They don’t have any comedic geniuses right now (IMO, last one was Kristin Wiig, McKinnon is above average, but doesn’t get me laughing just by looking at her), which means it’s almost 100% on the writers.
The writers are gonna have some garbage skits, it’s inevitable.
It occurred to me that a couple of Saturday’s skits were actually fairly funny, IF you’re part of the very specific audiences for the skits. Namely video gamers (specifically a particular set of 1st person shooters) and Game of Thrones fans.
If you’re not in either group, the skits probably seemed weird and totally fell flat.
It’s debatable whether the show is better when it has a standout superstar, or when it has a strong ensemble cast.
But I think Ashtura has a point: the less sheer comedic genius you have among the performers, the more the burden is on the writers to come up with strong material.
Of the current case, I think McKinnon, Thompson, Jones, and Strong are pretty consistently good. And Jost and Che do a fine job at the Update.
I also agree with folk who observe there has always been inconsistency - combined with the fact that a lot of humor does not age well. We’ve watched some old bits we remembered fondly, and were not a thrilled this time around.
Gotta disagree re: Kaufman. As a HS kid, I found his absurdism hysterical. Before he got into wrestling and Tony Clifton.
Now I don’t think she’s that good. But that’s the thing about SNL, you never had to like just one cast member, there are always a bunch of them, and they keep changing over time. And we change over time also, I couldn’t stand the What Up With That for a long time, then suddenly I loved it and now I miss it. And that’s why I keep watching. There have been rotten episodes, but somehow they always manage to get good again.
Absolutely, MacKinnon is brilliant. Her only flaw (and it’s hardly her fault) is that the equally brilliant, but in a much more subtle way, Cecily Strong gets criminally overshadowed.
Strong is far and away the best actress of the bunch. I wonder what she’ll do after SNL – I think she has more range than MacKinnon.
Yep, me too.
Really? I mean, comedy is subjective, of course, but I thought it was hysterically funny. Of course it was awkward – it was meant to be. That was part of the joke.
SNL has been uneven since 1975. I would go so far as to argue that this “uneveness”… from skit to skit, from show to show, from season to season… is no small part of its appeal.
I think Heidi Gardner is great too, but she doesn’t seem to have found her way into the sketches every week. She’s fantastic on her solo bits on Weekend Update.
The host, Kit Harington, was a guest on Seth Meyers’ Late Night show this week. As many know, Meyers was head writer on SNL for several years.
Harington said that on the first day of his hosting stint (the guest hosts do planning and rehearsals the week before the show airs), he was asked if he had any particular talents or interests he’d like to showcase in the sketches that would be written for him. And he said ‘no.’ And Seth chimed in to say that when guest hosts don’t offer guidance or suggestions, the writers tend to pull out the ideas for skits that have been rejected when offered during past show-rehearsals.
Seth said every writer had at least five such rejected sketches ready to go. And that’s probably what we were seeing during the Harington show.
(I opined over in the Game of Thrones thread that Harington had shown himself to have solid character-acting talents in those skits, and I still think so. But, yes: the writing was not stellar.)
(from the Meyers show:
The show has always been uneven.
The cold opening sketch and the Weekend Update segments are consistently good. Howevever, most of the remainder of the show is only marginally watchable.
The most recent sketch that made me LOL was the Cha Cha slide one with John Mulaney. It is plays on the same “white guy surprising everyone with his black sensibility” joke that this “Black Jeopardy” sketch also plays on it. But we’ve come a long way from Tim Meadows dressed up like Mariah Carey, at least. I do think the current cast is funnier than other ensembles.
Comedy is subjective, true. And I thought Might Mouse was a long setup for a very small joke. “We showed something that wasn’t funny, for a long time, so, that makes it funny” isn’t true, at least, not for everyone.
Subverting audience expectations can be funny, but it isn’t always. Many liked MM, but even in this thread, one person said they didn’t like the wrestling and Tony Clifton. Seems just like degrees of the same thing to me,
4’33" subverts audience expectations, too, but it isn’t a good piece of music. It’s not even a good statement. And you can’t dance to it. 
SNL has always spoofed and referenced pop culture, especially that appealing to young people (the folks most likely to be up at midnight). I’m sure my grandparents didn’t “get” the Star Trek sketches with Jim Belushi. But that was okay because almost everyone else did. So I guess what I’m saying is, you’re now my grandparents.
It doesn’t seem like SNL has been doing recurring characters as much. There aren’t any memorable characters like Father Sarducci, Ladies Man, the Cheerleaders, or Church Lady. I’m not sad about this because sometimes those characters can be run into the ground (I hate the Coneheads). But I do think they add something special. I suppose Alec Baldwin’s Trump is filling that role.
In a general sense, I think that the current incarnation of SNL is one of the best it’s been. But even so, there have been some dud episodes, and this most recent one was a major dud in every way. Which really sucks because I smoked a jazz cigarette in preparation, and I was totally let down.
You are 100% right. At the same time, the long setup was a huge part of why it was funny for me.
The wrestling thing, and the Tony Clifton thing, were just not funny, as far as I was concerned.
I never really got Cage. Aleatory music? That’s an oxymoron, as far as I’m concerned.
Harington has been on Myers’ show before. They did a sketch together that was actually pretty funny:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BabsgCQhpu4
Carice van Houton (Melisandre) too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5C6kG57J7Q
They were both pretty funny. Good sketch comedy. Given Myers’ past as SNL head writer, these are basically SNL bits.
The video game FPS sketch was solid and the GoT spinoffs were good too. Start the show off with those and get rid of that garbage Nephew sketch and the show would have had a whole different feel. When the first segment bombs it’s hard to recover.
I heard a comedian (I forget who) that once was a writer on SNL interviewed on a podcast, and he said keep an eye on what they do for the opening monologue to tell if the week’s guest is actually good at comedy. If they have people in the audience standing up and asking questions, that means the host isn’t very funny - they pull out that routine for hosts that need extra help. Conversely, when they have a professional comedian like John Mulaney hosting, they often let the host take care of the monologue themselves because they usually just want to do five minutes of their stand-up set anyway.
Since they went to the audience last week, I take that to mean the writers didn’t think Harington was very good. But as I don’t watch GoT, I wouldn’t get any of the jokes anyway. The video game sketch was the only one I can recall being funny.
I was pretty mad at myself that I didn’t get the sketch about the Discover card. I felt instantly old and out of touch. I did get the reference the specific commercials they were spoofing (when you call Discover, you talk to someone just like you!) but as far as I can tell they were also doing a riff on the movie Us, which I haven’t seen.
Oddly enough, NBC has not put that sketch on the episode’s clip page.
I had forgotten about the Teresa May film - that was quite good. But I’ve been following Brexit. Also all their films are quite good IMHO.
Because it was from the previous week (if this is the one you’re talking about).