Former SNL great, Bill Hader, describes a cut sketch he starred in on Saturday Night Live featuring Dana Carvey, who played famed radio broadcaster, Casey Kasem
Only thing that changes is the # of hits Mariah Carey had, lol. He doesn’t lock a specific integer into his memory throughout interviews, which is interesting
I totally agree. Isn't it interesting that someone like Casey Kasem, who was soooo well known back then, has been so quickly forgotten? Even the little things referred to in the skit, like the "here's a note" line, which would have absolutely killed in the 80s, would garner just a "huh?" from the audience today.
This is absolutely hilarious. And one of the best things is hearing Kevin Pollak, who is of the right generation to fully appreciate the material, laughing uproariously. Great stuff.
I don't understand what happened. Is Don on the phone? Ok, I want to know why we come out of an up tempo song with a GD death announcement. And I want to know what happened to those pictures I was supposed to get.
I wonder if the audience just didn't have enough familiarity with Kasem because, as someone who grew up listening to him, I was doubled over laughing just at Hader's rendition.
@@jon8004 Casem would read letters sent in from listeners, so familiarity was also required there, though I'd think Bill and Dana's delivery would've been good enough for at least some laughs. I _really_ wish we could see the recorded version.
@@BassByTheBay I didn't write "whole." I wrote "perhaps...some." Plus, one does not have to have experienced that tragedy oneself to be able to empathize with those others who have.
@@bobdavis4848 What's your point? That the audience didn't laugh because _some_ of them never laugh at the mere mention of a drug dealer since they immediately think about the fact that some people die from ODs? We're talking about SNL here. They _constantly_ make references to all sorts of subjects which can be related to some negative experience. Ever see the one where Alec Baldwin tried to molest Canteen Boy? The audience was laughing hysterically. You think audiences are sympathetic to drug ODs but not to victims of sexual assault? I think you're grasping at straws. Having watched well over 40 years of SNL, I know the audiences aren't nearly that sensitive.
To this day I resent that audience from the depths of my inner core for destroying any chance of ever seeing that sketch come to life….Every time he recounts the creation of this bit with Dana & Mulaney and I visualize what it could have been I die laughing.
It's eerie how Bill can instantly switch on an impression subject's voice like that. It's so precise. Kevin's a top notch impressionist as well. Bill's Alan Alda is so close, I bet most people with eyes shut couldn't distinguish the two.
It tanked because you’re doing an absolutely HILARIOUS sketch (thanks Bill!) to a different generation who hadn’t even heard of the legendary DJ. What a shame. This is funny as all get out!
“When are you gonna get a job? When are you gonna move out? And what recording artist has more number one hits?” “Mariah Carey with 17. But seriously dad, there’s a drug dealer after me named Mateo.”
100%!!! I've heard him recount the sketch on Conan, Smartless and now here and I laugh every single time he tells it. Seth needs to get on this!! I really also want to know why audience didn't find it funny, it sounds like it should have been a home run!
This sketch is nuclear IF you grew up listening to Casey’s Top 40. A “violation of expectations” as Harold Ramis called it - is the engine here. I would’ve guessed Kasem’s phrasing was inherently funny enough to carry the younger crowd but guess not! I hope someday Dana & Bill will record this one together- I need it! 😂
It doesn’t make sense though, I’m 35 and we all knew who Casey was. He was even on Saved by the Bell. Without context to a younger generation, it’s still hilarious. This was the last cast that was actually funny on snl.
@@MyNameJeff.. I think it’s you really have to be raised on Casey’s top 40 show. He was like a robot God on high telling you which songs were better than other songs this week. He alone seemed to decide. THEN for this perfect robot God to have a serious family problems (Adayo etc) BUT still handle it all in the same smooth DJ style = an explosion of expectations which = true hilarity. But it’s just a theory, I wasn’t there and Bill seems truly mystified too.
yeah i actually think if Bill hosted and Dana came out for that sketch, the whole place would erupt instantly and basically be primed to love whatever they're doing together. i think it would kill. the audience the night they ran it originally probably just didn't get it but it's clear that the rest of us think it's hilarious.
The closest thing we have to it is a late 90s sketch with Greg Kinnear and Darrell Hammond. They both did Ted Koppel impressions with Kinnear using portraying Koppel's fictional brother who like Casey's son has a f-ed up back story that has caused the more famous family member to disown the other. Similarly to how described the crowd didn't react all that well to it maybe since it was a little too weird and dark. But a great sketch nonetheless just as this one would have been.
