Saturday Night Live

i can

yerac hates

rice

the movie Q&A one is not that surreal though

i liked the 3 way more after they were on the show, whoops and i meant to say chris parnell and not fred armisen. I have a deep dislike for Che and Jost. Not as much as Mooney though. I do agree with one of the statements above though, some of the other guys blend in together too much that they don't really stand out for me to dislike.

i got a strange whim to look up all of the "Under Underground Music Festival" skits last night, goddamn they're funny. "play Farmville with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed!" "NBA star Dirk Nowitzki shoots at you with a BB gun in an open field!"

RIP Ass Dan.

like the Driver sketch upthread

idk, i think the driver sketch had its own internal logic, which contrasted with the setting of the sketch. and i liked that the response wasn't just "what the fuck is happening," but had villasenor enjoying the hell out of driver's nonsense.

that Driver sketch is maybe the only genuinely great sketch this whole season so far

Because he was really selling it. Many hosts, even the good ones, give sort of limited monotone cue-card readings, but he was into it.

Pete Davison breaks more than Jimmy Fallon ever did.

idk i think the Driver sketch had the energy and an exceptional central performance but not the jokes so much, it was a pretty easy setup with zero decent writing for any character beyond Driver, just have an embarrassed son and a pleasant teacher and one student who's all "whoa righteous dude" or whatever, i mean it is the type of shit that is student film level. the standard should be a lot higher, no one other than Driver in that sketch is any good and he was admittedly extremely good.

even the line the firefighter at the beginning was supposed to land and it was a nothing, they didn't even try to come up with anything better. i'm not an anti-comedy lex but i just thought it was lazy.

the Baldwin Trump atrocity is even worse when you consider what a great job someone like Hartman did w/Reagan, or on a lesser skill level scale what Carvey did w/Bush, which utterly defined the actual Bush for a time.

nope, not gonna do ir

it*

lol

it’s weird i don’t think i ever watched snl at the time (bc i was v v v young) but dana carvey’s impression still *is* bush to me

His Bush was memorable enough that he still does it!

Will Ferrell was great as W.

Yeah, he and Hartman defined their presidents. They never nailed Obama, but Jordan Peele found a way in.

and don’t forget tina fey...

not having this gut reaction to baldwin as trump that you are. I'm a little tired of it now but that's becaues I'm a little tired of trump and all of the presidential impersonations over the years got tired after a while.

I thought this week's was weak, partly because it's hard to even make fun of the Kanye Oval office meeting which was surreal enough in and of itself; and also because it went soft on Jim Brown who doesn't deserve to be given the benefit of the doubt.

Peele's O is good

Darrell Hammond was a much better Trump than Baldwin but still not great. Trump is a surprisingly hard impression, maybe because he's already such a caricature. Atamanuik is the only one that's come close.

re: problems in the writers' room - the difficulty in satirizing current events is that they are beyond satire. pretty much all of the cold opens recently simply recite the news & are practically transcripts (Kanye, Kavanaugh, most Trump)

I hate all the "jokes" that are just meta-commentary ("I will just make this face I call the Booker Look" "Refer to me as the prosecutor, not the lady prosecutor")

like putting that Kavanaugh sketch up against the opening they did during the Clarence Thomas hearings shows how dire things have become

Matt Damon was so randomly mis/stunt-cast for that. They should've gotten, I dunno, Gilbert Gottfried to shriek Kavanaugh's testimony.

I pretty much hate all the Kate McKinnon stunt casting as various political figures. She gets this hoot of approval like a conquering hero, but I don't think her squirrelly mugging deserves it.

It's not really stunt casting when she's part of the ensemble.

i mean there are so few cast members that have any charisma or pop the crowd is gonna react that way to her

She's pretty much their most powerful player right now?

JIC otm. McKinnon is hella talented but absolutely does mug, I get the feeling she thinks she steals any sketch she shows up in, which I think was the case early in her stint on snl

She's pretty much their most powerful player right now?

― Yerac, Thursday, October 18, 2018 2:34 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

She's been that since like Sudekis left!

It’s a complete misconception to play Trump as a louder version of his IRL persona, the joke would be to play him as totally competent and soft spoken and thoughtful behind the scenes.

xpost yeah, I almost said she's been at the top for the last couple of years but i didn't really want to do the research on who she usurped. Sudekis doesn't seem right (I only remember him for being married to Olivia Wilde, for Maine Justice and his dancing).

Then the double joke would be that the IRL leaks reacting to Trump’s incompetence and how scared the GOP inner circle is would be theyre negatively reacting to how measured and decent he really is.

It's not really stunt casting when she's part of the ensemble.

It's stunt casting when each role - Sessions, Rudy, Graham - is her under garish piles of gender-swap make-up.

Maybe Bill Hader.

this show is not interested in effective political satire. Lorne Michaels and the entire writing staff should be fired and the show either cancelled or completely retooled if that's what you want from this garbage.

Hader was great.

I don't even like the current weekend update crew, which feels lazy and hedged in.

I miss "What's Up With That."

Damon's Kavanaugh may not have been a great impression but it was funny and engaging nonetheless, seemed like a needed spark of life

this show needs more cecily strong. she needs better material though. she def. has star quality.

How is Kate not new Kristin Wiig?

not as funny

not as funny

― ( ͡☉ ͜ʖ ͡☉) (jim in vancouver), Thursday, October 18, 2018 3:13 PM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Kate is def in that Key & Peele vein of people who just have completely mastered this as an artform and craft, which I guess doesn't mean they necessarily has the personal touch of a Wiig or a Farrell or whoever

I feel like I would've liked Farrell more in SNL if he hadn't had that terrible recurring cheerleader character.

It’s a complete misconception to play Trump as a louder version of his IRL persona, the joke would be to play him as totally competent and soft spoken and thoughtful behind the scenes.
― omar little, Thursday, October 18, 2018

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5wfPlgKFh8

mckinnon also seems to have graduated to a stage where she doesn't need to be in that many sketches any more and probalby makes a shit ton of money anyway, while it seems like MIkey Day is in every single thing and kind of continually sucks

there's a guy named MLKey Day?

is it consensus that Heidi Gardner is the next big star once McKinnon leaves?

seems to me that she should be

McKinnon’s HRC was great. All the Trump people she’s played - terrible