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.

Back in nasty, metallic, cocaine-powered ’90s London, where everyone was standing around talking loudly and competitively in overlit rooms, I would find myself from time to time in the company of comedians. Stand-ups, mainly. They were brilliant of course, and miserable of course (because stand-ups have to live with accelerated brains and grotesquely magnified associative powers), and when they got going, the laughs would stack up, bitter, dazzling, progressively more stimulated and rarefied. Until, that is, something truly and originally comedic was said. At which point silence fell, faces straightened, and somebody would gravely observe: “That’s good material.”

For a biography of a man whose business is comedy, Susan Morrison’s Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live is weirdly barren of laughs. Across 600 extremely interesting pages, I LOLed exactly once, and it was at a joke (or what the critic Jesse David Fox calls “a joke-joke”) that the future SNL staffer Alan Zweibel wrote and sold—for $7—to Rodney Dangerfield. Here it is: “Even as an infant I didn’t get any respect. My mother wouldn’t breastfeed me. She said she liked me as a friend.”

Then again, maybe the laughlessness is not so weird: Lorne Michaels, in the words of his collaborator-­nemesis Chevy Chase (in show business, everybody you collaborate with eventually becomes your nemesis), is not “an initiator of humor as much as a believer in humor.” As the creator and impresario of Saturday Night Live and its spin-offs, he has made a career—­an epoch, an oligarchy—­out of coolly appraising, classifying, curating, and to some degree determining the funny. Out of knowing the funny and creating the conditions for it. The bloodier and more dangerous business of being the funny, he has wisely left to others.

And the others, as they go tumbling in furious vulnerability across Morrison’s viewfinder, are fascinating. The rage-filled writers (Michael O’Donoghue) and the exploding clowns (John Belushi, Chris Farley). The alpha entertainers, desperate to please (Conan O’Brien), and the autarkic geniuses who’d be doing it even if no one was watching (Andy Kaufman). I got an education in the groundbreakingness of Lily Tomlin.

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But somehow no one is quite as fascinating as Michaels himself, easing in his faintly reptilian way through showbiz vicissitudes and blinding storms of ego, nurturing brittle artists and disarming corporate thugs, “impervious to refusals,” sending mixed signals, making strange noises of approval or demurral, getting richer and richer, living better and better, quietly arrogating to himself enormous cultural power without ever appearing to break a sweat. Even tripping on psychedelics in Joshua Tree, pre-SNL, ranting to the writer Tom Schiller about the coming revolution in broadcasting—“Now is the time to enter television. We now have the airwaves”—he keeps his cool. “He never becomes noticeably different under any circumstances,” Schiller tells Morrison. “You can’t get through the glaze of brown eyes.”

He was raised Lorne Lipowitz in Forest Hill, an affluent suburb of Toronto that had the distinction (under the alias “Crestwood Heights”) of being the subject of a government-funded social-science study, the findings of which were published in 1956. “Many features of this middle class culture,” noted one contemporary reviewer of Crestwood Heights: A North American Suburb, “reveal the compulsive, ruminative preoccupation with knowledge especially about human behavior.” He added: “One would assume that neurotic and psychosomatic conditions are quite prevalent in this population.” Out of this hothouse of manners and pathology comes the young Lorne, ever watchful, whose first recorded laugh occurs in second grade when he makes a joke at the expense of an overweight girl. Ah, cruel roots of comedy. Later, at the University of Toronto, Lorne takes note of what happens when a political-science professor intentionally mispronounces the name of the Canadian prime minister: “I’d hear the laugh, and I’d think ‘But he didn’t do anything funny.’ It was just that he’d made the students proud that they understood that he’d referred to our prime minister in an unflattering way.” The mainstreaming of that privileged, nostrilly, insider-y laughter might be Michaels’s chief legacy.

