A couple of weeks back I posted a thread about my disenchantment with video games. A lot of people helpfully suggested that it was not the video games that sucked these days, but rather that I was being nostalgic for the old days.
I really feel this way about SNL. I get so sick of people who write in EVERY SNL thread about how it sucks and how it isn’t funny anymore. SNL hating is something that people have been engaging in for a LONG time now ever since Chevy Chase departed the show. Now I’m not that old, but I’ve been around to witness a good 15 years of the show and I think it has it’s ups and downs. I think that’s a fair assessment. They have had some bad shows this year (Michael Phelps… and that country singer) but overall I’ve enjoyed it.
But I currently think that SNL is on the way to being good again. I really like almost all of the cast members, and I think that you nay-sayers are being too charitable to the old days and too negative of the current players.
When has any episode of SNL been good start to finish? Really that has never ever been the case. We think of “good” SNL as a collection of memorable skits. Here is how I’d list the good periods of SNL from most recent to oldest. Some overlap
current era (although we’re probably in the very beginning)
Will Ferrell era
Mike Meyers / David Spade / Chris Farley etc.
Phil Harman era (feels like he and lovitz et al were there for a little bit before)
Eddie Murphy era (big gap between him and the late 80’s)
Beginning era (Chevy Chase and Bill Murray etc)
You’ll notice there are some serious gaps in there. The time on both sides of Eddie Murphy are pretty desolate. Charles Rocket? Please.
But really I think people are looking at SNL after having seen these “best-of” videos which are the best skits of hundreds. In a given year you’d have at least a hundred skits. If you were to pick the best 6 of them you’d easily have a hilarious show.
Bad SNL in my opinion is a kinda-funny skit every couple of shows. I think this SNL usually has one really funny skit every two shows now and at least a kinda-funny skit once or twice a show.
I realize that it’s not the best, but it is a lot better than it has been since the end of the Will Ferrell era. I think it’s in the ascendant. The cast members are all very funny and are starting to gel together. That’s what seperates a good SNL era from a bad one to me. It takes a while for them to work well together and it also takes a while for us to get used to the new guys too. I remember when the Will Ferrel and Daryl Hammond crew came in and I thought they were not funny at all. It was a strange sense of humor. But it grew on me.
Having watched some of the (uncut) first season episodes on DVD, I can say that you’re right, it was much more hit-and-miss than I remembered (and I’m old enough to have seen the reruns of the first season during the second and third seasons, when I started watching live). The same goes for the “classic” years of SCTV (though I hate to admit it). And let’s not talk about the first post-Lorne Michaels cast of SNL – yeesh.
I think the second and third seasons of SNL are now on DVD uncut as well, I should check out some of them to see how my memories hold up. 1977-79 are the only years I really watched nearly every episode live. I don’t think I’ve watched more the snippets of any episode since then, so I’m not really qualified to compare the first cast to any of the others or the current one. I like Kristen Wiig, though.
I stand by what I said in the other thread; the style of performances on the show has changed. It’s most noticeable on Weekend Update. In the Jane Curtin/Dan Aykroyd era, the two of them stayed in character as newsreaders. Not to say that it wasn’t bizarre (remember Garrett Morris as the interpreter for the deaf?), but the delivery was deadpan. At some point, along came guest commentators like Opera Man. That’s bad enough, but when the “news anchor” says “Opera Man, ladies and gentlemen!” that destroys any pretense of delivering a news show. I think it’s that comedy background that makes them want to punch up the jokes and milk the applause. It’s not a news spoof anymore, it’s stand-up behind a desk.
Leaving aside all the questions about talent, writing, and subject matter, that’s the biggest change I notice between the old days and now. To me, that deadpan style will always be funnier, and I miss it.
Well when did this happen? As far as I know WU went through a serious dead period before Dennis Miller (but really the entire show). And he was certainly not the serious type. I feel that the current WU guys have more of the Daily Show type flavor. Not a terrible thing to copy. Do you really think the deadpan delivery would work these days? I am having trouble envisioning a modern-day equivalent of the Dan Ackyroyd Jane Curtain team.
Have you watched a news channel this decade? Even the basic nothing but news (over and over again) channels have turned into the hottie morning girl and scary undead baby death lover channels at this point.
I think regarding WU that they all want to create their own thing and not be considered copycats.
Having said that, I think I agree in some sense with the OP, but I am not sure that there isn’t alittle more going on. Older SNL seems better because it was ahead of it’s time. Nowadays, it is just a product of it’s time. That doesn’t mean it isn’t funny, but it isn’t very often “wow, did they just do that” funny. But we do get all nostalgic-y thinking everything in the original SNL was great, when in reality it was just new (for example Gilda Radner’s hyperactive child in my mind is hilarious and for it’s time it was, but if someone did it today…meh).
And let us not forget “Celebrity Jeopardy” is from the more recent incarnations and it is quite possibly the funniest thing ever on TV
As soon as they have the balls to do something as edgy as Garret Morris entering the prison talent show and singing that he’s going to get a shotgun and shoot every whitey he sees then I’ll begin to consider SNL relevent again, but they’re content to hide behind weak sauce impersonations and PG rated humor, so to hell with them.
SNL in the past, find an incongruity and satirize it.
