I was a big fan of SNL when it came out, but then did not watch for decades.
Recently, my wife and I started recording and watching it - (desiring more humor in our lives). We’ve been pleasantly surprised. Several of the episodes have had us laughing out loud. In fact, each episode has had at least a couple of skits that we found VERY funny. We really enjoy several of the cast members.
So we were surprised at how unfunny we found the most recent ep. The host was an actor from GoT (which we do not watch.) Every ep has at least a couple of dud skits. But in this one, we thought it felt “off” from the cold open, thru the opening monologue, and up to the final skit.
Now, I’m not suggesting OUR sense of humor represents EVERYONE’S. And I imagine there are folk out there who think that ep was the best in a long time. But I wondered if other regular watchers of SNL feel they occasionally have a dud episode. And if you feel that way, why do you think that is? I would think that the same writers and actors would provide considerable consistency. How much does the guest star’s energy contribute/detract?
(Unfortunately, our musical tastes are not represented by the musical guests, and we generally FF thru those.)
They’ve had plenty of dud episodes over the years, including a few dud seasons. It’s nothing new. You can’t expect the shows to have the same kind of impact as 40 years ago when they were breaking new ground in television. The last few years have been somewhat better than average as they’ve worked in new talent.
SNL is kind of a weird beast, in that it’s a sort of a moving target in pretty much every way.
The actors and writers all work there for a time, and usually move on to something else. Every now and again, there’s some kind of unique serendipity, where you get a set that clicks particularly well, or has some particularly talented people. Think the original cast (Belushi, Murray, Ackroyd, Curtin, etc…), the early 90s (Hartman, Myers, Carvey, Farley, Schneider, etc…) and the early 2000s (Ferrell, Fallon, Sanz, Rudolph, Dratch, etc…). Then you get stretches where it’s particularly terrible - stretches of the 80s and late 90s were just awful.
Then there are the guests- some are really good, and actually contribute to iconic sketches- Christopher Walken and Tom Hanks come to mind. Others are clearly neither actors nor comedians, while the vast majority are passable.
And sometimes, even when the standing stuff is all adequate, there are just lame individual episodes. This last weekend’s episode was a good example of that situation. This current cast isn’t awful at all- they have some really funny skits, but they have some really weird and unfunny ones too. And Harrington isn’t untalented either. But this past week’s SNL seemed to lead with what would have been a post Weekend Update sketch (Nephew Pageant), and mostly went down from there.
Comedy IS a moving target. Why are some episodes of sitcoms funny and some not? Why do you prefer one stand up comic’s humour to another?
Because it’s ALL subjective. That’s the nature of comedy, it’s a slippery, ever changing thing. Doubly so for comedy that heavily relies on the current political climate.
And definitely a lot of the unevenness is related to hosts who, while they have acting chops, and seem good in rehearsals, actually suck at sketch comedy, come down to it. Sometimes that ‘sucking’ contributes to the funny, sometimes it sucks the funny out of the bit.
Over so many years and radically shifting times, I think they’ve done okay, to be honest.
I understand some SNL cases have been stronger than others (the current cast impresses me as quite strong) and that even the best of casts have had dud eps. Just kinda wondering what factors contributed to those duds.
Last wknd, it didn’t seem like ANYONE had a single good idea. Started with an awkward Biden harassment intro. Not being a GoT fan, the monologue left me flat. Then I had no clue what was supposed to be funny about the Nephew bit. Continuing on through the long PM May song, the Sinatra/Jackson imitator on a cruise ship, rectal exam with fingernails, male stripper at bachelorette party… Can’t really recall Weekend Update, but my recollection/impression was that THAT wasn’t even as funny as usual.
I guess some bands have bad nights, where it just doesn’t come together. But it just seems like in a sketch show, where several bits are pre-recorded, that at least ONE good bit would slip in…
My theory is that the show has always been hit-or-miss but that people really only remember the good stuff.
And yes, the most recent episode with Kit Harrington guest-hosting was weak. But given that the OP isn’t familiar with Game of Thrones, some bits probably made no sense.
SNL has worked for so long because Lorne Michaels understands the importance of selecting actors who ‘you’ would want to invite into your home for dinner. Being funny was the next tier you had to cross.
Well, you don’t want too much consistency. You don’t want the writers and actors just following a formula; you want them to come up with some genuinely new ideas every week. But it’s hard to come up with genuinely new ideas on demand, and they don’t have the luxury of saying, “We’re not having a show this week because we couldn’t come up with 90 minutes worth of totally top-quality new material.”
In the past, SNL has been criticized for relying too heavily on recurring characters and bringing out the same sketches over and over. Lately it seems like they’ve been doing a lot less of this, which is a good thing, but increases the demand on the staff to come up with original ideas.
One criticism the show gets nowadays is relying on outside actors to play key roles in sketches, like Alec Baldwin playing Donald Trump or Robert Deniro playing Robert Mueller, rather than using the main cast.
BTW, if the OP wants to see a better episode, I’d recommend the recent one with John Mulaney as guest host. Not perfect but some good stuff.
