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Saturday Night Livewas built with acast of young no-namesperforming countercultural comedy. Fifty years later, it is firmly part of the culture, dictating mainstream comedy instead of throwing spitballs from the margins.The show has become an incubator of talent think Will Ferrell, Chris Rock, Amy Poehler, Billy Crystal, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler, Phil Hartman, Pete Davidson and Tracy Morgan. Its sketches have sparked Hollywood movies, from The Blues Brothers and Waynes World to MacGruber and Coneheads.But SNL has embedded itself in our culture in deeper ways, from slogans like Were not worthy! to You look mahvelous! It inspiresHalloween costumes, connects viewers to the news via Weekend Update and may even haveinfluenced elections.As the showgears up to celebrate its milestone,here are 12 moments over the past five decades when the show didnt just reflect pop culture it drove it.Wolverines, 1975This was the first sketch from the first show, an absurdist-meets-physical comedy interaction between a student played by John Belushi and his English teacher, played by head writer Michael ODonoghue. I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverines, the teacher asks his pupil to repeat.The show, then called NBCs Saturday Night, would have George Carlin as the first host. Jim Hensons Muppets had a sketch and Andy Kaufman lip-synched the Mighty Mouse theme song. Billy Preston played his hit Nothing From Nothing and later folk singer Janis Ian sang At Seventeen and In the Winter. Preston closed things out with Fancy Lady.New York magazine called its promise enormous and the Chicago Tribune said it premiered in superb fashion. The Los Angeles Times said it was bright and bouncy and even suggested it move to prime time.King Tut, 1978Steve Martinsaw this off-the-wall novelty song about ancient Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun capture the nations imagination during a goofy performance. It eventually reached No. 17 on the Billboard Hot 100 and sold over 1 million copies after he performed it on SNL.The comedian was parodying the hysteria and commercialization surrounding a traveling Tutankhamun exhibit, dancing sideways as he sang King Tut/Buried with a donkey/Funky Tut/Hes my favorite honky!The song was riddled with errors: King Tut was not born in Arizona, he did not live in a condo made of stone-a and he was not buried in his jammies. Nevertheless, the song went viral long before there was an internet.The French Chef, 1978Dan Aykroydparodied iconic chef Julia Child in a cooking segment gone horribly wrong: She cuts the dickens out of her finger, releasing staggeringly large spurts of blood, tries first aid and then collapses face-first in a puddle of her own blood.It was inspired by a real injury on the set of Childs The French Chef and was written by Tom Davis and Al Franken (the future former senator was also under the table pumping blood out of a tube on Aykroyds arm).Instead of being offended, Child enjoyed Aykroyds parody of herself so much that the book Baking With Julia recounts she would play the tape at her own dinner parties, crying out, Save the liver!White Like Me, 1984Long before white privilege became a mainstream concept,Eddie Murphyin a landmark sketch put on white face makeup to see how he would be treated as a white man in New York.It was a parody of the famous 1961 book Black Like Me, in which a white journalist went undercover as a Black man. You can see the legacy in Chappelles Show, Whoopi Goldbergs The Associate and White Chicks.In the skit, a cashier wont take his money for a newspaper (Slowly, I began to realize that when white people are alone, they give things to each other for free), a city bus turns into a party after the lone Black passenger gets off and a bank clerk simply hands him $50,000 in cash. So what did I learn from all of this? Murphy asks at the end. I learned that we still have a very long way to go in this country before all men are truly equal.Sinad OConnor, 1992The Irish singercapped her a cappella cover of Bob Marleys War by holding up a photo of Pope John Paul II and tearing it into pieces. Fight the real enemy, she said. SNL was blindsided. During rehearsals, OConnor had instead held up an image of a refugee child.She was protesting child sex abuse in the Catholic Church, a decade before theBoston Globe revealed asystematic cover-up that forced the church to apologize and pay millions.NBC banned OConnor from SNL for life, Joe Pesci mocked her during the next weeks show and Frank Sinatra called her one stupid broad. Her albumswere crushed by a steamroller in Times Square. Less than two weeks later, OConnor made her first public appearance following the incident at a Bob Dylan concert at Madison Square Garden and she was jeered asKris Kristofferson consoled her.White House vs. Waynes World, 1993White House figures are a long-standingtarget