Saturday Night Live alum Jane Curtin says show’s early sketches were ‘terrible’: ‘Not one thing was funny’

Actor and comedian, 75, performed on the sketch comedy show from 1975 to 1980

Jane Curtin, one of Saturday Night Live’s original cast members, has reacted to the popular sketch show decades later.

The now-75-year-old actor and comedian, who currently stars in director Marc Turtletaub’s new film, Jules, first made a name for herself performing on Lorne Michael’s NBC live comedy show from 1975 to 1980.

A couple of years ago, Curtin said she had been sent a compilation video of Saturday Night Live’s first five years.

“I gave one to my daughter,” she told People in a new interview. “We were out visiting her daughter one Christmas and her husband said, ‘Have you ever watched any of these? And I said, ‘God, I haven’t seen them in a long time.’”

After picking one to watch, Curtin recalled: “We sat around the TV, and I had that sort of anticipatory, open-mouth grin that people have when they’re waiting for something to happen, that they know is going to be really great.

“And... it never happened. It wasn’t funny. Not one thing was funny. There was not one utterance of a laugh or a giggle.”

Curtin explained to People that she thinks “it was just one of those, you had to be there in the moment things”.

“That’s what happens with live TV, and with topical TV. It gets dated after a while. Remember, this was almost 50 years ago,” she said. “But after we rewatched, I was like, ‘That really wasn’t a very good show. It was terrible!’”

Jane Curtin on ‘Saturday Night Live’ (Saturday Night Live YouTube )

Curtin’s most notable roles on SNL included serving as the Weekends News Update anchor alongside Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray.

One of her fan-favourite sketches, The Coneheads, in which she and Akroyd appeared as an alien family who had to blend in on Earth, was so successful that it went on to inspire the feature-length 1993 sci-fi comedy, Coneheads.

Following her career-making turn on SNL, Curtin later starred in the six-season sitcom 3rd Rock From the Sun, which aired from 1996 to 2001. She also appeared in the 2018 comedy The Spy Who Dumped Me and, more recently, in an episode of fellow SNL alum Pete Davidson’s comedy-drama Bupkis.

Curtin can currently be seen opposite Ben Kingsley and Harriet Sansom Harris in Jules, which follows a man whose quiet life in rural Pennsylvania becomes upended after a UFO crashes in his backyard. After he befriends the extraterrestrial, however, things quickly become complicated when two friends discover his secret and the government closes in.

Jules does not yet have a UK release date.