Saturday Night Live

I'm lolling at this gay guy eating cookies sketch too.

that was great! kenan thompson killed it as always though.
hugh laurie has a great american accent too! i never even knew he was british

whoops
"killed it" = sucked

so, should i just wait until this is torrented, and then skip about? I keep waiting for them to involve Stephen Fry whenever Hugh is on

it was a good episode but kanye's perfs seemed endless (and bad)

I just wish he did "Love Lockdown" live with like 15 drummers instead of singing over the track in front of a big video screen

ya that was weird - he brought the drummers for like ellen and conan but not snl wtf?

yeah, good point. i thought the episode was one of the better ones this season, though. fred armisen is really on fire recently

yeah I think his weak Obama and the sameyness of a lot of his characters had me pretty sick of Armisen lately but he was good last night.

never been a huge Poehler fan but I'm gonna miss her on Weekend Update, especially "Really!?! with Seth & Amy." I wonder if they're gonna have Seth hold it down solo or put one of the newer girls at the desk.

armisen was MVP of this episode definitely, paterson insulting jersey was major lolz

he should probably go solo for the time being. i know a lot of people hate on weekend update, but for me it's easily the most consistent part of the show.

lol i mean besides obv that it is the only thing ON every week

yeah being a NYer i loooved his paterson. i thought the boy george last week was one of the highlights of the season too.
and i dunno some dude i like his obama. he's really got the arhythmic patterns down (almost reminds me of chris walken) and how he tends to end sentences at a faster pace and a louder volume than the rest of the sentence. maybe it's a bit too OTT though

his Obama is improving based on last week's "cool" sketch, but it's still not good enough.

i see it as a continuation of SNL's tradition (with a couple of exceptions) of just not being able to pull off good presidential impersonations

i dunno, maybe you don't like Carvey's Bush, Hartman's Clinton or Ferrell's W as a matter of personal preference, but there's pretty much no way you can spin Armisen's Obama as not being a step down from those (assuming Michaels doesn't eventually give in and hire a black guy other than Kenan in the next 4 or 8 years).

armisen's last big mountain to climb is mastering the smile. the fact that he never even tries makes me think it must be a conscious choice. but you aren't obama if you can't grin.

when i first started watching again I thought armisen and ESPECIALLY forte were horrible, but I like them 90% of the time now.

will forte's part on the "road trip confessions" a few weeks ago KILLED ME

the one w. paul rudd

god i love that recurring singalong/anecdote bit

i quite liked the new guy and will forte in the wedding toast sketch.

yeah...pretty dope episode considering that Hugh Laurie was surprisingly dull and didn't make me laugh once

i know a lot of people hate on weekend update

Huh? Most people watch it halfway through just to see WU and then tune out.

weekend update sucks.

i miss this guy

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/5c/f0/d932224128a0ef52b2178010._AA240_.L.jpg

He seems like he would be a more believable senator than Mr. Franken.

Did he ever become *the* Whitney Brown?

Did he ever become *the* Whitney Brown?

He had a show on Air America for a bit and now writes for Daily Kos.
http://awhitneybrown.dailykos.com/

there's no need to beat a dead horse...

except for the sheer joy of it.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/12152008/news/politics/paterson_in_a_blind_rage_over_snl_skit_144292.htm

i thought it was a little over the line, but why didn't Paterson object when Armisen did the exact same bit on a Comedy Central special like 8 months ago?

Because no one saw it?

I was totally in stitches during the Paterson bit. Not because "lol u blind" but just because Armisen nailed the guy's look so well.

I'm not surprised. Apart from the New Jersey jokes, the whole thing struck me as being in pretty poor taste; if you can't come up with much beyond blind jokes, you absolutely deserve the hate of, you know, impaired people of all sorts.

This week's was really funny, though, noticeably better than usual! Moynihan in the wedding-toasts sketch was just ... too good for animated gifs, even. (Plus also "I wish we had accents," A+ if-we-pitch-in-for-babysitters-will-those-two-keep-doing-that work.)

