Liberating late night: Saturday Night Live vs. the censors.

• Author: Kurtz, Steve
• Position: Culture and Reviews - 'An Uncensored History Of Saturday Night Live' - 'Saturday Night Live, Equal Opportunity Offender: The Uncensored Censor' - Book Review

Now that Saturday Night Live is firmly ensconced as a small-screen institution, it's hard to recapture the original energy and excitement behind the show. When producer Lorne Michaels started SNL in 1975, he wanted it to be revolutionary -- for television, anyway. He wanted his program to have the freedom that already existed for books, magazines, movies, and theater. Michaels and his actors and writers were intent on using characters, concepts, and, yes, words that had never before been on TV.

Standing in SNL's way was NBC's Broadcast Standards Department, which was charged with making sure the network upheld the "public interest," a condition for keeping its federal broadcast license. While the public interest has never been defined satisfactorily, this much is indisputable: The rule made television remarkably tame. The tension between the SNL crew and network restrictions shoots through two new books about the show and its influence, Live From New York:

An Uncensored History Of Saturday Night Live, by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller (Little, Brown), and Saturday Night Live, Equal Opportunity Offender: The Uncensored Censor, by William G. Clotworthy (1st Books Library).

In its infancy, the show was an ongoing experiment in testing boundaries in pursuit of laughs. As staff writer Rosie Shuster tells Shales and Miller, "Comedy writing was all about flirting with taboos and seeing how far you could push it. Not just gratuitously, though; it had to be funny." The comedy in SNL's early years was often sophomoric, such as the infamous "vomitorium" sketch. But just as often it was political satire with actual bite, including presidential debates in which Gerald Ford thought there'd be no math questions and Jimmy Carter took pride in flip-flopping on abortion.

Such envelope pushing made Clotworthy's job as SNL censor a busy one. To his credit, he gave as good as he got. Whenever anyone threw the First Amendment at him, he responded, "Wake up and smell the coffee, boys, this is network television." He notes that "the fact of life in television is you cannot say whatever you want....there were limits and it was our job to define those limits."

Clotworthy comes across as a nice guy. He has a sense of humor, clearly liked the SNL crew, swears occasionally, and saves his greatest scorn for organized bluenoses. But he lacks a proper sense of the absurdity of his job. He discusses sketches he allowed (such as a nude beach bit where the word penis is...