Before John Belushi, before Bill Murray or Chevy Chase or Dan Aykroyd—before any of them, there was Gilda.

Gilda Radner was the first performer Lorne Michaels hired for the cast of Saturday Night Live when it launched, in 1975. She was, at the time, one of the stars of The National Lampoon Radio Hour, the only woman in a cast of men destined to be famous. “I knew that she could do almost anything, and that she was enormously likeable,” Michaels once said of the decision. “So I started with her.”

Television audiences immediately fell in love with Radner. How could they not? She was magnetic. She sparkled with a kind of anything’s-possible energy, and stole every scene she was in. She made everything hilarious, and more daring. That was Radner—the tiny woman with the gigantic hair having more fun than everybody around her.

Radner’s charm was so off the charts that practically every character of hers wound up with a beloved catchphrase. There was the bespectacled nerd Lisa Loopner (“So funny I forgot to laugh!”); the poof-haired newscaster Roseanne Roseannadanna (“It just goes to show, it’s always something.”); and the little old lady Emily Litella (“Never mind.”). A typical Litella rant on “Weekend Update” went like this: “What’s all this fuss I keep hearing about violins on television! Why don’t parents want their children to see violins on television! … I say there should be more violins on television!” Chevy Chase eventually leans over and corrects her: Violence, not violins. Litella, sheepish: “Never mind.” Radner based Litella on her own childhood nanny. And the portrayal, like everything she did, was shot through with love.

Radner also appeared in the now-classic “Extremely Stupid” sketch, which became one of the earliest examples of actors breaking—that is, breaking character and cracking up on live television—in SNL history after the guest host, Candice Bergen, flubbed a line. Radner used the moment to great comedic effect, turning directly to the camera to exaggerate the impeccable delivery of her own lines, while Bergen dissolved into laughter beside her.

Almost every comic who came after Radner—and certainly the ones who wound up on Saturday Night Live—counts her as a formative influence. You can see Radner in the rag-doll chaos of Molly Shannon’s character Mary Katherine Gallagher; in the total commitment to the bit of Adam Sandler’s singsong gibberish; in the weird imagination of Kristen Wiig’s universe of absurd characters (the mischievous Gilly and the tiny-handed Dooneese both come to mind); and in the master-class physical comedy of Melissa McCarthy.

Gilda Radner jokes with a person in a King Kong costume at a party on the observatory floor of the Empire State Building in New York City on August 13, 1980. (AP)

Radner herself was always drawn to classic physical comedy—among her idols were Charlie Chaplin, Lucille Ball, anyone who was, in her words, “willing to risk it.” So it made sense that Radner parodied Ball—and the legendary chocolate-factory episode of I Love Lucy—in a sketch, alongside Aykroyd, that had her juggling nuclear warheads coming down a conveyor belt. Then there was Radner’s wordless dance routine with Steve Martin—in which the pair toggles between all-out slapstick and total earnestness—that remains a higher form of comedy, even 50 years later. Radner’s particular charisma came from this blend of bigheartedness and fearlessness. She always went for it. “There was just an abandon she had that was unmatched,” Martin has said. She’d keep going until she got the laugh, however far that took her. And she could make fun without being mean-spirited. (See: her impressions of Barbara Walters as “Baba Wawa” and Patti Smith as “Candy Slice.”)

In 1979, Radner gave the commencement speech—fully in character as Roseanne Roseannadanna—to the graduating class at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, part of which wound up on her comedy album Gilda Radner: Live From New York, released that same year. And while the delivery is pure Roseannadanna, listening to it today is also a reminder of the trail Radner herself blazed, along with SNL cast members Jane Curtin and Laraine Newman, as women in comedy in the 1970s. “Imagine, if you will, an idealistic young Roseanne Roseannadanna, fresh out of the Columbia School of Broadcasting, looking for a job in journalism,” Radner-as-Roseannadanna says. “I filled out applications, I went out for interviews, and they allll told me the same thing: You’re overqualified, you’re underqualified, don’t call us, we’ll call you, it’s a jungle out there, a woman’s place is in the home, have a nice day, drop dead, goodbye. But I didn’t give up.” Radner didn’t give up either. But her sense of purpose wasn’t about proving a point or being a feminist, but something even more straightforward. If she wanted something, she went for it. Why wouldn’t she?

