The cast of “Saturday Night Live”

Everyone needs a good laugh. We all have our favorite stops to get a giggle, and for some people, it is a weekly tradition as important as a grocery run or paying bills. Staying up late or scurrying home to catch that always-exciting announcement that once again Saturday night will be “Live! From New York!” is, at this point, a late-night institution.

As it has for 40 incredible years, one of the longest-running variety shows on American television aims to tickle us with the “Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special.” Catch this special three-hour live event when it airs Sunday, Feb. 15, on NBC, following the "40th Anniversary Red Carpet Special."

Broadcast live from Studio 8H in New York City’s Rockefeller Center, “Saturday Night Live” premiered Oct. 11, 1975, and has hardly skipped a beat for generations since. We rolled our eyes or laughed out loud while watching the careers of so many actors and actresses in the making flourish into the icons they are today. Seeing musicians and actors out of their element for a bit is always worth the visit, and then we stay for side-splitting impersonations of the most (or least) cultured pop icon or president of the moment. Even the fake commercials have become part of the comedy zeitgeist.

But it all had to start somewhere, and it comes down to the longest-lasting "character" in the show: Canadian-born executive producer Lorne Michaels. As a quiet king of comedy television, his credits include "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," "Late Night With Seth Meyers," "Mulaney" and "Portlandia" and, of course, the crown jewel: "Saturday Night Live."

"The only show I ever really wanted to do was 'SNL,'" Michaels said in an interview with "New York Magazine" last year. "It was some sort of merging of my talent and my metabolism. It suited who I am and what I do really well, though whatever I was thinking it was, it kept mutating and growing. At first I didn’t even know that the cast would be the thing everybody talked about. We thought it would be the hosts."

And, boy, grow and mutate "SNL" did. Sketch comedy and late-night shows changed substantially in the 40 years since the show's inception, as it revolutionized television and cemented itself in the annals of comedy greatness.

“There were no live shows when we started," said Michaels. "The last of them were in the early or mid-'60s. ... [NBC] wanted this new show to be live. No one had done a live show in forever. Now it’s just part of the culture.”

Of course, while it may now be part of the culture, things do change -- and not just the cast or the Weekend Update anchors. How people ingest the news (from which "SNL" takes a lot of its content) changes, what people are into changes and how people approach comedy changes.

Host George Carlin in the first ever episode of “Saturday Night Live”

“The things people are interested in have changed," Michaels said in the interview. “['SNL'] was the baby boomers’ coming of age. Now, nothing we do in politics tends to be shocking anymore. There’s not the gasp of seeing the president made fun of, because the president is on TV all the time -- he does daytime, he does late night. Some of the majesty is gone.”

"It was much easier to do when everyone knew the references," he continued. "At that point, you had a complete unity generationally -- in music, movies, politics and sports. It’s much more fragmented now ... even news is fragmented now. There used to be much more cohesion. I don’t know whether people know what’s going on right now. ... So it’s just harder to do comedy about that. Now we do comedy that’s more about the way we live our lives."

Having to change and adapt is never an easy task, but at the very least, "SNL" has kept up and now gets to celebrate a milestone 40th anniversary -- not something many talk shows or television shows in general get to say.

If you still just can’t quite get enough "SNL" after 40 years and a three-hour live special, there is an art exhibit opening some time in the spring in New York City that will showcase an audio/video installation that puts you in the shoes of the cast and crew, unraveling the creative process behind each edgy episode.

“In addition to connecting visitors with the backstory of the show and affording an opportunity to relive the show’s most laughable moments and sketches, 'Saturday Night Live: The Exhibition' goes even further to give people a sense of what it’s like to be part of the creative team, and the frenetic schedule and pace that is involved with each weekly episode,” said the creative director, Mark Lach of Premier Exhibitions, who'll be presenting the state-of-the-art exhibit. “It can look so effortless on TV, but this exhibition illustrates that a lot of hard work and preparation undoubtedly goes into each and every laugh.”

It is hard to believe that four decades have been shared in our living rooms and at water coolers cracking up to these late-night antics. Warm up those funny bones on Sunday, Feb. 15, when the live, three-hour "Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special" airs on NBC, following the "40th Anniversary Red Carpet Special."