December 9, 1978. The hair, the clothes, that high-pitched and tremulous voice, the tall and blocky build moving awkwardly, as if the kitchen were too small to hold her--Dan Aykroyd has Julia Child down pat. "It's time to bone the chicken," Julia/Dan warbles. "For this you need a very sharp knife, and you cut along the backbone like so...Oh, now I've done it. I've cut the dickens out of my finger." The blood does not merely trickle; it gushes, it flows, her arm flops about, spurting crimson like some out-of-control firehose. "Oh God, it's throbbing," Julia/Dan announces and makes a tourniquet from cheesecloth and a chicken bone--always the proper, resourceful foodie. Finally, seeped in liquid, she wonders, "Why are you all spinning? I think I'm going to go to sleep now," and collapses across the chicken. The Cordon Blood School of Humor reaches its high point here with Aykroyd's unforgettable, landmark sketch.
March 18, 1978. This "commercial" for the Royal Deluxe II is a priceless parody of the 1978 Mercury Grand Marquis ads featuring a diamond cutter, using sharp precision tools, shaping a gem in the backseat of the smooth-riding luxury sedan as it maneuvers sharp hills and hairpin turns. In SNL's outlandish version, a rabbi performs a circumcision on an 8-day-old boy to illustrate the stability of the Royal Deluxe's power disk brakes and rack-and-pinion steering. Dan Aykroyd, the deadpan narrator, describes the rabbi's 40-mile-an-hour odyssey from Temple Beth Shalom in Little Neck, New York, as the car's grinning driver (Garrett Morris) negotiates rough roads and precarious construction cones. When the ride finally comes to an end and the rabbi returns the baby, who has only yelped once, to his adoring parents, he echoes the tag line of the Mercury commercial, solemnly declaring both the ride and the religious ceremony just "poi-fect."