Classic Saturday Night Live: "Robert KleinBonnie Raitt"

Though he isn’t held in the same high regard as some of his contemporaries, especially those with the great fortune to die young and lead wildly self-destructive lives, Robert Klein was a hugely popular figure in the seventies, a comedian’s comedian with a professorial air and an appealingly avuncular presence. Klein had more in common with the intellectual likes of Mort Sahl, Woody Allen and Nichols & May than the raucous, high-energy stoners of Saturday Night Live , which helps explain why he only hosted twice. In Richard Zoglin’s Comedy At The Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America the author suggests that Klein and Richard Belzer never reached superstar levels in part because Saturday Night Live didn’t embrace them the way it did Steve Martin and Richard Pryor. Incidentally how many fucking books have comically hyperbolic titles conveying that their subject (Jews, Stand-up Comics, Renegade Notary Publics) changed or invented America? Perhaps my upcoming memoir should have been ... (link)