Radner was famously boy-crazy. (She used to joke that she couldn’t bring herself to watch Ghostbusters because it starred all of her ex-boyfriends.) She had on-again, off-again romances with Martin Short and Bill Murray (and that was after she’d dated Murray’s brother), among others. In her own telling of her eventual marriage to the great Gene Wilder, the two wound up together only because she pursued him so relentlessly. She knew from the minute she saw him that she wanted to be with him forever. He did not share this view, not initially. An interviewer once asked Wilder if it had been love at first sight. “No, not at all,” Wilder said. “If anything, the opposite. I said, How do I get rid of this girl?”

Gilda Radner and Gene Wilder in 1982 (Adam Scull / MediaPunch / AP)

He would come around. “If I had to compare her to something I would say to a firefly, in the summer, at night,” Wilder recalled. “When you see a sudden flash of light, it’s flying by, and then it stops. And then light. And stops. She was like that.” What Wilder meant, in part, was that Radner could have the highest of highs but also the lowest of lows. In moments of lightness, the whole world was illuminated, and everything in sight seemed to bend in her direction. But other times she was anxious and sad. She grieved the death of her father, who died of cancer when she was a teenager, her whole life. She described herself as highly neurotic. She had had eating disorders more or less since she was 10 years old. And she suffered in other ways, too. She never got to be a mother, which she’d desperately wanted. And while she brought untold joy to millions of people, her short life ended tragically. At one point, toward the end, she looked back on the early SNL years and marveled. “We thought we were immortal, at least for five years,” she wrote in her memoir. “But that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Wilder and Radner were married for only five years before she died, at 42, of ovarian cancer. And today, she is remembered as much for the unfairness of her young death—like Belushi before her and Chris Farley after her—as she is for her originality and spectacular talent. In a gentler world, all three of them would still be with us. Radner and Belushi would be in their 70s, Farley in his 60s. In a gentler world, Radner could have had all the babies she wished for, made all the movies she never got to, and would still be making people laugh. When I think about Radner now, what I think about most is the way she lived, and how that ought to be a lesson to the rest of us. She had a sense of total urgency, and a willingness to do the things that terrified her. Somehow, she made it look easy. “I don’t know why I’m doing it,” she once said in an interview, about why she’d chosen to take her act to Broadway, “except that for some reason I’ve chosen to scare myself to death.”

That was Gilda Radner. Gilda, who as a child once overheard her mother saying, “Gilda could sell ice cubes in winter,” and so set up a little stand outside to do just that. Gilda, who loved work so much that she’d get impatient on the way to NBC Studios and ask her taxi drivers to speed up already. Gilda, who fell in love easily and often, and wasn’t afraid to be weird, or look ridiculous. Gilda, who could make anything funny. But her real legacy, it turns out, is something much more profound than her comedy. This is the lesson of Gilda Radner’s too-short life: For God’s sake, don’t bother with fear. Just go for the thing you want, with your whole heart. Each of us gets only so much time on this planet, and none of us knows for how long. Life can be terrible this way, and sad, and it isn’t fair at all. But it is funny, anyway. Really, really funny.

Fifty years is a long time. But you wouldn’t necessarily know that from large portions of SNL50: The Anniversary Special, the much-hyped celebration of the long-running sketch show that aired in prime time last night. SNL50 was meant to commemorate the program, created and executive-produced by Lorne Michaels, for achieving five decades of cultural relevance. But the evening’s rundown suffered from a severe case of recency bias, with sketches that were more inclined to play it safe than honor the show’s extensive, complicated, and fascinating history.

With a couple of notable exceptions, the three-hour special primarily revived recurring segments from the past 20 years. Kristen Wiig brought back Dooneese, the bizarre young woman with doll hands who performs with her sisters on The Lawrence Welk Show; she debuted the character in 2008. This time, Dooneese’s sisters were played by Ana Gasteyer and two celebrity guests, Kim Kardashian and Scarlett Johansson; Will Ferrell dusted off an old impression to join them as the crooner Robert Goulet. Kate McKinnon, who left the show in 2022, returned as Colleen Rafferty, a woman who is constantly abducted and exploited by aliens. Rafferty was joined by her mother, played by Meryl Streep—making her first-ever SNL appearance—but the sketch didn’t deviate much from past iterations.

