We Begin Our Journey Through Saturday Night Live Movies with Michael O'Donoghue's Punky 1979 Provocation Mr. Mike's Mondo Video

You can't do this on television! No, seriously, the censors wouldn't allow it.

Welcome, friends, to the first installment in an epic journey of staggering pointlessness. For the next several months I will be watching and writing about all of the Saturday Night Live movies in chronological order for this newsletter. 

Incidentally I recently watched Monte Hellman’s final film, 2010’s Road to Nowhere, for The Fractured Mirror, an encyclopedic look at movies about movies, and I was so intrigued/appalled that Hellman’s penultimate directorial effort was 1989's Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! that I’ve decided to fast-track my series about the Silent Night, Deadly Night movies and make it Christmas in July. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself! Like many members of my generation, I have a relationship with Saturday Night Live that’s intense, pathological and deeply unhealthy. And since I have devoted my life to film that means that I have an equally extreme interest in movies spun-off from Lorne Michaels deathless comic institution. 

Some of the oddballs on Saturday Night Live BELONG in an institution. Have you seen that Colin Jost guy? I’ve literally never seen him tell a single joke but you can tell just by looking at him that he is a dangerous, savage satirist who would happily burn down society just for a laugh. 

Before Colin Jost scared the shit out of everybody with his edgy brand of nihilistic, transgressive humor the late Michael O’Donoghue reigned as the show’s Prince of Darkness. He was the Colin Jost of his time.

In Saturday Night Live mythology Lorne Michaels is the ambitious establishment pragmatists who guessed, correctly, that if he was safe and savvy enough his silly little late night comedy show could make rich and famous and powerful beyond his wildest dreams. 

Michaels played the game and won. He continues to win. He is the face and the sonorous, easily mocked and replicated voice of mainstream comedy. O’Donoghue, in sharp contrast was cast into the role of the rebel, the outlaw, the avant-garde freak more interested in blowing square’s minds than in making them laugh. 

At least that was the very flattering narrative for a very long time. Like all of our most idealized and romanticized martyrs, O’Donoghue was just too damn pure for this degraded world. He had a higher calling in line than making people laugh in between commercials. 

Or maybe he was just an asshole. And a misogynist. And a misanthrope. These days O’Donoghue is know for his contributions to The National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live but, according to rumor, he’s also apparently the man who terrorized Catherine O’Hara by spray-painting “DANGER” in her dressing room and making her cry. 

On WTF, however, O’Hara explained that she didn’t sign on to become a Not Ready For Prime Time Player out of admirable loyalty to SCTV and her costars, not because a deeply unpleasant man tried to freak her out with his masculine intensity.

This couldn’t help me think what O’Donoghue would be like if he were still alive and hadn’t died decades ago. I don’t know if he’d be MeTooed, necessarily, but I suspect he’d be one of those bitter old cranks railing against “wokeness” and the kids today and how terribly over-sensitive society had become, particularly when it comes to edgy, provocative dark comedy.

In 1979 O’Donoghue was afforded a once in a lifetime opportunity to stick it to the man with his boundary-pushing brand of proudly nonsensical comedy when he co-wrote, directed, produced and starred in Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video. 

The project was conceived as a Summer replacement for Saturday Night Live but in an unsurprising events, NBC executives looked at what O’Donoghue had done and asked, “What the fuck is this shit? And what makes you think we would run this on our network, even at night?” 

NBC rejected Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video so it became a midnight movie for the hip and stoned. 

Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video begins an opening scrawl warning, “The film you are about to see is shocking and repugnant beyond belief. It contains scenes of disturbing sexual practices and mindless violence. If older people with a heart condition are watching, or people under psychiatric care, make them sit close so they won’t miss anything. Do not let children of an impressionable age to leave the room. If they are sleeping, wake them up and slap them. Give them hot coffee.” 

After the opening credits we’re greeted by Mr. Mike sitting cross-legged on the floor of a shabby room brandishing a handgun while surrounded by rabbits oblivious to the strange role they’re playing in O’Donoghue’s disturbing comic vision. 

Like a psychotic Rod Serling, O’Donoghue invites us into his weird wicked world with an exquisitely wordy introduction warning, “Good evening. I’m Mr. Mike. Inviting you to come into a world where the bizarre is commonplace, and the commonplace bizarre. It is an odyssey of aggressive weirdness. Whatever raw, savage acts men’s hellish brain can conceive, our cameras are there, scouring the globe, seeking the cheap thrills, the pointless perversities, the shabby secrets, the grotesque, the pathetic, the unholy, the twisted the macabre the ultra, the eerie, the mystifying, the  sky above, the mud below, blue water, white death, in search of Michael Rockefeller. Come with me to the incredible world of Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video.”

The deadpan joy O’Donoghue takes in the infinite possibilities of words, of language, of the dark, horrible, exhilarating power of ideas, the more horrible the better, is infectious. 

Why does O’Donoghue have a gun? Why is he sitting on the floor? Why is he surrounded by adorable animals?

There is no answer beyond O’Donoghue’s love of randomness, absurdity, darkness and pitch-black comedy. The juxtaposition of bleak words of horror and cute bunnies is jarring and shocking without necessarily being funny. 

Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video is a parody of Mondo Kane, a 1960s cult film surveying the bizarre, the unusual and the sociologically fascinating that similarly spans the globe in search of freaky, exotic shit to entertain jaded American consumers. 

The next segment continues the theme of adorable little animals and danger, peril and free-floating weirdness. It concerns a Dutch Swimming School for cats whose methods begin and end with tossing cats into a pool and then hoping that they don’t drown. 

O’Donoghue could do whatever he wanted here. What he wanted to do, perversely, but unsurprisingly enough, was hurl felines into bodies of water. For a solid two minutes Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video consists of nothing but unhappy-looking cats being thrown into a pool and paddling along desperately against an instrumental version of the special’s theme song. 

Watching this scene go on and on and on I couldn’t help but think that someone, somewhere, really gets off on cats being tossed into bodies of water against their will and was consequently getting way too excited about this sadistically extended exercise in anti-comedy. 

Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video is filled with familiar faces from Saturday Night Live like Dan Aykroyd, who lends plays a minister in a religion devoted to Hawaii 5-0 star Jack Lord. 

Incidentally many years ago I did a sketchy basic cable panel show on television history with, among others, Eric Estrada. Estrada told a lot of meandering, name-dropping stories that didn’t really go anywhere from his decades in the business. 

His longest and most pointless anecdote involved doing Hawaii 5-0 as a young man and being amazed that there were giant buses surrounding Jack Lord in many of his scenes. 

Finally Estrada asked why the buses were alway around and they explained that they were there to protect Lord’s hair from the wind and preserve his perfect hairstyle. 

I consequently always think of Eric Estrada when I think of Jack Lord and Hawaii 5-0 and now you will as well. 

Like the cats in water, the Church of Jack Lord sketch goes on and on, to an almost perverse degree. First Aykroyd’s perfectly coiffed evangelist delivers a fiery sermon about how “You are all suspect in the eyes of Jack Lord, guilty until proven innocent” before a hula dancer sings “Where You There When They Crucified Jack Lord?”, a Hawaiian gospel song about Jack Lord, her tacky TV savior.  

O’Donoghue is juxtaposing the sacred and the banal, depicting a consumer society where television is our new god and pop culture our new religion. 

We travel to France where a waiter brazenly insults his American customers before setting their table ablaze in a crazed ritual of defiance and search the globe for the mysterious “Laser Bra 2000”, a weapon of staggering power and importance that ultimately just turns out to be an old-fashioned brassiere that shoots laser beams. 

Like the cats being thrown into water in slow-motion, women shooting lasers from their undergarments is clearly someone’s weird fetish. I’m certainly not here to kink shame but throughout Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video it feels like its creators are working out his own issues onscreen and making the audience watch. 

Free floating insanity follows just barely held together by the idea that we’re exploring the worst and weirdest life has to offer. There are absurdist man on the street interviews on ridiculous topics, a snippet of Sid Vicious performing “My Way” from the movie The Great Rock N’ Roll Swindle with no sound, O’Donoghue delivering non sequiturs like, “Women: put a bag over their head and they’re all the same”, Klaus Nomi singing opera and beautiful women revealing how turned on they are by gross creeps.  

Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video closes with the strange story of the Dayak Indians, a remote tribe who live near the great barrier reef whose previously proud and noble lives of tradition and sacrifice have been hopelessly corrupted by exposure to American pop culture. 

They’ve traded in their native garb for tacky, Day-Glo New Wave clothing, Hula Hoops, mood rings, Peter Max posters, Slip N Slides, what Mr. Mike refers to as “the flotsam and jetsam of a decadent culture.” 

O’Donoghue insults this tribe’s manhood and dignity before they figure out what he’s saying about them and they murder him in protest. 

Mr. Mike does not survive Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video, just as “Weird Al” Yankovic does not survive Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. That’s not the only commonality between this cult oddity and the visual and recorded works of “Weird” Al Yankovic. The opening crawl reminded me of The Compleat Al and the final bit’s premise is very similar to that of “Buy Me a Condo”, which similarly concerns someone who chooses American consumerism over living in paradise and following the traditions of their ancestors. 

Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video love-hate relationship with the vulgarity and stupidity of American pop culture feels very AL-TV to me .

I am biased, of course, but I came away from Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video feeling like wholesome, PG-rated “Weird Al” Yankovic, a friend to children everywhere, does this kind of weird, dark, conceptual, writerly humor better than a man heralded as a quintessential comic genius and master of dark comedy. 

Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video is an incongruous way to begin this journey through Saturday Night Live movies because it was never meant to be a movie in the first place. It’s unusual in other ways as well. 

Saturday Night Live-derived movies would never be this dark or misanthropic ever again. They wouldn’t be as cheap or scrappy or random either. 

In that respect Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video feels like a real anomaly, a strange beast that’s part television and part film and not at home in either medium. 

Next up is The Blues Brothers, the most expensive and ambitious Saturday Night Live movie ever made and a motion picture as feverishly devoted to entertaining the masses as Mr .Mike’s Mondo Video is intent on alienating audiences.