Best Opening Monologues From Saturday Night Live
13 Perfect SNL Opening Monologues That Were Almost Better Than the Show Itself
1
Comedy legend George Carlin kicked off the first SNL monologue ever in 1975. He goes in with a joke about sports, comparing the aggressive language of football and relatively gentle semantics of baseball. There's a lot of sharp and layered comedy here about colonialism and masculinity, long before such topics were discussed in the mainstream. It's also easy to follow, even if you know next to nothing about sports (like me).