The most overly familiar section featured the pop star Sabrina Carpenter participating in a version of the viral “Domingo” sketch, which debuted when Ariana Grande hosted this past October. Grande’s rendition hinged on a parody of Carpenter’s hit song “Espresso”; Carpenter returned the favor for hers by reworking “Defying Gravity,” from Wicked, the film adaptation of which Grande recently starred in. The third take on the premise in four months, the spot was among the most glaring moments when the night seemed like a celebration less of the entire show than of its catchiest contemporary material.

The selections were also at odds with the rest of the storytelling that has surrounded Season 50, which seemed to trawl SNL’s deep archives. In the lead-up to yesterday’s event, a wave of documentaries emphasized just how much history the show has encompassed. The four-episode docuseries SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night featured sketches and cast members from across the show’s entire run; each installment recalled an aspect or era of the show in detail. The excellent film Ladies & Gentlemen … 50 Years of SNL Music, co-directed by the Roots drummer Questlove, was a deep dive into the series’ relationship with its musical guests, including the punk band Fear, who made a controversial appearance in 1981, as well as the singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor, who infamously tore up a picture of the pope onstage. It did a great job of showing the wide corners of culture that SNL has touched—a key theme of the overarching anniversary project.

Last night’s special had a comparatively narrow focus, prioritizing the characters and celebrities that many younger viewers would recognize. But even when such a major name as Mike Myers reprised his popular “Coffee Talk” character Linda Richman, originated in the early 1990s, it was in the context of a much more recent bit: Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph’s “Bronx Beat,” from the late 2000s. Some of these more contemporary sketches offered surprising twists on their formulas, however. In “Black Jeopardy,” Eddie Murphy pulled out a perfect impression of Tracy Morgan—while standing next to Tracy Morgan. The sketch demonstrated the veteran comedian’s prodigious talents, which we see all too rarely these days; it was the kind of showcase I expected more of from a celebrity-filled spectacle like SNL50.

Meanwhile, the latest edition of John Mulaney’s New York–themed musical sketch toured the past five decades of the city. It was a brilliant send-up, as the entries in this recurring series tend to be; a highlight was Nathan Lane, the original voice of The Lion King’s Timon, as a 1980s financier singing “Cocaine and Some Vodka” to the tune of “Hakuna Matata.” Mixing Disney with hard drugs is the sort of edgy comedy that SNL has catalyzed at its best, and the satire worked superbly here.

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These sketches played like a greatest-hits reel of the past 15 years or so, but the special’s more nostalgic bits got to the root of SNL’s uniqueness as a TV institution. The 10-time host Tom Hanks emerged to set up an “In Memoriam” segment—not for the deceased, but for all the gags that had aged poorly. (Categories included “ethnic stereotypes,” “sexism,” “sexual harassment,” and “gay panic.”) It was somewhat cringeworthy, but also bracingly self-aware. While the majority of the night’s material was expected hagiography, the pointed self-critique was a sober reminder that a lot of SNL does not hold up. (The subsequent “Scared Straight” sketch, which resorted to some of those same gay-panic jokes, was an unfortunate juxtaposition.)

Some of the other effective moments were ones that looked back almost plaintively. Adam Sandler—introduced by the actor Jack Nicholson, in a rare appearance—played an original song that was so filled with genuine love for the studio and its history, it was hard not to be moved. The comedian himself seemed to tear up when mentioning two of his friends and former castmates, Chris Farley and Norm Macdonald, both of whom have died.

And, speaking of death, no segment of SNL50 was more poignant than the original cast member Garrett Morris presenting “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” a 1978 short film by the former staff writer Tom Schiller. The black-and-white clip featured the late John Belushi, dressed as an old man, walking around a graveyard memorializing his co-stars with goofy, sardonic epitaphs; Belushi, of course, preceded most of them in death, giving the comedy a somber tone. This was the kind of odd, even morbid artifact that SNL has accumulated in spades over the years—and the 50th-anniversary celebration could have benefited from digging up more of them.