As the late-night comedy showcase “Saturday Night Live” approaches its 50th season, two podcast hosts are rewatching and summarizing half a century of comedy sketches for their listeners. 

Scot Bertram, general manager of Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM, and National Review columnist Christian Schneider published the first episode of their podcast “Wasn’t That Special” through Substack on July 10. Released to subscribers every other week, each episode of the podcast provides a detailed summary of one season of SNL, including the cast, writers, and sketches. 

“The idea was inspired by hearing a lot of people say things like ‘I liked SNL a lot better when it was funny,’ or ‘SNL was so much better before it was political,’” Schneider said in an email. “Every few years people call for the show to be canceled because it isn’t living up to this vague idea of greatness people think it once represented. We wanted to take a closer look at whether the show was actually as good as they remembered it.”

One of the goals of the podcast is to give an honest account of SNL throughout the years and determine which seasons and cast members were the best, according to Schneider. He and Bertram have covered five seasons in five episodes, in addition to an introductory episode and an interview with former SNL cast member Siobhan Fallon Hogan. 

“We are already finding that peoples’ recollections of the shows from the 1970s are often misguided,” Schneider said. “Not only are there a lot of episodes that aren’t very good, there are also cast members that people remember as all-time greats that don’t warrant such high regard.”

Both life-long SNL fans, Bertram and Schneider met through radio. Schneider said he made appearances as Bertram’s Wisconsin correspondent over a decade ago when Bertram co-hosted a morning talk show in Rockford, Illinois, and later on Bertram’s music podcast “Political Beats.”

Bertram said that Schneider reached out to him almost three years ago with the idea for a podcast to chronicle “the good, the bad, the ugly, the funny, and the not funny” of SNL.

The late-night comedy show first aired on NBC in 1975 and has starred actors such as John Belushi, Tina Fey, Phil Hartman, Victoria Jackson, and Eddie Murphy.

“Every season has its own feel,” Bertram said. “Things are constantly changing. The cast is changing, writers are changing, the success the cast has outside the show sometimes influences the way they are presented on the show. So it’s really fascinating the way all of that comes together. The good seasons are great, and you laugh a lot. The bad seasons, you go back and say ‘What went wrong? How did they think this was funny? Who wrote this stuff?’”

Schneider said that he hopes to introduce a new generation of comedy fans to SNL through the podcast.

“We are hoping it won’t just be old people who find this stuff interesting,” Schneider said.

Senior George Accola, who took a class on the political humor of SNL with Bertram last fall, said he originally had a negative view of SNL. Watching the older seasons of the show in Bertram’s class, Accola said, showed him the appeal of the show and taught him about the pop culture of the late 20th century as well as how the comedy of SNL has changed over time to mirror current events. 

“I don’t think you can really understand the comedy of SNL without understanding the events that were going on,” Accola said. “What makes it so special, and this is something we would keep bringing up, is that in a time before Twitter, before social media, you have this thing that’s able to make jokes about things that happened two days ago or three days ago, and no other show was able to do that. So a lot of SNL’s comedy comes from: you saw something on Wednesday on the news and now they’re making fun of it on Saturday night.”

Because SNL is intertwined with American politics and culture, Bertram said the audience for the podcast extends to anyone interested in learning about comedy or America in general.

“SNL is an American comedic institution, and its humor is of the time,” he said. “There are a lot of references and things that are happening that week – it’s live – but there are plenty of sketches that also are timeless and or do a great job of dating the show, like this is specifically what was happening and what we found funny at this point. And I think it’s fascinating to look back and see all those points through the show’s history.”