TV Quote of the Day (‘SNL,’ With Rodney Dangerfield on ‘The Pepsi Syndrome’ at Three Mile Island)

Rosalyn Carter [played by Laraine Newman]: “Where is Jimmy? I have a right to see him!”

Ross Denton, head of public relations [played by guest host Richard Benjamin]: “Mrs. Carter, the president is receiving special treatment right now.”

Mrs. Carter: “What kind of special treatment? Why can’t I see him?”

Denton: “Mrs. Carter, this is Dr. Edna Casey. Perhaps she can explain better than I what has happened to the president.”

Dr. Edna Casey [played by Jane Curtin]: “Mrs. Carter, your husband was exposed to massive doses of radiation. Now this has affected the entire cell structure of his body and greatly accelerated the growth process.”

Mrs. Carter: “Well, what does that mean?”

Dr. Casey: “It means, Mrs. Carter, your husband, President Carter, has become [camera zooms in on Dr. Casey] the amazing colossal president.”

Mrs. Carter: “Well, how big is he?”

Dr. Casey: “Well, Mrs. Carter, it’s difficult to comprehend just how big he is but to give you some idea, we’ve asked comedian Rodney Dangerfield to come along today to help explain it to you. Rodney?

”

[Rodney Dangerfield enters]

Rodney: “How do you do, how are you?”

Denton: “Rodney, can you please tell us, how big is the president?”

Rodney: “Oh, he’s a big guy, I’ll tell you that, he’s a big guy. I tell you, he’s so big, I saw him sitting in the George Washington Bridge dangling his feet in the water! He’s a big guy!”

Mrs. Carter: “Oh my God! Jimmy! Oh God!”

Rodney: “Oh, he’s big, I’ll tell you that, boy. He’s so big that when two girls make love to him at the same time, they never meet each other! He’s a big guy, I’ll tell you!”

Mrs. Carter: “Oh no! Oh Jimmy! My Jimmy!”

Rodney: “I don’t want to upset you, lady, he’s big, you know what I mean? Why, he could have an affair with the Lincoln Tunnel! I mean, he’s really high! He’s big, I’ll tell you! He’s a big guy!”

Mrs. Carter: “No! No! No!”

Denton: “Rodney, thank you very much. You can go.”

Rodney: “It’s my pleasure. He’s way up there, lady! You know what I mean?”—Saturday Night Live, Season 4: Episode 16, “The Pepsi Syndrome” skit, Apr. 7, 1979

The nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania may have occurred 40 years ago today, but we live in its shadow even now. The techno-utopia pushed by the nuclear power industry to that point proved, as utopias invariably do, a chimera. An industry that took wing through Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program received a decisive check in the early spring of 1979, and subsequent incidents at Russia’s Chernobyl and Japan’s Fukushima plants proved far more damaging, both to the environment and to public trust in institutions.

Only two nuclear power plants are currently under construction in the U.S., and the average age of existing ones is 40 years old, according to an Andrew Maykuth article in the Philadelphia Inquirer last month. The industry has been forced into expensive safety and security measures, with its representatives increasingly compelled to explain themselves.

Speaking of explaining themselves, Saturday Night Live gave a hilarious preview of the parlous future in the week for industry mouthpieces in the week following the accident. The skit title, “The Pepsi Syndrome,” was a send-up of The China Syndrome, the Jane Fonda-Michael Douglas-Jack Lemmon thriller that was still only in its second week when Three Mile Island gave it the kind of unexpected boost that film flacks can only dream of.

“The Pepsi Syndrome,” cited by ex-Senator Al Franken as one of his 10 favorite SNL political sketches, kicked off with Bill Murray spilling the soft drink over the plant’s control board, leading to a meltdown in the plant’s core. Two unconventional people come either to clean up or inspect the damage: a female maintenance worker (Garrett Morris, in drag) and President Jimmy Carter, who, as a former self-advertised “nuclear engineer,” walks in to inspect the core, wearing yellow boots that prove inadequate to the danger he faces. 

I had not seen (or read a transcript of) this scene until now, but I have always recalled my surprise and delight when Rodney Dangerfield came out of nowhere to describe the President’s medical “condition.”

If you want to know more about the scientific and political fallout from Three Mile Island, there are plenty of background sources. (For instance, this past weekend, C-Span re-ran a 2004 interview with J. Samuel Walker, author of Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective.) But comedy forms part of the historical record, too, in telling later generations how contemporary society reacted to events—and in this case, it was just plain fun to see.

Quote of the Day (Kevin Baker, on the First Baseball Parks, in the Cities)

“The first major-league parks, back in the nineteenth century, were little more than sandlots with rows of precarious wooden bleachers—one step up from those vacant, rock-strewn lots in Chelsea. Eventually they were ringed, frontier-style, with a stockade fence so the owners could monopolize what was going on inside—charge for admission and food sales; shake down or expel gamblers who dogged the game; expand the fan base to the growing middle class, to children, and even women. These changes were akin to Vegas going family—or to the incandescent cities of fire that rose along the sands of Coney Island during the same period, replacing the site of louche entertainments with the very first official amusement parks.”— Novelist, historian, and diehard baseball fan Kevin Baker, “At the Park,” Creative Nonfiction 34 (Anatomy of Baseball), 2008

It’s opening day. Play ball!

(The source of the image accompanying this post, by the way, is The Boston Public Library. The photo, dating from 1893, shows South End Grounds in Boston, where the Boston Red Stockings, Beaneaters, and Braves played from 1871 to 1914. Today, the site—at the intersection of Walpole Street, railroad tracks, and Columbus Avenue—is a parking lot between Northeastern University's Columbus Parking Garage and Ruggles Station of the Orange Line of the MBTA.)

Bonus Quote of the Day (Todd Rundgren, on Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Appeal to His Teen Self)

“Both my parents were very much into music. My initial exposure [to music] was classical—Ravel, Debussy—and show tunes, which gave me a sensibility that maybe some of my contemporaries missed. As I got older and started to play guitar, my parents were wary that I might end up an indigent! I wasn’t doing well at school, or developing practical skills. But when The Beatles came out, I thought, ‘This is the lifestyle I want. You play music, you party, and girls chase you everywhere.’ What more could a teenager ask for? ”—American rock ‘n’ roll singer-songwriter and producer Todd Rundgren, quoted in Peter Doggett, “Todd Rundgren: The Mojo Interview,” Mojo, Issue 183 (February 2009) (article not available electronically)

Quote of the Day (Martin Amis, on How Utopia Becomes Dystopia)

“Every imagined Utopia, from Plato to the present day, helplessly becomes a Dystopia, almost certainly because the writers just couldn’t resist the urge to make the ‘place’ sound halfway interesting. Otherwise the Perfect Society is perfectly inhuman and perfectly inane. What would you do all day in Utopia? And who now would turn to a map of the world in a vain quest for the wastelands called Never Has Been, Never Could Be and Never Should Be?”—English novelist-essayist Martin Amis, “The Deadliest Idealism,” in The New York Times Book Review, Oct. 22, 2017,  collected in The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage,1994-2017 (2018)

(Photo of Martin Amis taken at the 2014 Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas, by Larry D. Moore.)