Got fooled by the media AGAIN: they kept talking about SNL. Do a Google News search for SNL and you’ll find some dozen news stories in the major media about the latest episode.
I Got tricked into watching another sucky episode.
The staying power and cultural relevance of SNL is strange to me
considering that: IT’S NOT GOOD.
can someone explain this???
Btw.
Ben Affleck’s impersonation of Keith Olbermann on SNL was good
I also liked the Barry Gibb show
and any of Darryl Hammond’s impersonations
especially the underrated one of Jimmy Carter
his Trump was best
dunno why they replaced him with Baldwin
Baldwin’s Trump is: truculent retard
without the charm
Hammond as Trump was best
Mark Wahlberg talking to animals is a classic
Kate MacKinnon is a standout
Kristin Wigg excellent
yeah, but these gems are spread out over decades…
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They can keep reinventing themselves: swapping in new castmembers to riff in new ways on current events — and on the latest hit TV show, or the latest blockbuster movie, or whatever — with new material coming their way every time there’s a new president, or a new trend, or whatever. And if they’re ever running short of recent commercials to parody or flavor-of-the-month celebrities to impersonate, they can pad out an episode with an any-time-at-all skit.
Sometimes the musical acts are big hits. Weekend Update is usually pretty good, one good sketch can make a show. It has a following, and there’s no reason to think any other show would do better in that timeslot on broadcast TV. And some shows are really good. They happen less frequently, but they’ve hit bottom and bounced back before.
Hard to know what to tell you, man. For those of us who grew up watching it from the literal start, it can never measure up because we were a lot more juvenile back then, so of course it was funnier. That said, as I’ve gotten more jaded, I’ve been more amused by their outright forays into comedy weirdness, like Kristin Wiig doing Liza Minelli, or Aidy Bryant’s Childhood Journal (TURTELS). I also like most of what Melissa Villasenor and Cecily Strong do. So…it’s still okay, and it had one of its best ratings years in a while, and was number one among comedies on cable/TV for the first time in its history.
One things I’ll add - I’m really amazed by the number of people who complain on social media that SNL has sucked for decades while they’re watching it [note: this does not apply to the OP, who just came back to SNL for a visit…I’m talking repeat watchers]. There seems to be a persistent cultural resentment that somehow SNL has been taken away from them, and so they’re gonna watch it and then they’re gonna complain about it. Weird.
That’s probably me, as well. I don’t watch SNL much anymore, but it’s not just SNL – I think that my tastes in comedy are probably rooted in what I thought was funny when I was a teenager and a young adult, and the style of comedy TV and movies of that era; I simply don’t find a lot of modern comedy particularly funny.
I completely recognize that SNL, and other comedy stuff, may well be awesome, and still not entertain me. That doesn’t make those shows irrelevant, and it doesn’t make them sucky; it just means that I’m not the target audience anymore.
The period of time I watched SNL most regularly was probably '97-'03. Before that I was too young to stay up that late and after that I just wasn’t watching TV very often. I do feel a bit that most of the episodes I’ve watched since that period have not been as good, but there have been some pretty funny skits. I found the episode which brought back Eddie Murphy to be pretty good.
Because the funny moments often have enormous staying power. A few years on, I still watch the funniest 25 seconds of TV in recent memory. The rest of the skit is a bit “meh” for me, but I crack up each and every time I watch this or am reminded of it. Kay-suh-dee-lah!
Maybe some people watch the show because of the aspect of it being broadcast live. There aren’t many other narrative shows that do this.
So people watch the show with anticipation in the knowledge that some unexpected event might happen and they will witness it.
But the cast and crew are experienced professionals. In almost all cases, they execute the show like they rehearsed with no unexpected glitches. So a viewer sees a show that was essentially no different than a taped show would have been.
That means when the final credits roll for each episode, viewers have to deal with the difference between the possibilities of what they might see before the show aired and the reality of what they did see now that it has aired.
(I should talk, my teenage humor was Firesign Theatre and National Lampoon)
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But, seriously, I grew up with SNL (the first cast). In fact, I was a kid channel surfing with our no-remote-control-yet TV, and suddenly saw a news report that President Gerald Ford’s thumb was wrestled to the ground by the Secret Service. I thought “WTF?” and kept watching.
It was Weekend Update. (“I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not.”) What you have to realize, we’d never seen television like SNL, that was subversive, and downright anti-government (especially in terms of anti-Vietnam War, and Nixon.)
And throughout good casts and bad, I always loved Weekend Update (Poehler and Fay, Fallon, Miller, and of course Norm MacDonald).
I think it got America ready for the likes of Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah… (and Colin Jost and Michael Che are doing a great job upholding a long tradition. I often tune in just for that.)
SNL is targeted at 15-year-olds who are too young to be out at 11:30 on Saturday night. Always has been, always will be. If anything, the pivot over the past few years to “viral” and music-based content has only strengthened this approach.
It likes to give the impression that it’s a sophisticated show for grown-up comedy nerds or rebellious college kids. That’s how you market something to 15-year-olds. That’s what Lorne is a “genius” for understanding.
