said, referring to an infamous Akroyd sketch. She also name-checked three early hosts—Richard Benjamin, Buck Henry, and Steve Martin—for really getting the vibe of the series. “First of all, you had to be really smart to be a good host, and the ones who kept coming back got the idea of it and they got the fun of it,” she said. Other hosts were not such a great fit for the series. “I remember Walter Matthau— he just came from a very different place,” said Curtin of the Oscar-winning actor. “We were in rehearsals, two days out from the live show, and he said, ‘Why isn’t anyone having fun around here?!’ There was a discipline to it — even though it looked like chaos.”