Catherine O’Hara, left, and Andrea Martin on SCTV.
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Growing up, there were SNL people, and there were SCTV people.
To a kid growing up in the manicured, homogenized cul-de-sacs of suburban Philly, SNL seemed like everything I imagined late ’70s/early ’80s New York to be: young, hip, a little sexy, a little sleazy and maybe even a bit dangerous.
Sure, it quickly became a vehicle for cast members to trot out characters spouting signature catchphrases they hoped would find purchase in the nation’s schoolyards and breakrooms, but in its early years SNL‘s Harvard Lampoon-inspired satire was sharp, and inevitably carried with it the smug self-satisfaction of those Ivy League roots.
SCTV, on the other hand was … well, more than anything else, it was Canadian. If SNL was a smirking upperclassman in a rumpled private-school uniform, SCTV was a lovable dirtbag in a denim jacket and jeans.
I was an SCTV kid, because the focus of its satire was narrower; SCTV didn’t riff on the culture at large, but on the culture of television. Its humor was more specific, and more keyed into my TV-poached brain, so I found it much, much funnier.
In the Alan Bennett play The History Boys, the teacher Hector talks about that same feeling of discovery, albeit with respect to literature:
The best moments in reading are when you come across something — a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things — which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.
That’s what remains timeless about SCTV, which has recently started streaming on Netflix — that sense of being in on something, of belonging, of finding your comedic people. In the excellent documentary SCTV: The Greatest Show You’ve Never Heard Of (which dropped on Netflix Friday), folks like Conan O’Brien, Bill Hader, Bob Odenkirk, Kathryn Hahn and others talk about their own moments of realization and recognition with the show.
SCTV reveled, as I did, in the particular joys of low-rent local television. The conceit of the series was SCTV — Second City Television — as a tiny TV station (and, later, TV network) broadcasting out of a Canadian backwater called Melonville, and the sketches in each episode comprised a typical programming day. Talk shows, game shows, variety shows, music shows, movies-of-the-week, children’s programming, specials and, mostly, hilariously, ads.
Specifically, the kind of cheaply made local ads that were thick on the ground, back in the 1980s. You know: Lots of chyrons and star-wipes. Ads for Tex and Edna Boil’s Prairie Warehouse and Curio Emporium. And Harry’s Sex Shop. And Phil’s Nails. And Al Peck’s Used Fruit.
Celebrity impressions were a key ingredient in the SCTV artisanal recipe, but they weren’t just there for their own sake — they each came outfitted with a laser-focused point of view. Again and again, writers would build a sketch around some particular aspect of a given celebrity’s persona so small and specific that I’d managed to convince myself only I could possibly have noticed it — but here it was, expertly filletted for everyone to see.
Eugene Levy, left, and Dave Thomas on SCTV.
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Netflix
I remember gasping in recognition when I realized that Eugene Levy had picked up on the fact that Alex Trebek — long before Jeopardy! came along, back when he was clocking field time on your High Rollers and your Pitfalls, had a reputation for getting tetchy with contestants who couldn’t follow the rules. Enter: the SCTV sketches High Q and Half Wits, wherein “Alex Trebel” goes off on Catherine O’Hara’s Margaret Meehan, and Martin Short’s Lawrence Orbach.
Or Andrea Martin, who noticed, as I had, that in her commercial for Playtex tampons, the smoky voiced actress Brenda Vaccaro took conspicuously audible breaths between each line. Martin simply turned up the volume, transforming those breaths into increasingly emphysematic wheezes.
Or when Catherine O’Hara turned up in the “Have Yourself a Scary Little Christmas” sketch as the then 70-something Lucille Ball. First, she channelled Ball’s abysmally froggy musical turn in Mame by croaking the word “Christmas” like a death-rattle, then put in an appearance on a talk show segment perfectly capturing the over-it, bitterly dismissive persona that, I knew only too well, late-period Ball had been bringing to her appearances on Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin and Dinah Shore for years at that point. Yeah, it was tough love for a comedy legend, and it was a little mean — but it was so breathtaking in its clarity, so sharply observed, and so deftly delivered that you could do nothing but respect it, and feel like it was talking only to you.
When you watch SCTV, that hand that Bennett wrote about reaches out to you. Only it takes the form of Martin Short’s Fred Rogers wailing on John Candy’s Julia Child with a King Friday puppet.
This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.
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