Saturday Night Live

i took gilly to be some kind of nancy grotesquerie

http://www.gilchriststudios.com/images/d2s/09/Nancy.gif

I like Watkins as a versatile utilitarian player rather than a star player, though tbf I haven't seen her do an out-of-character character yet.

Will Forte will always have a place in my heart for being the voice of Abe Lincoln on Clone High.

bill hader doing the dateline guy is the only thing on snl i've seen in 5 years or so, and it was just a clip online, but i thought it was hilarious

I like that, too, even though I have no idea who he's parodying.

except for it being ruined by seth meyers going "AREN'T YOU JUST A SNARKY BLOGGER?" lol hello 2005

how did seth myers ruin it by pointing out the premise?

― mizzell, Monday, April 13, 2009 1:04 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

cuz the actual jokes were pretty funny in a childish way

watkins-as-blogger is fuckin awesome, if only for the "bitch please" payoff. kills me every time

gilly = raggedy ann gone mental

gilly =

http://www.nexternal.com/dreamland/images/blecky.jpg

Hader's Keith Morrison impersonation is definitely caricature, but after a bit you can start imagining the real guy as totally being that creepy.

http://thumbnails.hulu.com/13/908/62056_145x80_generated__uLeb-882bUaS9IofVSGg-w.jpg

your nancy theory looks promising...

the blogger character is really funny, but hitting on the angle that it's about bloggers too hard does hurt it a little imo

Samberg isn't really a factor in sketches, i am very pro- the guy lately cause the Lonely Island album but i like those dudes far more for the writing than for his performances

he blogger character is really funny, but hitting on the angle that it's about bloggers too hard does hurt it a little imo

I read this as "does hurt a little"

Wiig is funny but I don't think she's as versatile as Lorne wishes. I don't think she's charming enough to carry the show like Ferrell or even Oteri.

― The Contemptible (Dandy Don Weiner), Monday, April 13, 2009 1:59 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I think Ferrell's run is benefitting from the rose colored glasses provided by a good movie career and cherry-picked best-of specials as much as any cast member from the 70s or 80s -- guy was an insufferable sketch hog in his day, at the height of their sketch lengths going on way too long, it seemed like every week's broadcast included at least 15 minutes of him yelling in a thong or something. there were a couple years where i straight up hated him.

xpost haha whiney

Is Darrell Hammond in like one sketch an episode?

One sketch too many.

^^^ REAL TALK xp

yeah al i mean i dont hate the writing on this show at all. each week they consistently throw 3-5 A+ ideas out there that either they underwrite or the cast underperforms.

I don't know if it's part of the del close 'chicago school' of comedy but it seems like an unwritten rule that in any bit with an eccentric character there must always be a proxy for the audience who is normal and 'clever' enough to say 'what you are doing here is both weird and stupid'
so seth meyers might be contractually obligated to point out the blogger thing, just like kenan has to point out that his being a suspect in Gilly's crimes is ludicrous.

this is really condescending to the audience -- smells like Lorne's doing.

i dont hate the writing on this show at all. each week they consistently throw 3-5 A+ ideas out there that either they underwrite

this means that you should probably hate the writing

Wiig has definitely been hurt by the lack of creativity of the writing staff. Oh, people like a character she does? Now she has to do it all the time. Now people like Wiig in general? Now she is in every sketch. Etc. I liked her better when she had more room to breathe.

Also, when Seth Meyers is your head writer, there is a problem, and I *like* Seth. He's just not a lead guy. They miss Tina Fey a lot, I think.

xp jordan yeah i guess, but my problem is how they end sketches most of the time. if i can get a few minutes of good lollin and at least one "wish i thought of that first" moment, i'm usually ok

philip OTM, that stuff bugs me a lot

what ideas were like that this past week?

the foot massage sketch, the underage bar sktech, and another one i forget

ringing endorsement

i thought the today show parody was funny and the blogger things were funny, that's about it

wring my nuts xpost

yeah today show is a pretty consistent bit

yup

One problem with the Today Show bit is that the actual Hoda/Kathie Lee hour on the Today Show is fucking insane and way funnier than a sketch about it could ever be.

I miss seeing Chris Parnell on the regular. :(

Oh, people like a character she does? Now she has to do it all the time.

when has this ever not been the case on snl?

Kristen Wiig is really running the risk of turning into Maya Rudolph.

i don't really know what that means

In so far as she's a funny character actor who Lorne will beat to death with overexposure and she'll end up sleepwalking through the show all the time.

i dunno...i never got to a point where i felt like MR was on the show too much...she never even really had that many ubiquitous running characters.

Oh, there was a while there when she was in 70% of the show, doing characters that all revolved around the one of the three or four weird voices she could do.

when has this ever not been the case on snl?

True, but it is happening again and I hate it.

don't really remember that time...iirc she basically stopped doing donatella versace after awhile, yeah?

Unfortunately I can't cite specifics, because I started wiping her from my memory (sad, because I liked her in the beginning). It would probably be around 2004/05.

I don't know if it's part of the del close 'chicago school' of comedy but it seems like an unwritten rule that in any bit with an eccentric character there must always be a proxy for the audience who is normal and 'clever' enough to say 'what you are doing here is both weird and stupid'

I don't think that's a Del Close thing, although I have seen stuff at the iO Theater where that sort of audience proxy is welcome and even funny in a scene that otherwise threatens to devolve into something ungrounded, unfocused, and self-indulgent. The difference, of course, is that with improv, you probably need that kind of reassurance ("look, we know this guy's being a weirdo on stage") way more than with a mainstream televised sketch show, where you implicitly trust that everything's done on purpose and for a reason.

I think Ferrell's run is benefitting from the rose colored glasses provided by a good movie career and cherry-picked best-of specials as much as any cast member from the 70s or 80s -- guy was an insufferable sketch hog in his day, at the height of their sketch lengths going on way too long, it seemed like every week's broadcast included at least 15 minutes of him yelling in a thong or something. there were a couple years where i straight up hated him.

he became a sketch hog because he was the last guy to leave, right? the thing about Ferrell is that he had many, many moments of hilarity which is something the current cast seems unable to claim. He was as much a sketch hog as anyone there ever was--Dana Carvey comes to mind. And let's face it, the institution that is SNL has ridden its renegade 70s legend through rose colored glasses and sketches that were more groundbreaking than funny. I think this is especially driven by the number of players who successfully to the big screen and made the show larger than life.

And seriously, if they get 3 or 4 good to great sketches in any given episode, that's as good as it's ever been. I think DVRs make the show either worse or heighten its worseness.

if they get 3 or 4 good to great sketches in any given episode

^^yep. imo this is basically the batting avg during even the best years

A lot of the Ferrell stuff is funnier in hindsight than it was live, I think. And that could be said for most of SNL's past, for any player. If there's one thing about SNL that works, it's that most sketches aren't as funny in real time as they are after the fact.

Tracy Morgan, for example, was on some other level most of the time, but it wasn't so obvious when it was happening.

I used to think early SNL might not have been so great, but then I saw a rerun of one of the early shows (Candace Bergen was host?) Nearly every sketch was a winner. Even had some weird muppet shit.

They cut out all the shitty sketches for rebroadcast to whittle it down to an hour, but at least they HAD a good hour.

The version I used to see in australia was on a basic cable channel and they cut it down to 1 hour to start with but eventually cut it down to about 35 minutes. i used to think i was missing a whole lot but now we record the actual live show and watch it, after all the fast forwarding, we end up with about 35 minutes.

It does take 35-40 minutes watching it on Tivo. I can't believe now that I ever watched this show live.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/53458/saturday-night-live-aladdin

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