for SNL.In 1993, the White House fired back.In a Waynes World sketch, Mike Myers and Dana Carveys immature, basement-dwelling characters suggested first daughter Chelsea Clinton, then 13, wasnt as attractive as then-vice president Al Gores daughters.Hillary Clinton scoldedproducer Lorne Michaelsand his writers for having nothing better to do than be mean and cruel to a young girl. Michaels issued an apology, Myers apologized to the Clintons and the joke was cut from subsequent reruns of the sketch.More Cowbell, 2000Anotherwacky skit that permanently entered the culturewas when Christopher Walken, playing a producer as Blue yster Cult recorded (Dont Fear) the Reaper, insisted: I gotta have more cowbell.The sketch widely regarded as one of the shows greatest lampooned the excess of 70s rock and became a shorthand for adding one too many layers. The irony is that the idea was submitted some seven times before finally airing.Blue yster Cult had to ban people from bringing actual cowbells to their concerts and Walken has said people tease him about cowbells everywhere he goes. The sketch was so influential that producers of the four-part SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night dedicated an entire episode to the parody.First show after 9/11, 2001Less than three weeks after 9/11, Saturday Night Live aired one of its most memorable openings.Rudy Giuliani, then New York Citys mayor,was flanked by firefighters and police officers who had just left ground zero.Calling Saturday Night Live one of New Yorks greatest institutions, Giuliani said: Having our citys institutions up and running sends a message that New York City is open for business.Can we be funny? Michaels asked, to which the mayor responded with perfect timing, Why start now?That joke told everyone that things could be all right.Ashlee Simpson, 2004The younger sister of Jessica Simpson, making her SNL musical debut, first performed her hit Pieces of Me. All good. But when she came back to play the title track from her album Autobiography, the audience heard the vocal track from the first song by mistake.Awkwardness ensued. Simpson did a silly shuffle and then walked off stage as her group continued to play and the show cut to commercial. She later said a case of acid reflux forced her to lip-sync that night.The incident drew attention to one of pop cultures worst-kept secrets:Lip-syncing was way more commonthan performers or the music industry wanted us to think. Billboard magazine ranked it second among lip-sync scandals in modern pop history afterMilli Vanilli.Lazy Sunday, 2005SNL is live, of course, but sometimes the funniest bits are pretaped, like the digital shorts fromAndy Samberg and his Lonely Island compatriots,Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer. They crafted 101 digital shorts between 2005 and 2012 many of them destined for virality, from Dick in a Box, with Justin Timberlake, to Natalies Rap with Natalie Portman and Shy Ronnie with Rihanna.Lazy Sunday was the second video SNL viewers got from the trio, starring Samberg and Chris Parnell rapping about hilariously mundane yuppie activities, like grabbing cupcakes and using Google Maps. It inspired an entire genre of video-shot joke raps and fed a fast-growing site that people had only just become aware of YouTube.Lazy Sunday was the first TV show clip to have a viral second life online, with 2 million-plus viewings in its first week alone. That week, YouTubes traffic was up 83%.Tina Fey does Sarah Palin, 2008Many people believe that Republican vice-presidential candidate Palin once uttered: I can see Russia from my house. She never said that. That was Fey in her first appearance as Palin on SNL.Feys spot-on impression later leaning into the more ridiculous sayings the candidate had offered may have changed some mindsand therefore influenced the presidential election, an amazing thing for a comedy show. CNN coined the phrase the Tina Fey Effect.People actually did studies on the Tina Fey Effect after the 2008 election and found Republican and independent voters liked Palin less after watching the SNL rendition of the politician, even though Palin herself appeared on the show alongside Fey to show she was in on the joke.Welcome to Hell, 2017SNL addressedthe #MeToo movementwith a pitch-perfect video a bubblegum song with lyrics about how women have suffered abuse and harassment for centuries.Guest host Saoirse Ronan was joined by cast members Melissa Villaseor, Leslie Jones, Aidy Bryant, Kate McKinnon and Cecily Strong, many of whom had teamed up for hysterical pop girl group songs likeFirst Got Horny 2 U,Back Home Ballers,and(Do It on My) Twin Bed.This time, the comedy was bleak: Now House of Cards is ruined, goes the song, and that really sucks. Well, heres a list of stuff thats ruined for us: parking, and walking, and Uber, and ponytails, and bathrobes, and nighttime, and drinking, and hotels, and vans.Mark Kennedy, AP entertainment writer
