When I think of my family’s first VCR, a massive, noisy metal box, I think of one of the machine’s early missions: recording a rerun of Steve Martin’s 1980 NBC special Comedy Is Not Pretty (not to be confused with Martin’s album of the same name). It’s a brilliant collection of sketches, and as a lad I put even more wear on that tape than I put on the local library’s copy of Cruel Shoes. The dry-cleaning evangelist bit with Louis Nye, the insurance ad for “Mutual of Steve,” Socrates drinking hemlock, the search for the Abominable Snowman, the date with Joyce DeWitt—they’re all solid gold.

The special’s greatest moment, however, is an ambitious fusion of the sublime and the stupid that comes right at the beginning. In the opening sketch, Martin, a burro, an elephant, and a cast of simians dramatize Marty Robbins’ love-and-death gunfighter ballad “El Paso.” There has never been a spectacle quite like this on TV, and—dare I say it?—there never will be ever again.

There’s not much else I can tell you about this wonderful artifact, but I will pass along a suggestive detail: according to a biography of Robbins, Martin opened for the country singer at the Sahara Tahoe in March 1973. Might that encounter have contained the germ of this sketch?
 
Only “El Paso” is embedded below, but you can watch all of Comedy Is Not Pretty on Hulu.