Without knowing who Kasem is, it probably just came off as strange to the audience. Why are both father and son talking in this strange distinct voice? Why are they asking each other about musicians number one hits? Why is he reading a letter? And most of all… why is the torpedo Lebanese? 😆
If you're too young to have experienced listening to Casey Kasem do the top 40 every Saturday, you missed out. Man, the 80s were an amazing time to be in HS.
I got into radio during that era as a fan and when Casey left the weekly Top 40, I recall Rick Dees taking over by saying *”The biggest shoes to fill in this profession were just handed to me, Casey I hope I do you proud.”*
Well, glad you enjoyed it so much. I always thought the top 40 music from then (well, for decades, really) sucked arse. I hated that show, and I'm far from alone in that take.
@@kevinlakeman5043 Did I like most of the "Top 40" in the 80's? NO. But there was a lot to like and it was the zeitgeist of the 80's. Cruiseing in your car... Top 40 was on at least 4 radio stations. Stop in a gas station... the clerk has Top 40 on the radio... Go to a freinds house... Sister is listening to Top 40 in her bedroom, mom has it on in the kitchen radio. Go to the girlfriends to pick her up... Kasey is countin' em down on her radio in the bathroom. If you were listening to the radio on 06/22/85 you at least heard a couple of songs on American Top 40.
I was in a comedy sketch troupe for a while back in the nineties and this is so true. You can put something up that you are one hundred percent sure will kill and the audience is having none of it. Conversely, you can dash a little something off that you're so-so on but the audience thinks it's the funniest things they've ever seen in their lives. And in both cases, you're like "Really? Welp. Okay, then." Like it didn't happen often but once in a while it could come along and surprise you.
It must have been a super young audience who had no idea who Kasey Kasem was ... because this was a hilarious idea performed by 2 greats with unholy timing and spot on impressions
Being that the dress rehearsal audience is different from the air audience, it's very possible that the audience watching it live may have thought it was pretty good. Sometimes audiences are just flat.
Some things are funnier when the story is told than when it actually happened. For example, I don't like the real Three Stooges. Do a parody of them, or tell a story about them, then I'm totally rolling. Bill Hader's description is told much more humorusly than the reality, I suspect.
Funny that there’s such a fine line to getting things on air. The audience in dress didn’t like it - but the performers also don’t like it if it kills in the dress rehearsal, because they know they won’t get the magic back for the live show. Different people in the audience too, but that’s how it goes
When I was growing up, I knew all kinds of pop-culture references that predated my birth. I work at a college, and I’ve found that young people today have a much more limited awareness. It’s really strange how little they know.
Growing up all of the comedy I loved was made by Baby Boomers who grew up in the 60’s and 70’s (The Simpsons, Seinfeld, MST3K, etc.). In order to understand a lot of the jokes you had to have a cursory knowledge of stuff from that era (and even the stuff that those writers had watched on TV as a kid, like old movies from the 40’s and 50’s)… I learned a lot about older 20th century culture this way. Maybe kids today just don’t get their entertainment from the previous generation… they get it from other kids their age making stuff.
I'm completely mad at the audience that didn't find this funny, thus ripping us all off from seeing a sketch that would have been hilarious. Just listening to the description of it has me tearing up from laughter.
I must have just heard about this sketch so many times that I thought I actually had seen it! The way they describe it, and perform it, it feels like there’s no way this couldn’t have killed!
Hader is SO FUNNY ! When I first saw him on as a no, he was doing Vincent Price and I’m convinced there were so many people in the audience, who had no idea who Price was … he was hilarious in the skit, it was priceless😢. I wish I could’ve been there, for the Kasem skit - I would’ve been laughing so hard
So the entire premise of the sketch was: Casey Kasem and son discuss deeply personal details about their relationship. . .and that Casey Kasem's unique idiolect isn't for radio, but a families genetic condition. Brilliant. And I can totally see a crowd not being into it.
Yep, that’s where we’ve been for the last few seasons: Hader’s impromptu recollected performance of a sketch that died in dress is 10,000 times funnier than anything SNL has put out in at least five years. This has to rank with Michael O’Donoghue’s “Silverman’s Bunker” sketch as SNL’s best ever unaired sketch.
I remember when a friend and I first watched the movie Clerks - our sides were splitting. We kept having to rewind to get dialog we missed for laughing. So, I wanted to show it to another friend of mine and he reacted to it like I was forcing him to watch an autopsy. When I saw the movie After Hours, the first time, at a theater in Boston, the audience was roaring with laughter all throughout. A few weeks later I was visiting my hometown in the midwest and it was playing there and I wanted to see it again with my old best friend and we went and the audience sat and watched it, they were riveted, clearly very into the movie, but there was almost no laughter, at all. They had no idea they were watching a comedy.
