In the final moments of the SNL50 reunion special, nearly all living “Saturday Night Live” cast members of the past and present were on the 8H stage for Goodnights. Thanks to Laraine Newman and Jane Curtin, the original women Not Ready for Primetime Players, Gilda Radner was there, too.
“If you want to know what it takes to make a show like this last for 50 years, it’s these people right around me, the first cast,” Martin Short addressed the audience. As he listed their names “Laraine Newman, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris and Chevy Chase,” Laraine and Jane lifted a framed black-and-white photo of Gilda Radner above their heads to ensure that their late friend, the legendary Jewish comedian, got her due. Radner tragically died of ovarian cancer — which hereditarily affects Ashkenazi Jewish women and people at a much higher proportion than non-Ashkenazi populations — in 1989 at the age of 42.
“This got me,” writer Dave Itzkoff said of the tribute on X; incidentally, his tweet went viral. Another viral tweet, this one about Laraine and Jane, read, “They made sure their girl got there.” To be sure, it was a poignant moment for anyone who’s ever known or been a fan of Gilda Radner. This includes Jewish women.
On “Saturday Night Live,” Gilda portrayed Jewish women with authenticity and sincerity unlike anything that had ever been seen before. (Of course, it’s worth noting here that Laraine Newman is also Jewish and brought her own Jewish identity to SNL as well.) She may have been the first person to light a menorah and recite the Hanukkah blessings on national TV when she did so in a 1980 sketch. And in her recurring character of Rhonda Weiss, a Jewess Jeans model and Shmaltz pop pioneer, Gilda lovingly teased the “Jewish American Princess” stereotype. “Until Barbra Streisand, there were not a lot of Jewish women who were attractive and multifaceted, and you could go at them in a million ways,” Jewish SNL writer Marilyn Suzanne Miller, who created the Rhonda Weiss character for Gilda, told Vulture ahead of the reunion. “It wasn’t done and still hasn’t been, really. [Rhonda] was attractive — Gilda and I both felt like Jewish women, while they’re not Annette Funicello or Sandra Dee, they’re women too.”
“I just wish she could be here for all of this,” Laraine Newman told Andy Cohen ahead of the special, saying what all SNL fans were thinking. It’s deeply painful that Gilda isn’t still with us today, especially given the sliver of hope that had her cancer not been misdiagnosed all those years ago she might still be. But that Laraine and Jane, Gilda’s friends, insist on her blessed memory and broadcast her to nearly 15 million viewers, even (an auspicious) 36 years after her death, it make the bitterness of her death a little less so. In fact, it is a powerful act of l’dor v’dor.