Looking forward to Kanye's hilarious presidential candidacy in 2020 and subsequent isolation of whatever gene makes him think he's so amazing he doesn't even have to be good at stuff.

nabisco OTM

Oh also the problems with Armisen's Obama are that (a) he gets all the mannerisms but has no underlying spirit that makes it feel like it's Obama as opposed to someone reading lines as Obama, which means (b) there's nothing funny about it, no central funny Obama quality that's coming out. The reason the "cool" one worked better was that it was latching onto an actual, recognizable Obama personality trait -- if he went on to play the guy as preternaturally cool to the extent Ferrell played Bush as a cheerful idiot or Hammed played Clinton as a lovable hornball, then maybe it'd work, but they'd need to figure out how to write that, and not just expect the dude to carry it.

(Actually that makes me realize that all their successful political impersonations are based on turning politicians into funny characters you like, as if they're all just leveling with you about their flaws -- true of that Bush and that Clinton but also lately of Poehler doing Hillary or Fey doing Palin. That funny animated Obama from the primaries did the same thing, the one where he was basically Bugs Bunny tricking Sharpton and Jackson to stay away from him.)

(I apologize for getting all analytical about this.)

alright, but can we agree that NY post article is HILARIOUS?
"Paterson in a Blind Rage Over SNL Skit"
"Gov. Paterson didn't see the humor in a "Saturday Night Live" bit that mocked his blindness.

I will never admit that anything intended by the Post is actually funny, even when it is, because it's always the kind of dick-funny we should all pretend not to notice.

oh no argument there, and it's obviously in horrible taste. but it's what's expected from those guys

paterson is a funny dude who makes fun of himself a lot, so when he gets mad about something i think its fair to say it was in pretty poor taste

"When you have a perception problem like we have, you take these things a little more seriously," said Chris Danielsen, spokesman for the National Federation of the Blind.

ok THAT is funny

hey: when ben affleck was on earlier in the season, what was he there to pimp?

i think that was one of those "i ain't got shit goin' on, but i was good when i hosted before and i feel like doing it again" type gigs.

either that or he really wanted Gone Baby Gone to do well on DVD

He hosted right before election day 2004, too.

that was mainly to help put Surviving Christmas over $4mil on opening weekend, though.

Perrin on the fourth season (Radner & Murray ascendant); I fondly remember the Scotch-tape store sketches:

http://dennisperrin.blogspot.com/2008/12/snls-classic-coke-year.html

I don't know if another American comedy show ever referenced coke use the way SNL did that year. You certainly wouldn't see that now, which dates these episodes in a weird nostalgic way. When researching Michael O'Donoghue's biography, many of the writers I interviewed told the same stories about blow in the SNL offices; how it fueled them on Tuesday nights as they shaped scripts for the Wednesday read-through; how the show's hotness guaranteed a steady supply of coke, and so on. You definitely see the results in this seven DVD set. Some of the humor is cheap. Much of it is inspired, though a certain meanness comes through. When you watch these shows in bulk, comic aggression is immediate....

For me, the most inspired, original writing in the fourth season came from Don Novello and Brian McConnachie. Novello was best known as Father Guido Sarducci, the Vatican gossip columnist, whose absurdist takes on the Catholic Church still resonate. But Novello also authored two running, slice-of-life sketches: Olympia Cafe and Scotch Boutique. The former was more popular, its "cheeseburger, cheeseburger, no Coke, Pepsi" becoming a national catchphrase. Yet despite that covering, the Olympia Cafe pieces were subtly acted, Novello's attention to detail well defined. Scotch Boutique displayed even more precision. A store that sells only scotch tape opens in a dying mall. At first seen as a ridiculous idea, the Boutique soon prospers, selling tape to the other store owners so they can put up their Going Out of Business signs. These pieces ran through the entire season, forming an extended narrative as opposed to recurring one-liners and character turns. Scotch Boutique was an intelligent look at people confronting failure and loss. There were no jokes, only situations, each more dire than the last. Those pieces are perhaps the most poignant work to ever air on SNL.