Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead
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The death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco during the first season of Saturday Night Live in 1975 served as the source of one of the first catch phrases from SNL to enter the general lexicon.
Franco lingered near death for weeks before dying. On slow news days, United States network television newscasters sometimes noted that Franco was still alive, or not yet dead. The imminent death of Franco was a headline story on the NBC news for a number of weeks prior to his death on November 20.
After Franco's death, Chevy Chase, reader of the news on Saturday Night Live's comedic news segment Weekend Update, announced the dictator's death and read a quotation from Richard Nixon praising Franco as a good friend of the United States; as an ironic counterpoint to this, a picture was displayed behind Chase, showing Franco standing alongside Adolf Hitler.
From that point on, Chase made it clear that SNL would get the last laugh at Franco's expense. "This breaking news just in", Chase would announce-- "Generalíssimo Francisco Franco is still dead!" The top story of the news segment for several weeks running was that Generalísimo Francisco Franco was still dead. Chase would repeat the story at the end of the news segment, aided by Garrett Morris, "head of the New York School for the Hard of Hearing", whose "aid" in repeating the story involved cupping his hands around his mouth and shouting the headline.
The phrase may owe something to "General Grant Still Dead", one of the examples of undesirable newspaper headlines in Headlines and Deadlines, a handbook for newspaper copy editors by Robert Garst and Theodore M. Bernstein. Another possible precedent is in an issue of National Lampoon from 1973 that began with a picture of Dwight D. Eisenhower waving, with the caption "Hi kids, I'm still dead!"