You’d think that the cast of NBC’s Saturday Night had run up against every possible brand of insanity known to modern video man. A gang of virtual unkowns (at least to the tube public), they ventured into the vast wasteland at its most deserted hour, Saturday night at 11:30, a time slot usually reserved for crusty Brian Donleavy and Stephen Boyd B movies, maybe a few Attack Of The (fill-in-the-blank) regurgitations. They faced the most ridiculous set of odds not only in trying* to establish themselves, but also in putting on a real, live, ninety minute program, each week.

With the censors continually peeking over their shoulders, they’ve managed to slip in some of the most outrageous dialogues and sketches ever seen on national television (ah, the charming historical tale of young Anna Freud siL ting on papa Sig’s lap, describing her dream from the night before, “All these men were sitting on my bed and they all had beards and each one offered me a. banana but I wasn’t hungry until you offered me one. Papa, and yours was the biggest and nicest banana I’d ever seen.” Daddy’s hand nervously hovers over Anna’s nubile little pre-pubescent * chest. “Don’t tell Mama about this dream, Anna, it’s nothing, just a , dream. It doesn’t mean anything. Now go to bed like a good little girl and Papa i will come and tuck you in later.”).

With a host of guest hosts ranging from the sublime (Lily Tomlin, Madeline Kahn) to the ridiculous (Dyan Cannon. Dick Cavett). the Not Ready For Prime Time Players have made it through a sometimes better, sometimes worse but always interesting season’s set of shows. For rather than ju!st thumbing their noses at the establishment. they’ve transcended it by ignoring it, bypassing the trappings and confines always taken as a given in television circles.

Still, there’s one area that persists in driving these already raving lunatics even more batty. Namely, the NBC security staff. Dan Ackroyd looks up from his copy of Peter Maas’ King of the Gypsies and stares at his UFO Appreciation Society calendar. “We’ve had lots of problems with the security people in the building. We’re sorta like the underground here. One time they refused to admit me on our office floor. I freaked out and immediately went into my Rung F u stance, prepared to take out necks with a single blow. Here I am, a professional stand-up comedian getting all vicious like that. I guess they just don’t understand us here. I mean,” (and here Ackroyd tacks on his Richard Nixon voice a la the sketch where, on the eve of his resignation, Dick talks to the paintings of Jefferson, Lincoln, et al.) “WE DON’T WEAR TIES!”

Network executives? “They leave us alone, really• The show's makin9 money. That's what they care about,”says Belushi•

John Belushi, who shares office space with Ackroyd, has disappeared beneath his desk and he rises, wildeyed, as Ackroyd hits the word “ties.” He looks both ways, as if to make sure that no one’s around but us chickens. “They don’t know where we came from.” he says, then hits a sardonic smile and lifts his eyebrows, “but we’re here!”

Yes, they’re here all right, in all their glory, every Saturday night except the firsf one of the month, live and in color and funny. Saturday Night has been, to this media baby’s eyes and ears, the one and only saving grace of an absolutely dismal TV year. (I watched Mary Hartman when it started and quickly lost interest. After years of cutting afternoon English classes in college so I could catch Another World and The Edge of Night at the dorm lounge, I know what I want from a continuing serial. When it comes to soaps, I'm a strict constructionist and proud of it.)

Saturday Night, though, is a show unlike most of what we’ve all grown up seeing. A lovely combination of the downright silly (a Jaws takeoff with Chevy Chase wearing a shark’s headdisguise, terrorizing apartment house dwellers while disguised as a Candygram courier) and the healthily sick (the “Claudine Longet Accidental Shooting Invitational . Ski Tournament”), the show just marches on for an hour and a half with little rhyme or reason except to be funny and entertaining.

The brainchild of producer/writer Lome Michaels, the show started slowly last fall, often getting confused with its lone live rival, Howard “love to hate me, don’t you?” Cosell’s variety fiasco on ABC. Without much hype or hoopla, the show began to draw an audience by word of mouth and now is almost an institution. Early press made troupe member Chevy Chase the show’s star, but as the year w,ent on, each of the players’ talents emerged, showing that the equal billing they all receive at the beginning of the show is more than warranted.