As for this past week’s episode, I found it sort of so-so. There were several bits that I, personally, couldn’t relate to, but I thought they were fairly well done and would be funny or relatable for some people.
Comedy is like that: different people find different things funny. (Even the same people might find different things funny when they’re in different moods.) Sketch comedy is particularly hard—unlike, say, a sitcom, it can’t make up for its lack of funny with an engaging story or characters we like to get to know better.
Several websites provide regular recaps/critiques of each new SNL.
This week, Paste thought it was “a consistently fun episode full of surprises.” Vulture gave it 3 stars out of 5. And Entertainment Weekly said that “Harington’s playfulness … was muted by sketches largely light on laughs.”
The Kit Harrington episode was a little weaker than average, but I think the main problem was the order of the skits. Typically they start off strong and slowly decline in quality, or take bigger risks as the show goes on. But the first sketch was the Nephew bit, which was dreadfully unfunny and long.
They should have started off with the GoT spinoffs which was a much stronger skit. The Sinatra/Jackson impersonator thing could have been so much better with a little bit stronger musical performance, but the core idea there was decent.
I don’t know about that; I think it’s pretty funny to have the guest star of the week for the opening skit- a few have been less than awesome, but a few have been absolutely hysterical - Matt Damon’s Brett Kavanaugh was pretty great, as was Melissa McCarthy’s Sean Spicer, and Larry David’s Bernie Sanders. And Jason Sudeikis has been doing a pretty good Joe Biden for a long time now- IIRC, he started that while he was an SNL cast member.
And Baldwin’s Trump is pretty much the standard by which such things are judged.
I think it’s just a matter of the writers having so many good sketches under their belts coming in to the season after a break, and they run out as the season goes on. Of course there will be home-run sketches that come to them during the season, and maybe stuff they save for particular upcoming guests (see the gameshow Why Is Benedict Cumberbatch Hot?). But having good stuff to fill out a whole season is a hit-or-miss prospect.
I agree with EW’s assessment - Harrington was not bad as an actor, they just didn’t have good material. It happens.
This is the point I came in to add. They’ve done much better this season than the last show.
Another factor, maybe minor, Jost and Che had also been promoting WrestleMania for a couple of weeks and getting ready to get their asses kicked the next night. This may have distracted them a bit from a better news segment and other contributions.
NBC shows vintage episodes at 10:00 on Saturdays. Sometimes I’ll watch an old episode and think, wow, they used to be funny in ways they don’t even try anymore. Sometimes I’ll watch one and cringe and wonder why anyone thought there was a better past.
The show works better when the best players are around. The current cast is lackluster, at best. The Kit Harrington episode was the worst of a mediocre season, but what the show really needs is a new superstar.
This is really strange, because my wife and I are old folks who have watched SNL from the beginning and we both thought the Kit Harrington episode was the most consistently funny one of the entire season. We even stayed up past Weekend Update and past the second musical number just to see if they could keep it up for an entire show.
It’s kind of a mistake to think of SNL as being one show that’s run for 44 years or whatever it’s up to now. It’s just an hour and a half time slot dedicated to sketch comedy. The reason the show wasn’t as good in 1984 as it was in 1995 (or whatever, I picked those at random) is because it was, in effect, a different show; it had different players and, most importantly, different writers. The only common thing has been Lorne Michaels, who hasn’t one of the writers for ages, and by every account doesn’t actually have a particularly good sense of humor; he’s a producer and a talent scout.
Producing sketch comedy in that volume is really, really, really hard. If you’re near a Second City troupe, go watch that and you may find some of the sketches don’t land for you - and they generally do one revue a YEAR, or at most every six months. That’s months of effort you’re watching. Imagine trying to do it every week. No wonder it’s up and down.
Kate MacKinnon is absolutely one of the greatest performers in the history of the show. Hands down. Kenan Thompson, Cecily Strong and Aidy Bryant are very, very good as well. I know Pete Davidson drives people crazy but he’s got his uses.
It was inconsistent even in Season 1. (I’d say season 1 was still finding it’s way, and should be judged accordingly, but still, it was all over.) And it’s been so ever since.
Take the season 3 episode with Hugh Hefner, for just one example. I didn’t think there was one laughable moment in 90 minutes, and I had a raunchy sense of humor then. And the official NBC summation page ignores the worst one: the sci fi “planet of men vs planet of women” skit, with genital shaped spacecraft. I think they’d like to forget it.
And the quality always decreased the closer the show got to the end. They’d stuff the crap at the end and hope for the best, or, at least, hope everyone was asleep.
People who say “it was better in the past” have selective memories. They remember things like Andy Kaufman singing along with Mighty Mouse through the perspective of history. I assure you, it wasn’t funny live. More like awkward. You could never tell if a skit was just pulling your leg and pretending to fail (Kaufman, Franken and Davis “coming out” on live TV), or whether the host was really off the reservation (Zappa, Milton Berle, Lily Tomlin, for example.) I’m still not sure.