Best jokes: Eastern Airlines drug smuggling, Lee Iacocca, Donald Manes

Kind of an average night for Miller, though there’s a random non-sequitur about Nell Carter’s size after a joke dies, and the Donald Manes joke has a good swipe at Ed Koch.

The Weekend Update Dancers return, this time to interpret an item about Anatoly Shchransky’s release from a Soviet penal colony to Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know”. As I said in the previous review, it’s pretty much the same joke every time, though this outing has the visual of Miller boogying along in his chair while holding Israeli and Soviet flags in each hand.

According to A. Whitney Brown, the Weekend Update Dancers (whose members included Lila York) was a joke Lorne Michaels came up with, and the routines were choreographed by Pat Birch.

Evidently. the WU Dancers bit messed something up with Miller’s lapel mic, as his first line after the routine (“I feel so Jellybean Benitez tonight!”) is inaudible in the live show, and they have to resort to using the boom mic for him for the rest of the segment.

Nora Dunn debuts a new character, French sex kitten Babette (“A sex kitten never dies; we just get fluffy”), who just got back from hobnobbing with Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos in Manila. Dunn’s character work is good and there are some well-placed jokes (Marcos loves Babette’s dog Fifi so much, he let her vote), but it’s not particularly memorable.