Saturday Night Live

Wait, what the fuck song are you even talking about then?

oic

as a non-American, it astonishes me that this show is still a going concern
― Number None, Sunday, November 13, 2016

well, how else is anyone in America going to enjoy a free live show from the comfort of their own home?

SNL persists because it is LIVE. it is written and produced and rehearsed and performed straight out of thin air by real people that have made this their life's work, and they do it all in the space of DAYS. unbelievable! there is a book called "Live From New York" that is a mostly oral history of the show, told by many of the actual people involved, and it is a great book for many reasons (funny too of course) but it illustrates very well the amount of talent, and forethought, but mostly plain old grueling thankless hard work that goes into making the thing happen every week.

it's a live show! how many people reading this message board have performed a live show for ten people, thirty people, nevermind millions of people, a show that didn't even exist days before the performance? a show that will be recorded for hundreds of millions of other people to view and scrutinize well after the fact and forevermore, and you're all like "well so and so flubbed a line" are you kidding me? I can't believe this. I can't believe that one of the top threads on ILM is all about the new A Tribe Called Quest record, and yet their appearance on this show at this time playing the songs that they played is just an unfortunate anomaly or something, as if they are just on another "promo tour for the new record", as if Dave Chappell came out of hiding just to help Q-Tip sell some records! In 2016!

does no one want to talk about the monologue? the monologue where Chappell says certain unsayable things and addresses so many different stripes of people in a way that only a brilliant comedian can in this world? does no one want to talk about the first sketch, where Chappell and Chris Rock lampoon what has been the top thread on ILE for a year or more? does no one want to talk about the sketch about children (shades of wonder showzen here, that's encouraging) where they end with a stark black screen and bold white text: "Our children are watching."?

or the sketch where Chappell resurrects characters from the Chappell show to try and send a positive, constructive message to all of the hundreds of millions of Chappell show fans he can reach, no matter which side of this stupid imaginary aisle they sit on?

does no one want to remark on how the stars of the show were a homosexual woman and many POC (by the way, as a "Person of Color" myself how did this ancient slur become the preferred nomenclature what the hell is happening in this world)

does no one on this or the damn Tribe thread want to talk about what Q-Tip had to say live on-air to the entire nation, the entire world? one day ago?

does no one else think it was admirable for a collection of tremendously talented people to come together and show up for work and try to provide some measure of damage control for this country? and everyone else?

and to try and be entertaining! and funny! not a one of you has made me laugh or smile in the past week. that isn't your job, so I won't hold it against you.

but for some people it is their job, and they did a hell of a lot more work than I did on saturday night.

watching tribe perform "space program" is the best i've felt since the election results came in.

also ali shaheed muhammad has aged really well.

(Ha ha, I first thought of the Blondie song, too!)

i'm just going to presume that nobody read my wall o' text because I'm not a member of the 77 club so who cares, I am a little disappointed that I didn't even earn a dressing down from dr. morbz but oh well.

I forgot to mention in my talking points that no one wants to talk about that Dave Chappell is a black man AND a Muslim.

anyways dope discussion everyone, here's to 4 to 8 more years of the best echo chamber on the world wide web

sheesh

i mean sure comedy is hard and i guess snl's version of it... proves that? too many skits go on too long or rely on cheap pops or, worse, both

also not to be a dick but it's "chappelle"

thank you maura, thought to double check the spelling of dave's name but probably should have gone with the triple.

fwiw i am not here in this thread to defend SNL the television show, i cannot remember the last full episode of SNL i watched and maybe it is consistently terrible but i do understand the appeal of a live show, and i think this last live show that all of these people put on, on the day that they did, is the most anyone in America has done in the past week to try and fix this madness

Can someone explain what the cold open "Hallelujah" was about? I mean, what, rhetorically, was the point of it?

And when I say snl sux, that is in full view of the fact that it's live with a very limited time to prepare.

