What the hell is the matter with SNL? It hasn’t been funny–really ha-ha-ha funny–in a good 15 years. Maybe longer.
Isn’t good comedy writing largely a matter of NBC opening up its checkbook nice and wide and hiring top-drawer talent? I’ve seen plenty of funny comedies on primetime television, but SNL’s comedy is craptacular. My impression is that the comedy-writing talent in the US is very deep, but that the price of acquiring that talent has gone waaay up recently. That shouldn’t be a problem, since NBC has plenty of money.
So, what’s the problem with SNL? Is NBC too cheap to hire top-shelf talent? Does SNL’s skit-comedy format make it harder to be consistently funny than, say, a 30-minute sitcom? Or does the 90-minute format require Lorne Michaels to shovel tons of manure in with the roses?
For the past 15 years, NBC has been running an experiment to see how long they can sucker people into watching a lousy show, based on nothing more than the fact that it was once good.
Lance Armstrong has been one of the most unfunny guest hosts in a long time . The only sketch that was even mildly amusing tonight was the Trump sketch. Even the O’Reilly spoof was a misfire. They tried to play O’Reilly as dumb and that’s not really accurate. He’s a blow hard, a bully and a raging egomaniac but he’s not dumb. It wsn’t funny because it wasn’t true. What a wasted opportunity. Bill O’Reilly is just begging to be parodied in the right way and they picked a totally lame angle.
Its gotten progressively worse since the early 90s (i think the Dana Carvey/Phil Hartmena years were outstanding).
The last five years have been horrible, especially when Will Ferrel left.
I noticed that head writer Tina Fey has been given a new contract. Why?
Maybe its because I’m a guy, and the show has been dominated by women writers and actors for years, but I dont think those women know much about cutting edge comedy. Its bunch of song and dance now. Every time I tune in, its that tall skinny chick with the big lips pretending she’s in some girl band.
As witness to SNL’s formative years, I can tell you that SNL has always been wildly inconsistent. Even in the glory days of Belushi, Radner, et al, the rare hysterically funny skits (the ones you see in the SNL specials) were always interwined with embarrassingly awkward skits that were made more cringe worthy because they had no discernible exit strategy. (Sometimes the audience wouldn’t know when to clap and were cued only when the cast walked off the stage.)
Anywho, throw in some live (ha!) music of varying degrees of quality, some truly talented Weekend Update writers, and you’ve got SNL.
I’d advise you to do what I do and just wait for a highlights DVD. That way you can skip the 80% of SNL that is crapola.
Don’t the pinheads at NBC want a winner? Or are they too coasting on rep and just phoning it in themselves? Gotta admit, SNL has never, ever, had any credible competition.
Here’s a wild idea: Why doesn’t some 26-year-old whiz kid at NBC pull a jihad, shitcan Lorne Michaels, and retool the entire SNL concept from the bottom up? I’m talking about hiring the best damn comedy writers North America offers and basically playing alchemist so this crudded-up zircon becomes an exquisite solitaire and, um, and …
I think I first heard it on this board, but did you ever hear the Monty Python in-joke about SNL? “What’s the difference between life and a Saturday Night Live sketch? Life doesn’t go on forever.”
The show does have a formula now. It’s a desperate search for quotable, breakout characters. And the strange thing that the SNL brass doesn’t seem to notice is that these days, the characters are rarely funny - they’re just annoying. They’ve confused “memorable” with “irritating,” and I don’t know how they slipped across that line.
No can do. Unless I have the thing phrased exactly right, Google won’t return anything. Using a snippet, I only got a handful of other places that use it. So I assume that I did hear it on this board.
I watch the show every week (I’m at work at that hour, sitting at a computer with a TV next to me), and overall it’s maintained a pretty even keel over the years. There were horrible, awkward, embarrassing skits when Will Ferrell was around, when Phil Hartman was around, when Eddie Murphy was around, when John Belushi was around. But time mercifully lets those fade, and the laughs are what we remember.
My thumb achieved Warp Factor 5 in changing the channel when I saw Horatio Sanz walk through the door in his “Carol” sketch. That looked fucking SCARY.
Based on what I’ve seen, the show has never been uproariously funny. 'Course, the old episodes may have been hilarious in their day, but they haven’t kept well.
I’ve noticed that more and more comedy these days tends to use Family Guy style cut-away jokes; live sketch comedy seems especially slow by comparison.
But yeah, the show seems to have low standards. Most of the writing is sub-par. The cast is decent, but can’t pull off the awful material. The clincher is that some cast members, such as Will Ferrell, can pull it off through being ultra-committed to it, and then soon graduate to doing movies. I suspect that many current cast members think that part of being ultra-committed is being willing to do absolutely any sketch, regardless of how awful. Why else did this week bring us a sketch that was essentially Horatio Sanz as an unsophisticated fat chick? The sketch didn’t work, anyway; it looks to me that the only current cast members that can pull off bad material more or less consistently are Darrel Hammond and Will Forte.
I’ve got to stop giving this show the benefit of the doubt. I mean, come on! They didn’t even get an actor to host this week. Lance Armstrong belongs on stage as much as I belong in a bike race.
I recall reading somewhere that the reason why Lorne likes to have athletes host the show is because they do what they’re told and won’t object or intervene.
The problem with SNL is Lorne Michaels and the other folks in charge… but the last tme they took Michaels off the show got even worse.
SNL is a the grand dame of tv sketch. Old and set in its ways do we really have any right to demand it to be better, newer, hipper than what it is?
The biggest problem is that there is no longer a healthy wealth of sketch on tv to contrast it with. Gone are the days of Kids in the Hall, The State, The Vacant Lot and Mr. Show.