The earliest clip dates from 1976 and the latest from the mid-'90s, showcasing the program's greatest players throughout the seasons-Chevy Chase, Laraine Newman, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Mike Meyers, Dana Carvey, Nora Dunn, David Spade, Jon Lovitz. Earlier monologues were rougher, less staged, but absolutely out of control in the best way, as Martin is given free rein to unleash his 'happy feet,' play the banjo, and generally explore his zaniness. This collection gives us not only clips of some of the show's funniest moments, but also a sense of how the show has evolved from the 1970s.

Honestly, I snickered a little bit whenever Vanessa Bayer wandered into the room as the only frequent flyer brunette on the fake show.No other person has been a guest on Saturday Night Live as many times as the inimitable Steve Martin, which is what makes SNL's Best of Steve Martin compilation the finest of the series. references could still find reason to laugh. The ongoing love triangle of Fred Armisen's Stuart, Kristen Wiig's unfaithful Karina, and Bill Hader's forbidden love interest Devon was off-the-walls enough that even those of us who didn't get the barrage of L.A. Fred Armisen's leap from Valleyspeak traffic chatter to a fake soap is one that not many comedians might have made, but it definitely worked. If the SNL head honcho hadn't been habitually late for episode table reads, we might never have gotten the weirdly hilarious soap opera sketches. He was like, 'Hey, James Anderson and I took that bit we did, and we made it a soap opera.'Īs it turns out, fans everywhere have Lorne Michaels' tardiness to thank for what became The Californians. Then one day before a table read, Fred came up to me. Kenan Thompson was in on it, Andy would get it on it, and we would all just do these California voices. We'd just be sitting there waiting for like ten minutes for Lorne, and so we would start this bit where I would go 'Hey man, did you go to L.A.?' 'Yeah, yeah.' 'How'd you get back to your hotel?' And then we'd go, 'Well, dude, I would go down Sunset, then I would take a left on La Cienega, and I'd take that all the way down to Pico, take a right, take Pico, hop on the 10, hop on the 10 west, take that all the way down to the beach, then head up the PCH.' We would just do these things for hours.

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