Alphabetically speaking, they are: Dan Ackroyd, a Canadian lad who grew up wanting to be a cop and who still thinks about it every now and then (The week I was there, when Kris Kristofferson hosted,Ackroyd was quite pleased that writer Michael O’Donoghue had been able to score some real revolvers for their S.W.A.T. styled “Police State” bit.); John Belushi, owner and proprietor of the Samurai Hotel and Samurai Deli, impersonator of everyone from Rod Steiger to Captain Kirk to Joe Cocker; Chevy Chase, who reminds me of that wise-ass in high school who used to get 90s on all his tests and play practical jokes on the teachers and never get blamed ’cause he was such a good student, and you knew that he did ’em not to play the jokes but to have a good laugh when someone else wound up getting caught; Jan Curtin, a gifted actress who looks nice and normal and clean, but what usually comes out of her mouth is, as Woody Allen said about What’s Up Tiger Lily?, something wholly other; Garrett Morris, who endeared himself to'my heart forever with a hilarious and accurate impression of Sammy Davis, Jr. that’s better than Sammy’s ifhpression of himself on Sammy and Co.; Laraine Newman, an off-beat California weirdo whose “Weekend Update” correspondent’s nasalized “I Don’t Knowww” has become a catch phrase around my house; and Gilda Radner, Boy Howdy! T-shirt model for CREEM and creator of darling little old Emily Littella, who often responds to “Weekend Update” editorials as a sincere and concerned senior citizen, only to find out from anchorman Chase that the .editorial had been about restoring the death penalty, not the deaf penalty.

Inside Gilda Radner’s purse, which sits on her desk right next to an autographed picture of J esus Christ, the kind with the eyes that open and close (it says, “Love ya, Gilda and the show”—-the work of two time host Buck Henry) is a button given to her by some SN fanatics; it says, as Emily has, many times: “Never Mind.”

“Emily is based on this 83-year-old woman who raised me,” Gilda explains. “I actually didn’t realize I was doing her until after I’d already done it. She’s seen it and loves it. She’s just like Emily, too. We did this bit about girls talking about guys and had they ever seen ‘it’ and she called me and said, ‘Uhm, that scene you did about seeing it. Well, I was married for a year before I saw my husband’s. He used to say, ‘We’re both the same person’ and I’d say, ‘You be yours, thank you, and I’ll be mine.’”

Gilda wasn’t scared when the season started and the cast faced the cameras for the first time. “Who had time to be scared? We were too busy. All we knew for sure was that we had a guaranteed thirteen week run and we had nothing to lose. We were unknowns and if it didn’t happen, we could all do something else. We were all very naive about television and that helped.”

Gilda! thinks that one of the biggest reasons for the show’s success has been that it’s been true to itself. “Our audience came to us and that doesn’t happen that much on TV. We’re not adults performing for kids or kids performing for adults. We’re a certain segment of the audience that’s been pretty much ignored as far as TV was\ concerned and I think we appeal to people like us. And we never think, ‘Will this appeal to our audience?’ All we do here is make each other laugh and if we like it, then it usually works.”

SN hasn’t changed Gilda’s life, no, but it has changed her hairstyle. “I used to wear my hair styled and you cotildn’t see my face from the side. Lome kept yelling at me to do something about it. so now I wear berets a lot, or ribbons, like for my Olga Korbut bit.” (Commenting on Nadia Comaneci’s upstaging at the Olympics, Olga says, “I would like to stick the balance beam in her ear.” Translator translates, “Olga is very happy about Nadia’s performance and wishes her hearty congratulations ”).

Laraine Newman also has a button; hers says “That’s disgusting!” a memorial to one of Laraine’s lines in a teenage pajama party piece with all the girls discussing the process of making babies. Laraine, who attended Beverly Hills High and got her start (as did most of the SN gang) in improvisational groups, has gained most of her notoriety on the show through her varying portrayals of noted wackos from Squeaky Fromme to Reagan, from the Exorcist to Shirley Temple. The day I talked to her, I had misplaced the mike t6 my cassette recorder and while I was scribbling notes as. we talked, she scribbled down what I said on a note pad. (She passed by the next day while I was interviewing Gilda with my found mike and she flew into a great fake tantrum about being passed over for the bigger fish.)

'They don't know where we came from,” he says, then hits a sardonic smile and lifts his eyebrows, “but we're here!"

For Laraine, the show has been most helpful in establishing an onstage identity for herself. “All great comediennes and actresses are able to present a persona, if you will, when they perform. And it’s difficult to develop that sense of onstage personality when you do characters. That’s been the biggest thing for me.” Though the tensions of putting the show together week in and week out are many (“Fresh traumas every week,”) and sometimes give her hives (“Mostly on my back,”), her biggest problem right now, and she looks at me quite seriously here, running her fingers through her frizzed out blonde hair, are “Zits. I’ve got three zits on my face and I went to the doctor and he drained them, and they came back.”

