And we’re back! After a two-week hiatus, the Crummy Little Podcast returns to celebrate Saturday Night Live, which premiered 40 years ago this past weekend. Joining me to chat about it is friend of the program Matt Lewis. It’s especially topical for a political and cultural commentator like Matt, since this year’s season kicked off with a much-discussed cameo by Hillary Clinton.

Matt and I both enjoyed the show during our formative years, and we both now find it difficult to stay up late on a Saturday night to watch the program live. But SNL is a bit unique as a media property. As media has evolved over the past several decades – from the dominance of broadcast networks to the advent of cable to the rise of the internet and short-form, on-demand video – many cornerstones of the television schedule has decreased in importance. Not so for SNL, whose format was built for YouTube three decades before YouTube even existed.

Listen/download it here or subscribe on iTunes.

Extras:

• Criminy, we referenced a lot of SNL sketches. Here’s a partial list. (By the way, the show prep for this week was a lot of fun.)
  • Hillary Clinton’s cameo in “Bar Talk.”
  • Chevy Chase’s not-even-trying Gerald Ford impression.
  • “Ask President Carter.”
  • President Reagan, Mastermind. Funny enough, Matt brought up the fact that Dennis Miller was hardly ever in sketches; funny enough, he actually was in this one.
  • Clinton visits McDonald’s. WARLORDS! By the way, fans of the show will note Rob Schneider’s clutch move: he’s ready with a well-timed soda when Phil Hartman literally bites off more than he can chew. He even stayed in character, too.
  • Classic debate sketches from: 1992 (Bush/Clinton/Perot); 1988 (Bush/Dukakis); 2000 (Bush/Gore).
  • Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin.
  • Norm MacDonald’s Bob Dole talking to Bob Dole’s Bob Dole.
  • The final sketch of Season 19, which is now a classic and more than just a little sad because it ends with Hartman singing “Goodbye” while cradling a sleepy Chris Farley.
• You can follow Matt on Twitter, listen to his podcast, and read his stuff at the Daily Caller and The Week. His forthcoming book, Too Dumb to Fail, drops in January 2016 but is available for pre-order here.