﻿Best jokes: Wake up Babe!, Baby Doc exile, Charles Manson, Philippines Election

Good night for Miller, who seems to be fully settled into his delivery by this point in the season. He has a bit of fun with the negative audience response to the Philippine election joke (“That’s just the body count, the ballots are still being tallied”).

This is the first appearance of the Weekend Update Dancers, a running feature where a group of women interpret a top news story by dancing to a current pop hit; this week, they dramatize falling oil prices to the tune of Billy Ocean’s “When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going”. It’s pretty much the same joke every time but it is interesting to get a snapshot of what was on the pop charts at the time.

A. Whitney Brown, not yet credited as a featured player, makes his Weekend Update debut as senior correspondent with a commentary on human affairs called The Big Picture. Tonight’s inaugural edition features pokes at the pronunciation on Uranus, a revolution in Angola, giving aid to the Contras when they don’t have a country, and the Philippine election; Brown’s delivery is a little giddy, but this is smart, well written and sprinkled throughout with great lines (comparing the inter-relatedness of the global village to an Appalachian coal town).