Golden Era my buttocks. I’ve watched the reruns of that cast on E and, frankly, I didn’t find it funny in the least. The sketches were completely lame. Fortunately, when the show came out, the entire population was on drugs which I’m convinced is the only reason the show was once thought to be funny.
The funniest cast was with Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo. The next funniest was the current one with Tracy Morgan. I love that guy. He is a comic genius. I was really sad when I learned he was leaving the show.
Don’t understand the Tracy hate; thought he was the funniest second only to Will Farrel. I gotta say I don’t find most of the older ones funny either. Maybe its a generational thing on how one rates which SNL cast is “the best” (personally I think the blame should fall more on the writers).
Pfeh. I’m young and very non-drugging, and I’ll take the original cast, the Eddie Murphy era, Carvey/Hartman/Lovitz/Myers at their best… hell, I’ll take almost anything over what they’ve had the last 5 years or so. It’s a matter of taste, but drugs ain’t the answer.
Wow, I thought I was the only one. I couldn’t bare to watch Weekend Update when Colin was doing it. He seemed so unnatural when saying the news. Just awful.
Thought I think Tough Crowd is somewhat entertaining when Colin isn’t trying to be funny. It’s a good job for him.
OJ Simpson is friends (and golfing buddies, so maybe he can help find the real killers) with Don Ohlmeyer, NBC West Coast president at the time that Norm was still on SNL. Ohlmeyer is the one who had Norm fired either because of the constant OJ jokes or because he thought MacDonald wasn’t funny and was hurting the show, depending on which story you believe.
And I’ve disliked Tracy Morgan all the way back to when he and Jim Beuer were on Uptown Comedy Club back in the early 90s. To me he’s a loud distracting ham who derailed sketches with limited ability to do characters beyond “Tracy Morgan”. He had a little more range than Adam Sandler or Colin Quinn, but not much.
I’m ashamed to say I actually laughed at something Quinn did the other day on “Tough Crowd”. The “stereotype the cellphone user” bit he did got a few laughs out of me, even though part of me figured it was staged rather than off the cuff like it was portrayed. But since he didn’t stammer or get tongue-tied too much I figured he wasn’t reading a teleprompter or cue cards, since that’s when he usually screws up.