June 16-22 SNL Week: Saturday Night Live is celebrating 50 years on the air, can NBC last for another 50 years??

Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer are Nigel Tufnel, David St. Hubbins and Derek Smalls, but they’re also Alan Barrows, Jerry Palter and Mark/Marta Shubb. They first appeared on Saturday Night Live’s Season 10, episode 4, on November 3, 1984, when Guest and Shearer were in the cast and McKeen was hosting. I have no idea why Shearer would come back to SNL, as no one is more ruthless about the show in the Live from New York book.

Here’s a good Shearer quote: “I grew to quite loathe the producer of the show. The first words he said to me were, “I never hired a male Jew for the show before.” And knowing that he was Jewish gave it an extra tang.”

Anyways, that sketch — Shearer came back post-Lorne Michaels, I get it — “The Folksmen Reunion” was all about how America was into old folk musicians getting back together. The band also shows up in The Return of Spinal Tap and actually opened for itself, kind of, as The Folksmen opened for Spinal Tap, which didn’t always work out well, if you ask Guest, who told Wired, “One time, we had The Folksmen open for Spinal Tap because we always wanted to do a culmination of our entirely different personas. So there we were in caps playing folk music, opening for Spinal Tap, and the audience looked completely bewildered, like “What the fuck is going on here?” It was great. My son was at the show, and asked, “Mom, when are the old guys getting off and loud guys coming on?” That may have been a moment of weirdness for some people, but so what?”

They also played an actual folk festival alongside Arlo Guthrie, Joni Mitchell and Peter, Paul & Mary.

Anyway, The Folksmen started at The Twobadors, as Shubb and Barrows met at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont—or did all three members go to Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio—and met Palter in Greenwich Village. After their single “Old Joe’s Place,” they somehow released five albums in 26 months before breaking up, forever known as “the group who were too popular to be purist and too purist to be popular.”

At some point, Mark became Mary — saying “After that concert (the one in this movie) I realized I want to spend as much of the rest of my life as possible playing folk music with these gentlemen. And I want to spend all of it as a woman. I came to a realization that I was, and am, a blonde, female folk singer trapped in the body of a bald, male folk singer, and I had to let me out or I would die.” — and they really did become Peter, Paul and Mary. Or Marta.

Sometimes, the silliest jokes are the best.

As for the movie, when their manager Irving Steinbloom dies, The Folksmen join up with The New Main Street Singers — led by George Menschell (Paul Dooley), who can’t play the guitar he carries, along with Terry Bohner (John Michael Higgins), his wife and former adult star, now a witch named Laurie (Jane Lynch) and Sissy Know (Parker Posey — and the folk duo Mitch (Eugene Levy) and Mickey (Catherine O’Hara) for a memorial concert.

Directed by Guest, who co-wrote it with Levy, this movie has almost everyone—well, not George Menschell—play their own instruments. Levy even learned to play guitar just for the film.

While not my favorite of the Guest mockumentaries, I still laughed throughout this movie. Maybe it’s because my heart is in metal, and I strongly feel these lyrics: “Working on a sex farm / Trying to raise some hard love / Getting out my pitchfork / Poking your hay.”