SNL today contrive a forced incongruity and write it around the shows schedule whether the sketch deserves two and a half minutes or not.
People think Dick in a Box is hilarious. I don’t know if they even think about how low a form of comedy it is. Celebrities + Crude + Celebrities + Sex + Celebrities = Comedy Gold! As opposed to Eddie Murphy playing a black man in Central Park selling a white baby to a white couple who is afraid of being swindled and sold a bowling pin in the Central Park black market.
Essentially Saturday Night Live used to try and be incisive social commetary. They even put several side jokes surrounding the main joke in the sketch. It seems to me today that every sketch on Saturday Night Live revolves around the Larry David school only dumbed down. Lets put a single neurotic person in the center of a bunch of people trying to be polite in the face of their neuroses and extend the gag three times longer than needed in order to ‘build tension’ until everyone explodes and starts wailing and gnashing teeth.
SNL is just f***ing boring, and yes, it used to be much funnier. It’s not purely nostalgia. I got into SNL around the Kevin Nealon Weekend Update era, and I am not nostalgic for it. It was much funnier about ten years prior. Though Kevin Nealon is superior to anyone who has come since besides Tina Fey.
You’re oversimplifying things way too much. WU has had guest commentators, some of them quite silly, since the days of John Belushi and Gilda Radner.
As for the deadpan, parody-of-a-real-newscast style, yeah, I liked that. It was what made lines such as “I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not,” or “Jane, you ignorant slut!” so funny. Kevin Nealon anchored WU in this deadpan style, even putting in little jokes that parodied real newscasts. Thing is, he was preceded and followed by two anchors who were very popular for taking the opposite approach—a sarcastic, winking, snickering, “here’s the fake news approach”—that also was funny and worked well for them.
In its earliest years, SNL was countercultural. In fact, it was one of the main countercultural forces on American TV at the time.
But it hasn’t been that for a long time now, and it never will be again. Nowadays it’s something different: it’s an Institution. Which is in some ways a good thing and in some ways a bad thing.
That particular year was bad, the Jean Doumanian year, but the 7th season was frequently brilliant. Which was a bit of a shame, as nobody was watching! Dick Ebersol was the producer, but the real driving force was Michael O’Donahue. In the book of quotes about SNL that Tom Shales collected, nobody has anything nice to say about O’Donahue…and it’s obvious why. He wasn’t going to accept bad and lazy writing. He killed off characters that were wearing out their welcome. The “Death of Buckwheat” was a wonderful satire of Nightline and the cult of celebrity. The Hulu clip lacks the best part, the assassin, John David Stutts (“Do you believe he killed Buckwheat?” “Of course! It was all he talked about! He said to me, Saul, I want you to make me a suit because I’m gonna kill Buckwheat, and I want to look good on TV.”)
If Lorne was running the show at the time, there would be a Buckwheat sketch every single fucking episode! The show has been “SNL: The Search For Recurring Characters That Lorne Can Spin Into Shitty Movies”.
For instance, during the 7th season, Ronald Reagan was played with the camera from his own POV. Reagan thought he was making a movie and playing the President of the United States, and that his Chief of Staff was the director (“No ad libbing!”). If the host wasn’t a comedian, they wouldn’t have an opening monologue. Instead, they would have a sketch that would play to their strengths. When Bernadette Peters hosted, she opened by playing Betty Boop in an Army hygiene film called “Johnny Keep Your Gun Clean”.
Damn, I miss that era. The new stuff, apart from the Palin sketches and the occasional “Digital Short” are mostly mediocre comic performers mugging their stupid heads off.
I think SNL still has serveral very funny actors in Seth Meyers, Kenan Thompson, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Fred Armison, and Will Forte. I think the actors are doing the best they possibly can with pretty crappy writing, particularly Kristen Wiig. I think she’s hilarious, she’s just stuck in crappy skits where she’s forced to make stupid faces or act stupid for the punchline. However I agree that the humor is ascending. For a few years I only watched it at around 11:15 and 12:00 or the musical guests. These days I watch the whole thing.
You’re comparing SNL only to itself though. I use the South Park standard, which is why I think SNL is so terrible. I’ve seen every episode of South Park, and except for a few of the early episodes that were a little weird, they’ve all been knock-out-rolling-on-the-floor hilarious.
Maybe it’s unfair to compare an animated show to a sketch show but hey, they both aspire to the label of comedy - to that end South Park makes me laugh, and SNL doesn’t. Therefore SNL is shit.
Exactly. Especially when all you see are the good parts from the old shows. The original cast had its share of clunkers, particularly after Ackroyd and Belushi left.
And gaffa is right about how they started running the recurring characters into the ground until everyone’s sick of them. You didn’t see the Coneheads or the greek diner every single week.
Of course it was over the line. That’s what made it one of the funniest things on that episode.
And there’s your answer right there. SNL’s best shows and sketches were the ones that were “over the line”. The problem in recent years is simple: The line is gone!
Think about it: SNL grabbed the viewers’ attention by doing things that no one had ever done before. But look at TV nowadays; everything’s been done already. There’s almost no new ground to break; therefore, SNL has nothing left to do but lame parodies of “edgy” stuff that everyone is already doing.