“Saturday Night Live” Is the Story of Our Lives

For better or worse …

Saturday night, NBC showed the first-ever episode of “Saturday Night Live,” which originally aired on October 11, 1975. If you listened very closely, in the background, perhaps you can hear a one-day-old baby in rural Illinois, wailing as his haggard and overwhelmed parents, both in their early 20s, watched over this baby on Commercial Avenue in Mattoon, Illinois.

I do imagine the sensation of childbirth being not entirely different than listening to Chevy Chase yell.

There aren’t many Americans alive who don’t have some sort of memory, or hundreds of them, tied up in “Saturday Night Live,” which is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a (live, obviously) special Sunday night on NBC. Every time SNL has an anniversary special, it comes with fanfare, hype and endless promotion, and each time it happens, I grumble a little bit, because a reminder of “Saturday Night Live”’s birthday is inevitably a reminder of my own. I was born, at a now-demolished hospital in downtown Mattoon, Illinois, on Friday, October 10, 1975. The very next day, almost exactly 37 hours later, on Saturday, October 11, 1975, John Belushi and Michael O’Donoghue walked on a stage on the 18th floor of Rockefeller Center in New York City and, live over NBC’s airways…