The first episode of Saturday Night (the Live would come later) aired on NBC on October 11, 1975, and one way to read Michaels is as a quintessential ’70s guy: a post-counterculture guy, druggily expanded and still trailing wisps of the Age of Aquarius but buzzing now at a lower, thicker frequency. A wised-up materialist, on the same track as fellow plutocrats-to-be David Geffen and Jann Wenner. Commitment to the artist did not preclude commitment to making piles of money: If you do it right, they are the same thing.

And commitment to the artist means managing the artist, handling the artist: Lorne at his Lorne-iest. “He often compares doling out praise to feeding a stray cat,” Morrison writes. What Morrison calls his “emotional-energy efficiency” has protected Michaels from overinvolvement, overinvestment. As the former SNL writer Mark McKinney puts it: “He can’t get into the agonies of generation after generation of broken little toys who show up to write comedy for him.”

Almost nothing in that first episode worked, by the way. Not the sub-Python intro with its repeated only-funny-if-you’re-high use of the word wolverines; not the sweaty, jabbing monologue from a coked-out George Carlin; not Jim Henson’s Muppets trying to be dark and scabrous. (Henson was a great artist, but there was no way his puppets could survive in that environment: Michaels was running his own Muppet Show, with humans.) Awkwardness comes off the screen in waves. Even from 50 years away, you can still hear SNL’s debut softly bombing in dens and dorms and living rooms from coast to coast. You can hear it, in the words of Michaels’s friend Joe Boyd, “laying an egg.”

And yet it did work. With the laughs-that-weren’t-laughs and the frozen druggy vibes, the wizard Michaels had cast his spell. Stealthily tapping into the American public’s violent and bottom­less inferiority complex, he had succeeded in giving viewers the feeling that perhaps they weren’t quite hip enough or clever enough—­or high enough—­for this new brand of humor. The corollary to this, the lighter side as it were, is the invitation to become hip, to initiate yourself, by laughing your head off.

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Which is more or less the sensation of a great SNL sketch. Take the sole comedic triumph, the one truly gorgeous bit of business, from that first episode: Andy Kaufman’s Mighty Mouse sketch. Standing next to a record player in a sports jacket and turtleneck, Kaufman, with a kind of bulging meekness, a glisteningly gleeful timidity, puts the needle on the record. Crackle of vinyl; the Mighty Mouse theme song begins to play. Kaufman stands there. He stares, fidgets. He is waiting—on live TV. The jolly music pumps along; Kaufman twitches; now he is horribly exposed. His psyche, if you could see it, would look like a Francis Bacon painting.

But then, with the song’s refrain—­“HERE I come to save the DAAAAAAY!”—­he is transformed: Gazing grandly, arm raised to hail a grateful population, he mouths the words and wags his hips in time. He radiates triumph. And then just as quickly—­when the line ends—­reverts.

Watching this, watching Kaufman shift on a dime from SOS-blinking hesitancy to suavely billowing superconfidence and back again, you can feel yourself being lifted on the wafts and buffets of your own incredulous mirth to a new aesthetic, a new plane of absurdity, a new something. Michaels, when he talks about Kaufman, sounds atypically wonderstruck: “It was as beautiful a thing as you could witness,” he recalls in Lorne. “He wasn’t enmeshed in the show business of it … There seemed to be some other commitment, something very pure and personal.”

Can you draw a line from that to Dave Chappelle’s SNL monologue on January 18 of this year, to all the Dave Chappelle feelings—­anxiety, more anxiety, even more anxiety, gurgling gratified release—­that he so exquisitely manages? I think you can. Comedy is tension and deliverance from tension, and to maintain a space in the culture where this can happen at the same time every week, where even on an off night, there’ll be a moment that allows the static around your brain to crackle off into the ether: That’s no small thing. Kaufman’s nakedness, Chappelle’s command … they both rely on, feed off, feed into this space—the space that Lorne Michaels created, and has held inviolate or as close to inviolate as he could almost superhumanly manage, for 50 years.