NEW ‘SATURDAY NIGHT’ IS AS FUNNY AS A CRUTCH

The new “Saturday Night Live” is for people who get their kicks tearing wings off flies.

“Saturday Night Live” returned for its 11th season on NBC Saturday, more raunchy and more rotten than ever, with a new cast, a new former executive producer (Lorne Michaels, who fathered the show in 1975 and left in 1980) and a new ugly personality.

NBC had ordered a different producer and new cast as an alternative to possibly canceling “Saturday Night Live,” which resembled a leaky tire slowly going flat. But that strategy may have to be reassessed if the premiere is a sample of what is to come. Better that “Saturday Night Live” die a peaceful death now than be a brain-dead patient kept alive by artificial means.

In their sometimes futile efforts at humor, the many previous versions of “Saturday Night Live” also did their share of attacking below the belt, but never like this, never with a chain saw.

This was comedy the way Hiroshima was comedy.

First to confront viewers was boyish, soft-talking Brandon Tartikoff, president of NBC Entertainment, as part of a parody on the nation’s wave of drug testing, announcing that all NBC shows would submit to “random urine analysis tests.”

The zombies in the audience howled.

If ever a series shouldn’t make light of drugs, though, it’s “Saturday Night Live.” This is the show whose most famous and infamous alumnus--John Belushi--was a druggie who died of an overdose in his Los Angeles hotel room in 1982. And now “Saturday Night Live” is doing drug jokes, abetted by one of NBC’s top executives.

Bad taste, nothing! This is bad humanity.

Ironically, the new “Saturday Night Live” premiered just days before the release of “The Best of John Belushi,” a home video brought out by his widow, Judith Jacklin Belushi.

Some of Belushi’s funniest “Saturday Night Live” work is celebrated here, including his Samurai and Beethoven material and his impersonation of Joe Cocker. But the video’s most memorable sketch has him reflecting on mortality as an old man walking in the snow amid the graves of the other Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time Players:

“They all thought I’d be the first to go. I was one of those live-fast, die-young, leave-a-good-lookin’-corpse types, you know? I guess they were wrong.”

In light of Belushi’s death, that speech becomes a poignant counterpoint to the drug flippancy of the new “Saturday Night Live.”

But wait! Saturday’s premiere was only warming up. Soon came a little number called “National Inquirer Theater,” a clever premise to put down the scoop that “inquiring minds want to know.”

The subject, though, was all the slosh about Marilyn Monroe’s reported suicide being a cover-up for her alleged murder, somehow involving John and Robert Kennedy, and so on and so on. Those cutups at “Saturday Night Live” depicted Marilyn’s last night. Bobby was there, and so was Jack, who murdered her by putting a pillow over her face. I mean, you just can’t get any funnier than that.

“What now, some hot jokes about Rock Hudson?” I wondered.

Not quite, but close, for soon came a parody of show-biz fears about AIDS being transmitted through heavy kissing. If you believe that everything is fair game for comedy, then why exclude an incurable virus whose casualties are on the rise, right? Somehow, though, AIDS and yucks seem incompatible, no matter the context.

“What next?” I thought to myself, trying to imagine the unimaginable. “Cheap gags about the recent deaths of Yul Brynner and Orson Welles?” Not even the new “Saturday Night Live” would stoop to ridiculing Yul Brynner’s demise from cancer, though.

Orson Welles would suffice.

“The last remaining section of Orson Welles has died,” new cast member Dennis Miller reported on “Weekend Update.” He added: “Orson, we hardly knew you.”

Viewers may be wondering if they know “Saturday Night Live” anymore. More than desperately unfunny, it’s merely desperate. Like a clown who wears a lampshade at parties, it wants to be noticed at any cost, substituting shock for humor.

Last season’s Martin Short and Billy Crystal are missed, to be sure. The writing’s at fault here, though, not the cast, which includes well-known character actor Randy Quaid and Anthony Michael Hall, who starred in “The Breakfast Club” and “Sixteen Candles.”

Guest host Madonna took part in Saturday’s only comedically realized sketch, a funny parody of the media air invasion of her private wedding ceremony in Malibu.

She also took part in the evening’s utmost banality, a long and disgusting depiction of Prince Charles and Diana meeting Ronald Reagan and Nancy in the White House. The tone was decidedly “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” with Nancy played as a drunk who came on to Charles.

What was the message? Isn’t satire supposed to have a point beyond mere destruction? Isn’t “Saturday Night Live” supposed to amuse as well as repulse? Isn’t Lorne Michaels supposed to be funnier than Lorne Greene?

What’s on for this Saturday? Jokes about cancer? How about this? A man answers the door and someone throws acid in his face, blinding him. Isn’t that funny? What about some good old Leon Klinghoffer jokes?

Inquiring minds want to know.