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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: November 23, 1991
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Saturday Night Live, “Macaulay Culkin / Tin Machine” (season 17, episode 7). [Stream on Hulu.]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: The 1990s were a strange time. With Macaulay Culkin invited to host Saturday Night Live — to promote neither Home Alone nor Home Alone 2 but rather My Girl, the movie he made in between those two — there was a veritable ’90s bonanza. Check out this little tableau that greeted us in the cold open: a note-for-note parody of the Home Alone family-pizza-dinner scene, featuring Lorne Michaels as Catherine O’Hara, the late Chris Farley as Buzz, and (among others) Dana Carvey, Victoria Jackson, and the late Phil Hartman.
It’s surreal but it’s also perfect? Certainly casting Canadian Lorne Michaels as Canadian legend Catherine O’Hara and Hartman as Uncle Frank (“look what you did, you little jerk!”) were inspired, though no more inspired than Farley as Buzz, the mean, fat older brother who mimes barfing up pizza before Kevin/Culkin takes a run at him. There’s no real reason for this reenactment. Home Alone was a full year prior. Showing a sketch where the child-star host is treated as a pariah doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
But it’s all worth it for the moment when Macaulay Culkin throws Chris Farley through a table. For all of eternity, past Farley’s death and Culkin’s falling out of Hollywood rotation, we will always have this. This moment in time when the biggest movie star in the world/an actual child threw the would-be burgeoning comedic actor of his generation through a table in a bit of physical comedy that was emblematic of its era, all while the millionaire EP of the show looked on and tried to remember which line of movie dialogue he was supposed to parrot next. What a world we lived in then.
[You can stream the Macaulay Culkin cold-open sketch on Hulu.]
