After discovering he's not really black like the rest of his family, likable dimwit Navin Johnson sets off on a hilarious misadventure that takes him from rags to riches and back again. The slaphappy jerk strikes it rich, but life in the fast lane isn't all it's cracked up to be and, in the end, all that really matters to Johnson is his true love.
The eccentric and childish Pee-wee Herman embarks on a big adventure when his beloved bicycle is stolen. Armed with information from a fortune-teller and a relentless obsession with his prized possession, Pee-wee encounters a host of odd characters and bizarre situations as he treks across the country to recover his bike.
A brain surgeon marries a femme fatale, causing his life to turn upside down. Things go more awry when he falls in love with a talking brain.
Hollywood beckons for recent film school grad Nick Chapman, who is out to capitalize on the momentum from his national award-winning student film. Studio executive Allen Habel seduces Nick with a dream deal to make his first feature, but once production gets rolling, corporate reality begins to intervene: Nick is unable to control a series of compromises to his high-minded vision, and it's all he can do to maintain his integrity in the midst of filmmaking chaos.
A writer for a greeting card company learns the true meaning of loneliness when he comes home to find his girlfriend in bed with another man.
Juliet Forrest is convinced that the reported death of her father in a mountain car crash was no accident. Her father was a prominent cheese scientist working on a secret recipe. To prove it was murder, she enlists the services of private eye Rigby Reardon. He finds a slip of paper containing a list of people who are 'The Friends and Enemies of Carlotta'.
An intelligent pulse of electricity moves from house to house, terrorizing occupants through their own appliances. Having already destroyed one household in a quiet neighborhood, the pulse finds itself in the home of a boy and his divorced father.
Bernie Cates requests the services of the most absent-minded waiter he's ever seen, who pours water before setting the glasses, endlessly repeats questions, brings wrong orders, and ruins everything- but the bill.
Randy Quaid as the taxi driver drives Zen parables (Is time money - Is time the root of all evil?) into his passenger/protegee in a high-speed, idiosyncratic tour of their city's ethnic coteries. All the boy wants is to dispose of his date's dead dog Jasper and get back to the babe who's so hot she mutters darkly about being a Pressure Cooker: his conventional efforts are continually thwarted. Quaid is respected by the peculiar groups he interests in the dog's corpse and effects, and our one-gloved heroine is much keener on him than on her rather lackluster date.
Steve Martin's second NBC special was made up entirely of sketches. Highlights include: Marty Robbins' "El Paso" with monkeys; "The Death Of Socrates"; and "Bizarre Oddities Of The World."
