Reliving `Saturday Night' -- Help - Mr. Bill! Land Shark! The Coneheads! And Now, The Super Bass-O-Matic . . . New Book Is A Loving Look At Long-Running Comedy-Variety Show

"Saturday Night Live" has had some slow periods - like most of the 1980s - but you'd never know it from "Saturday Night Live: The First Twenty Years" (Houghton Mifflin, $25), a relentlessly upbeat valentine to TV's longest-running comedy-variety show.

The book's publication date is Monday, but it is already on the shelves in some stores - and the 20th anniversary isn't really until next year because the first show was Oct. 11, 1975.

This loving tribute is packed with information, including a list of the 56 cast members and 22 featured players, as well as every writer, guest host and musical guest, along with the songs they played. All the commercial parodies - from the Super Bass-O-Matic to Colon Blow high-fiber cereal - are recounted. You can relive every episode of "The Mr. Bill Show" and review every "Weekend Update" anchor.

The origin of every catch phrase, from "Isn't that special?" to "It's always something" to "You look marvelous" to "Party time! Excellent!" is revealed. "The Richmeister," the guy with the desk near the copy machine who makes annoying wordplay with people's names ("Tom-may! The Tomster! Makin' copies!") and "The Receptionist" ("And you are . . .?") show how often "SNL" has contributed to the language.

You could even put on your own "SNL" shows with all the sketches that are included, organized in "Early Years," "Middle Years" and "Current Years" sections. They're the best part of the book.

Remember "Land Shark"? The entire script for the first episode is reprinted, along with outlines of six other shark sketches. Laugh again at "Samurai Divorce Court" and "Samurai TV Repairman."

Love the famous "Star Trek" cancellation parody? It's all here. Remember when "The Coneheads" were on "Family Feud"? It's still funny:

"Name a famous explorer."

"Zythron the Insistent."

"The biggest holiday of the year?"

"The Moons of Meepzor."

"The Middle Years," 1980 to 1985, would be pretty bleak were it not for Eddie Murphy. His "Mr. Robinson's Neighborhood," "Buckwheat," "Velvet Jones" and especially "Gumby" appearances make up most of the highlighted sketches from that period. Joe Piscopo also had some memorable bits, especially as Frank Sinatra and Andy Rooney.

Eighteen "Church Lady," 11 "Nick the Lounge Singer," nine "The Whiners," 18 "Hans and Franz," 19 "Wayne's World" and 13 "Coffee Talk" sketches are outlined, along with many other regular sketches.

But some sketches that gained a lot in the translation from outline or script to performance suffer in this read-only format. The controversial 1988 "Nudist Colony" sketch, with 43 penis references, seems awfully tame in print. Sketches with "Frankie and Willie," the guys who love pain, just don't seem as funny on the printed page. And some sketches - "Ed Grimley" and "Toonces the Driving Cat," for example - are too visual to be adequately captured in print.

Yet the book has captured the look of the TV show. That's because Edie Baskin, one of SNL's production designers, whose title sequences and hand-tinted portraits of the guest hosts established the show's graphic style, supplied most of the photographs. She is listed as co-author, along with editor Michael Cader.

Other books have dealt with the seamier aspects of "SNL", from drug use by the original cast to the drug-overdose death of John Belushi. "Saturday Night Live: The First Twenty Years" is strictly a celebration and avoids such negativity. Sure, that's one-sided, but it makes the book almost as fun as the show itself.