Mourning.

sheesh i am not going to argue lengthily bcz unlike an SNL sketch, life doesn't go on forever

this was def a sub-par ep overall

thanks doc, your own story of the member of this community presently dying of cancer and so beloved that he has his own birthday thread, banned for being offensive or whatever and summarily un-banned days later for being right(?), as if nothing much has happened, whatever, who knows what is happening in this world, probably deserves to be commented on in your fucking birthday thread(!), but thank you for chiming in and if i may be sympathetic i most certainly am.

still can't believe all of the love ATCQ is receiving on ILM and yet no one on that thread has anything to say about this show beyond a perfunctory youtube embed, how can you reconcile this music that you love so much and the actions that the people that gave it to you have made? where is the support? do y'all honestly think that ATCQ cares about selling records? today?

i don't really know what you want us to say? i thought they were phenomenal. in a week with a lot to process (which, not to assign motivations to my fellow posters, might be part of the reason you're not getting the response you demand) it was a balm, an opportunity for catharsis about what was lost not only in the past week but in the past year.

sheesh 4 mod

i'm not dying right now, exactly, but thx for yr very badly formed concern

"and to try and be entertaining! and funny! not a one of you has made me laugh or smile in the past week. that isn't your job, so I won't hold it against you."

lol, sorry. you're doing it for all of us!

i mean this right here is comedy gold:

"does no one else think it was admirable for a collection of tremendously talented people to come together and show up for work and try to provide some measure of damage control for this country? and everyone else?"

Tribe performance was great - also the last time I will watch this show. Fuck Lorne Michaels forever.

is the average collection of SNL skits really that much better than what any semi-professional improv group would have come up with given the opportunity

no

Is there more than three semi-professional improv groups in the US?

Don't know if that's a serious question or not, but yes.

Yes to both questions, actually.

I haven't watched in awhile but I figure SNL must be pretty psyched a recent host is going to be President now. Maybe they'll get a shout-out in the inaugural.

I've watched and have been mildly obsessed with the show (as an institution, if nothing else) since I was like ten or eleven, but I haven't watched more than a handful of clips since they first announced that Trump would be hosting. Lorne Michaels knew exactly what he was legitimizing when he made that decision and I hope he's perpetually haunted by it.

SNL is roughly the comedy equivalent of a local sports team. You follow it partly out of habit during rebuilding periods, and a little more enthusiastically when they have a playoff-caliber year. They probably haven't won the whole thing since the 70s and the owner is often out of touch.

i think you might be overly generous about lorne michaels' ability to engage in honest self-relection tbh xp

lost me when he legitimized Adam Sandler

I thought PTA did that.

Sandler for President, 2020. Or 2018. Or 2012. Or 2016. It doesn't really matter anymore.

Sandler on SNL was so good

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/weekend-update-segment---halloween-costume-ideas/n10483

a lot of the 70's stuff hasn't aged well. i can imagine someone who first sees it now really wondering what the fuss was all about. but back then it was just the novelty of the NatLamp drug comedy thing coming to t.v.

and the live novelty. it felt exciting even when it wasn't great. or it did to me anyway when i was a kid. just staying up that late to watch something on t.v. felt exciting.

it has always been really uneven.

there was always a part of me later on that thought: shouldn't they be better at doing this by now? the flow can be so choppy and erratic. and you would think all the video shorts and produced stuff would buy them all kinds of time to figure out a rhythm.

the show seems to be uneven by design-- perhaps with the idea that a show thrown together in 4 or 5 days will be more exciting, and that the flaws are even a bit endearing

probably less "design" and more like "unavoidable artifact of the process"; I'm pretty sure everyone involved would want the show to be seamless top to bottom but that is very, very hard to make work on that production schedule.

Plenty of people involved in the show have complained that the unexamined tradition of exhaustedly blazing through several days of all-nighters doesn't do much for the quality of the show.

They could change up the production schedule--have the writers work on non-current events related sketches during breaks, etc.--but yeah, I think Lorne keeps it the way it is because that's what he thinks works.

yeah i always felt that, like their offseason is long and most of the material isn't topical - even the weekend update character bits tend not to be timely.

i usually ended up liking it for the people who made me laugh no matter what they did. which isn't an endless list.

top seven people who kinda always made me laugh no matter what awful stuff they were forced to do:

will ferrell
darrell hammond
phil hartman
jan hooks
jon lovitz
amy poehler
molly shannon

that's off of the top of my head. i don't know why i thought of darrell hammond. but he did make me laugh a lot. martin short doesn't really count. he's comedy all time.

They do so many game show sketches because the sets are easy to build in a week.

my friend ted's dad is the set designer. been there since the beginning.

Presidential Medal Of Freedom for Lorne.

"Hallelujah" right on time!

Do people like Michael Che? He's getting TV commercials and his own Netflix special and a lot of press, like he's a breakout star or something

He's a traditional stand-up.

i like michael che

so bummed we lost Jay Pharaoh as Ben Carson

^^^ ditto

Big beautiful boobs and buildings.