Filed under: Saturday Night Live, Video, Celebrities, Reality-Free

Of the many achievements George Carlin had in his long career, one that gets underplayed a bit is that he was the guest host on the first-ever episode of Saturday Night Live — then called NBC’s Saturday Night, thanks to Howard Cosell — in 1975. Not a bad choice, I’d have to say; since the “Not Ready for Prime Time Players” were only a part of that first episode (there was a lot of music and odd Muppets about … the show took some time to find itself), they needed Carlin to carry a lot of the comedic load. And that he did, giving the audience a number of his best routines from that time period.

As a tribute to the recently-deceased comedy legend, NBC will air the entire premiere episode of SNL this Saturday night. For those who have never seen the premiere before (it’s on a DVD set of the complete first season), it’ll be interesting to see how different the first episode is from the SNL format they know and hate-love today. I’ll be DVRing it; will you?

To give you a taste, the opening monologue — an early version of Carlin’s classic “Baseball and Football” routine — is after the jump.

Continue reading NBC airing first episode of SNL as a Carlin tribute - VIDEO

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 2:11 pm and is filed under Celebrity news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.