There aren’t any buttons in Belushi and Ackroyd’s little inner sanctum (“The vault,” explains Belushi. “They offered us a big suite with windows. We chose the vault. Who wants to look outside?”). What there is is clothing— underwear, shirts, pants. “Yeah, we crash here a lot. We don’t like it outside,” John confesses. The two of them are pretty close; they had two weeks off awhile back and they took a Driveaway car out to Los Angeles, with Ackroyd putting in a CB radio and broadcasting as they crossed the country. “I’ll tell ya,” John says, “out of all of us, I really think Danny’s the best one, the most versatile and talented. And he’s certified, too. He’s absolutely crazy.”

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Of course Belushi doesn’t appear to be that anchored to the steamship of sanity either. The week before the interview he’d gone on the air offering to sell his clothing, his records (“Hey, how ’bout this? The Doors first album, with Jim and everything! A buck. Whaddaya say, huh?”), everything he owns to get some money (“Support me, support my art, OK?”). On his desk are checks that came in to him from all over the country.

“Yeah, all kinds of checks. One girl sent me three dollars, cold cash. I called her up To tell her I couldn’t accept it. She was amazed that I’d called. I call people all the time. I never write letters. I don’t even write my mother. But I’ll talk on the phone for a few minutes with anybody.

“I started out to be a serious actor,” John says, “and hopefully, I am and I just happen to do comedy because uh, funny is money, y’know? It’s harder to find people who can do comedy than ones to do soap operas, not to take anything away from soap operas, but you just can’t find as many people who can make people laugh as can bum people out.”

Belushi started with two friends in a dope, sex and violence comedy act (“the more laughs we got, the more dope, sex and violence we’d throw in, real broad type of humor—pre-Cheech and Chong”) then went to the Second City improv group (“learned my subtleties, went to a more middle class vein”), showed up in the National Lampoon Show, did his infamous Joe Cocker imitation and the rest is history.

“I was skeptical about doing TV before this show started, you know, get caught playing one goofy character on some sitcom or something, but I knew this show was going to let me do different kinds of things. I knew they were on the right track when they hired O’Donoghue, and knowing him and most of the other people involved with the writing and acting on the show, I wanted to do it, ’fcause I was sure it would be good.”'

When Ackroyd comes into the little office, the interview breaks down quickly as he and Belushi take off on a thousand tangents. The topic turns to Dan’s piece of land in Canada. “Yes, I am landed,” Ackroyd solemnly states. “You know, by 1986 this country will be too fuckin’ technologically and electronically crazy to live in and you, John, can come to the farm and you’ll have a bed there; a bed, John, a cot, and you can crash there, ’cause by 1986 there’ll be no place for privacy. All your lakes and rivers will just be microcircuits, but you’ll be welcome. I’ll be married and have a brood of my own then. Chickens, geese. I’ll send my geese to school. Go on to school now. Bobby,come here. Bobby! HHHIISSSS! Bobby, stop hissing. Bobby, the teacher said that you just haven’t been concentrating on your calculus and Bobby, if you want to grow up to be like humap beings, well, haha, you just better be a smart little goose and get down to your homework. HHHHIISSSSSS! Bobby, are you listening? HIISSSSSS! BOBBY, STOP HISSING!!”

I ask them what kind of feedback they’ve gotten from the network executives about the show. “They leave us alone, really. The show’s makin’ money. That’s what they care about,” says John. Dan nods in agreement. “Yes, they sell their little peas and Honda motorcycles and chicken and CocaCola.” “And chocolate chip cookies, Dan!” J ohn screams. “Did you see that ad for the cookies? Man, these big companies sure know their dope smokin’ public.” ‘‘We’ll be gone soon anyway,” Dan says. “I have a wall with a bank of six TV’s that I watch all day. My doctor says my optic nerve has maybe two years at the most till it conks out. Most of America’s headed that way. This is a very suicidal profession.”

My final question is simple enough. Any advice for teen America? “Get outa school,” yells Belushi. “Stay in school,” yells Ackroyd. “Either stay in or get out,” says Belushi. “Make up your minds,” says Dan and then jumps on a chair and lectures the opposite wall. “Stay in school! You must! Stay in, become technicians and engineers, prepare for the colonization of Mars! You. young teen America, you will be the future colonists of Mars. You will build the houses and cities and transportation systems for other planets and only now, with the resources and knowledge that are available to you in Arnerica [cues Belushi, who starts marching in place and humming “Hail to the Chief”], this great country of ours, can you hope to strive for the goal of a colony on Mars? Bring your Chevelle Malibu, bring your Dodge Dart, your Ford Mustang ...”

Yes, 1 can see it all quite clearly. Chevy in his astronaut suit, stumbling over a rock, breaking his umbilical cord and floating off into the galaxy. He takes off his big helmet and smiles; “Live from the red planet, it’s Satur-day Ni-ght!”