Every episode has one bit that is designed to go viral on Sunday morning. It’s almost always pre-taped and some sort of musical parody. They’ve been doing this ever since “Narnia” in 2009 and right up through "“It’s Pride Again” two days ago. The rest of the show is basically filler - the completely neutered political sketches and self-indulgent media parodies lost any actual audience to sharper outlets long ago.
The reason you can’t stop hearing about the show despite it being unfunny and only its most toothless parts being popular is that most journalists are emotionally stunted losers who think they can relieve their high school years by catering to the “stuff that’s popular with 15 year olds” crowd in what they choose to cover. Media journalists, triply so. Now that streaming has made ratings meaningless and nobody actually knows what anyone is watching (other than being pretty sure that the most popular TV show of 2021 is reaching about 5% of the audience of network shows from 1983 that you’ve never heard of because the landscape is completely fragmented) there’s no objective guidance as to what TV shows are “newsworthy” for an entertainment columnist; they have carte blanche to decide what you are supposed to care about, and the priorities used to make these decisions often boil down to really stupid motivations like wanting to impress the cool teens.
Eh, I haven’t watched it since I was young (and I definitely am not now), but I keep running across isolated old clips I find at least mildly amusing on Youtube. Like this one from 2013. Or this one from 2019.
So, I can’t judge how strong the show is overall, but I assume like almost all comedy sketch shows it is hit or miss and still hits often enough with enough people to hold an audience. Humor is so insanely subjective I’m not sure how anyone can really judge mass appeal. I find the successful careers of a number of comedians baffling, but I’m sure they and their fans couldn’t care less about my opinions.
This is true. It is hit and miss. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s culturally relevant, sometimes it isn’t. And sometimes it’s funniest when it isn’t even trying to be culturally relevant, but just trying to be funny.
I was there from Season 1, and I have to tell you, it wasn’t that good in the beginning, either. It just seemed funny because 1) we’d never seen anything like it before, 2) we were 15, and 3a) we were half asleep or 3b) stoned.
For every good skit that you can remember all these years, there were three that completely fell flat and we no longer remember. (yes I know there are people that liked the Muppets. They were probably stoned. )
But we watched it every week waiting for those gems. Nowadays, people just wait for the clips that go viral, and they think the whole show is funny. It’s just as tedious as it always was, it’s just easier to skip the bad parts.
As an outsider from the UK, where it was impossible to watch for a very long time (think Sky comedy does it next day now, but can’t be for more than five years), it’s quality is often low nowadays, but a great guest or great sketch is just worth it. Musical guest? I just skip it without listening to a note. Usually a presenter I don’t recognise because they’re a sudden rising star: hohum, but what? Another Mckinnon alien abduction sketch, well that’s made it worth watching.for five episodes. One 5 minute of sheer brilliance makes up for the stilted and boring other sketches, which have always been there, because as Tina Fey says: “it’s live TV and we write sketches every week, some are going to hit, a lot are going to miss”.
The presence of it’s “current great” like Kate Mckinnon makes an episode shine, and from the few I’ve caught recently, she’s barely been in it. Previous ones I’d say were Sudeikis, Hader, but I’ve not watched too much before that to pick them out apart from the famous ones now. The ensemble can make a great sketch, but it’s usually because it’s good than because of them.
I’d say this generation has lacked greats, but has decent journey"men", I do have moments of “I like this one, they’re funny” but not enough to say “they’re funny again” regularly.
I’ve got all the seasons downloaded now, and did try the early seasons, and boy there was bad ones and very inconsistent ones. The muppets were strange. A lot of “not for primetime” wasn’t very good. Chevy Chase was not funny a lot. Top notch guests often underwhelmed (Eric Idle was decent not great, for instance). Weird episodes abound, like a Simon and Garfunkel episode where not much apart from them. The Charles Grodin one still stands out as a work or genius of disastrous car crash.
It’s the show. It’s highs and lows. It’s live. But maybe the cast will have a great season about three mediocre ones. It certainly has happened before.
There was charm? He’s hid that very well over the last five years. I remember the 2015(?) SNL episode where he sort of “stood” as the cast in effect did the sketches around a dummy. And that’s perhaps the most flattering thing I’ve seen of him for years.
As a brit who got a different version of his gameshow (the British one was like an asshole parade), did he come across as charming on that? Because his political career has given him a legacy of a “smashed old racist uncle talking nonsense”.
McKinnon is great, Kenan Thompson is great, they’ve had a good number of other talented performers in their recent decade who can almost save a bad sketch, but boy is the writing awful over that time.
Replacing Hammond’s careful, multifaceted Trump impression with Alec Baldwin making a duckface is emblematic of the sort of thing they do in the time-filler sketches - why should I be excited about seeing Alec Baldwin on TV? I can watch a movie or TV show he was in anytime I want to. I doubt the target audience of the show even knows who he is other than “a celebrity my parents like.” Lorne just likes hanging out with celebrities.
And this is why the earlier years shine so bright in the memory: because we pretty much just remember the good stuff and not the stuff that tanked (I mean, Bill Murray’s “Nick the Lounge Singer” was painfully bad).
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