Over 49 years, Saturday Night Live has cranked out 939 episodes, airing well over 10,000 sketches. But it all started with one.
As much as SNL has come to be known for its topical—often political—cold opens, the first ever sketch to air on the show was defined more by absurdity.
When the show that was then called NBC’s Saturday Night hit the airwaves on October 11, 1975, nobody knew quite what to expect.
Viewers were mostly in the dark, as the network hadn’t put much publicity behind the show. But even the cast and crew on the floor in Studio 8H were uncertain of how things would go.
“We almost didn’t get on the air, because dress rehearsal went so poorly,” associate producer Craig Kellem says in Live from New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live. “I remember Lorne [Michaels] seriously asking the network people—or having me ask them—to have a movie ready to go, just in case. And I don’t think he was kidding.”
But the premiere went on as planned, and what audiences saw during SNL’s first cold open was “The Wolverines.”
In the sketch, head writer and brief cast member Michael O’Donoghue plays an English instructor teaching the language to John Belushi, an immigrant. Belushi has to repeat all of the instructor’s lines, but—for no particular reason—they’re all about wolverines.
O’Donoghue only gets three sentences in before he suffers a heart attack, gasps, and collapses to the floor. Belushi, still in repeat mode, mimics him.
Chevy Chase, dressed as a stage manager, comes in to find the two comedians on the floor and closes out the sketch.
It’s an out-there bit built on two premises: the teacher’s inexplicable fixation on wolverines, and the physical comedy finale of the heart attack. The sketch might seem like a head-scratcher to today’s SNL fans, but according to Lorne Michaels, that was kind of the point.
“I made the decision Thursday to open cold with ‘Wolverines,'” he recounts in Live from New York. “It seemed to me that, whatever else happened, there would never have been anything like this on television. No one would know what kind of show this is from seeing that.”
However, there was one element of the sketch that did set a precedent SNL still follows today.
“Live from New York,” Chase yells as he stares into camera, “it’s Saturday Night.”