Clerks was so great. I did wonder though if people who weren’t from NJ or the northeast would appreciate it. I know some people just didn’t get it. Which is exactly how I felt about Napoleon Dynamite. I just didn’t get it. Different strokes…
@@mariosargiropoulos1715 I'm from the middle of rural Iowa and Clerks hit me right to the bone. I'm 53 so a X-er and the zeitgeist of the times still resonates. Still love it and all the Jay and Silent Bob movies,; but I wonder what my 17 year old daughter thinks of them?
I would love to have seen this! As a kid, my friend and I would do a similar skit with each other because we both could do a half decent Casey Kasem impression! I still do it to this day! 😃👍
That sketch sounds absolutely hilarious. I wish that Carvey and Hader could get to bring it back and do it when SNL has their 50 Anniversary show in a couple years.
I love Kevin Pollak. I really like his work as an actor. But he's beginning to build a catalog of celebrities to be the next Robert Osbourne with all the stories he knows. It's a great direction. Spot-on performance by Bill. Wonderful impression!
Whereas I feel enriched that I have now heard of this sketch and at least gotten a glimpse of its genius I feel a great sense of loss that some shmucks ruined the fun for the rest of us. THANKS you wet blankets! Kudos to Bill Hader and Dana Carvey. They are indeed quite the fellows.
OMG! That is GENIUS! No way a human-being talks like Casey Kasem did, in every day life. It is brilliant to imagine Casey Kasem talking like that during serious moments in his life. This should have been a recurring sketch. Bill Hader and Daney Carvey need to crowdfund this sketch.
I’ve always done a pretty good Casey Kasem. I’ve always had fun cracking up my family with it. This sketch would have been RIGHT up my alley. It amazes me how unfamiliar younger people are today with things from even 30 years ago. I’m 44, but I’ve always been familiar with even things from my grandparents generation. Even further back than that in some cases. But Casey was THE voice of national radio when I was growing up. Such a distinctive iconic voice. And Carvey could do him spot on.
I just saw an old SCTV sketch on youtube with the great Eugene Levy doing an amazing, spot on Howard Cosell. And then it occurred to me, my teenage kids (I had kids late) wouldn't get it. Such an equally iconic voice, lost to the mists of time. Outside of Trump, I can't think of current celebrities - DJs, sportscasters, even actors (comparable to e.g. Nicholson, Pacino and De Niro) - with unique voices who attract the imitators.
They are sketches, not "skits." Trust me, people who do sketch comedy absolutely hate when people call what they do "skits." It minimizes the work they do.
Pollak did #BillHader a solid at Aspen, Hader began sobbing it meant t so much to him. In this segment he also says to Kevin 'that was the height of my career, man, thank you.'
I had to uncomfortably stifle my laughter in public listening to this. I have no idea how an audience full of people would not respond to this hilarious sketch.
Can do a couple impressions; Carson, Hepburn and Casey Kasem/Shaggy. Had a karaoke during the summer where I emceed as Casey/Tracy/Stacey Kasem all night. Few people got it, most were too young. But would have loved to have seen this skit.
Exactly. Just do it un-announced around the hollidays or a special. Just do it cold in the middle of the show with all the cast members who were in the dress rehersal there. Boomers and Xer's would go nuts. American top 40 was on everyones radio on Saturday afternoons in the 80's
I'm not saying I know Mike Kasem, but I have seen him act on a few shows in Singapore. It's almost exactly like Bill and John knew "the real J.C. Kasem", son of Casey Kasem. Props to Mike, it can't be easy having to live with this level of satire attached to your legacy. It's not you, it's your roles.
The problem is that you'd have to be over 40 to know why it's funny. I was laughing just listening to it being described. But my 22 year-old son has no idea who Casey Kasem is and would have been totally lost.
I'm 30 and remember Kasem still doing top-40 well into the early 2000s. He was the biggest voice in American radio probably and was known as "the voice of NBC" since he did all their commercials and voice overs so that's likely why Lorne said no.
My 21 and 18-year old daughters got the humor when I showed it to them because we listen to Sirius XM in the car and they play old America's Top 40 shows on the '70s channel. My younger one, who is a natural comic, now has "here's a letter" in her vocabulary when she is going to tell a story.
