Elon Musk

and so does elon musk

haterday night live

im not an snl fan or as you say it across the pond supporter but that wario sketch is like barely even recognizable as tv

I remember when Something Awful would have people do readings of really bizarre fanfics and that's what this sketch resembled to me more than anything (granted this is based on the first 2 minutes that I just watched, I had to tap out after that)

Ego Nwodim as the "Woman in a dark place in her life" during Weekend Update made me laugh. So, it was not a complete waste of time.

the idea that SNL was ever good seems to be what the newspapers here call a "falsehood".

What Up With That is a thing of pure joy.

SNL turns over half its cast/writers every few years and they can do pretty much anything.

Pretty much anything that Lorne Michaels specifically approves of.

Jost graduated college in 2004, started writing at SNL in 2005, and became co-head-writer in 2012.

I bought a DVD of Phil Hartman's SNL bits and even that - even him - even their peak - still had some really cringey limp moments. Maybe I just dont get that certain kinda US comedy I dont know.

this is the only good SNL bit in living memory

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

the show's spirit was broken when lorne put on andrew dice clay over jan hooks and nora dunn imo

dunn did a great, honest intervew a few years ago - https://www.salon.com/2015/04/07/nora_dunn_snl_is_a_traumatic_experience_it’s_something_you_have_to_survive/

where she basically says SNL wasn't a smart enough show to deal with a guy like clay, and it's true. not sure it ever was. but she also says it was the first cast that made it iconic, and everything else since has ridden on though, no matter how talented everyone was. 'the outsiders who became insiders' is a good way of putting it.

We were lucky because we had a really stable cast. And I think as maybe three seasons went on, Lorne added a couple people, but we weren’t introduced to those people as new cast members. It was very strange. Suddenly there was just another person there. And I think it was very hard for those people. Like, Who are you? What are you doing here? Are you a visitor? Or are you in the cast? Then we got Adam Sandler, and he was pretty much just doing his own thing. A lot of these people came on and just did their standup routines on News Update. We had been an ensemble-type cast, and I think we were at our best when we were working together, and the show started to become solo performances and I started losing interest.

My theory has long been that SNL’s appeal was that it was the only show comedy fans could follow like a sports team, due to its weird format and wholesale cast changes. Lorne is basically like the team owner. It had its good eras and bad eras – the good eras usually looking better than they felt at the time through the benefit of nostalgia – and people could argue about which cast (team) was the best. But even at its most dire you could still check in from time to time to look for signs of improvement. Somewhere along the way – the run-up to the 2016 election, I think – it’s like they forgot how to scout for talent or the weight of the show’s history and weird cultural role started crushing them and it became unrecognizable to me as comedy. It seems like a celebrity cameo farm with a bunch of theater kids running around. It’s like they’re playing a different sport.

it’s like they forgot how to scout for talent

There are funny people in the cast who are not typically funny on the show.

I would agree with that in the case of some of the people who have been on the longest; not Kate McKinnon though, who along with Colin Jost embodies their whole problem.

Chris L otm, I've never been a sports person but yeah SNL was basically my sports team for most of my life.

Is it possible to use the strikethrough tags on the thread title and just make this another SNL thread, y/n

It's not a coincidence that the best bits are almost always the pre-recorded bits, which implies the problem is not necessarily the cast or even the writing but what to do with either in the context of a "live" show, with no second takes, no refining, etc. "Murder Durder," for example, was really funny and silly this week (it's the only "skit" I saw) but I don't know if it would have worked live. It needed the look of "Mare" to seal the deal. So yeah, what sic said: there are funny people in the cast who are not typically funny on the show. The question is why? At least Keenan always seems to acknowledge the half-assed absurdity of what he's asked to do. Yang, too, imo. But most of the other people aren't being funny, they're *acting* like they're supposed to be funny, which makes the whole thing feel sort of off balance. Che and Jost are not my faves, but there's a looseness to Weekend Update that often contrasts with the rest of the show's rote parade of fake game-shows or whatever. Maybe that's always been the case, but it seems pretty stark lately.

I watched like a minute of that Gen Z Hospital shit and, honestly, Musk wasn't much more wooden than any of the cast members featured in that sketch. It was like I was watching some small town's community theater comedy showcase.

That's a good example of what I was talking about. I have no idea if that skit (which I saw part of over my wife's shoulder, while she was playing it for our Gen Z kid) done well would be funny, but everything is delivered in a stiff and ironic soap opera tone. Which might have been funny in a pre-recorded bit that can rely on the timing of music cues, and edits, a soapy look and melodramatic voiceover, but live was just ... people stiffly saying bro over and over.

I will go to bat for "Liza Minelli Tries To Turn Off A Lamp"

Eh, virtually all long-running sketch shows have an abysmal hit rate. But you will find great sketches and performers in every era. Maybe I'm just an optimist, but I also believe in that "SNL was the best when you were 9 years old!" maxim.

Most of the time, SNL is fine; not amazing, not terrible, but amusing. Sometimes it's hilarious. Sometimes it's total horseshit (see: this past week).

For at least the last 20 years, probably even longer (my warm memories of the early '90s cast from when I was 12-14 clouds my judgment a little) SNL has been 35% absolutely terrible, 55% boring and 10% hilarious. I still think this is the case, it just happens that sometimes the 10% hilarious completely misses an episode or two.

pretty sure i've written this exact post elsewhere on the board, but i fell in love with early '90s snl via reruns on comedy central and did not realize that i was watching edited-down versions of the show, which i think accounts for at least half of why, when i tuned into snl in 2000 just to see radiohead perform, i was shocked at how... terrible the show was/is

i've only caught the odd episode since but it does seem even worse now

I feel like "Please laugh" should be their tagline

A funny character still needs to be funny.

fell in love with early '90s snl via reruns on comedy central and did not realize that i was watching edited-down versions of the show

very same here lol

For at least the last 20 years, probably even longer (my warm memories of the early '90s cast from when I was 12-14 clouds my judgment a little) SNL has been 35% absolutely terrible, 55% boring and 10% hilarious. I still think this is the case, it just happens that sometimes the 10% hilarious completely misses an episode or two.

otm

And this one keeps me laughing every time I watch it. Nieces and Pets!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb7b5-31LFY

Huh, Grimes was Princess Peach in the Wario skit.

Mario and Wario are not Japanese (although that was the only mildly funny part of the sketch) but Italian immigrants that live in New York (well Mario at least, Wario is italian but there’s no confirmation he also lives in NYC). Princess Peach is definitely not Italian she’s from the Mushroom Kingdom no idea why the Italian accent on her.

because Italian bippity boopity amirite

wario is german

so then it's pronounced "var-io"

"Murder Durder," for example, was really funny and silly this week

It wasn’t really funny, it just had an identifiable joke, unlike the rest of the parts I saw. Unfortunately, that joke was 30 Rock’s The Rural Juror.

And it was funny for the exact same reason, just hearing them say "murder durder durder murder" over and over again. If it were live it would have been funnier for them breaking.

some of their sketches remind me of the dreck that I used to read when I was a judge for a local Playwright Round Table that specialized in short, ten minute plays.

I eventually quit because I couldn't read any more shit sketch writing.

It was initially conceived as a german character with a german accent and words but nintendo changed him to have the same Italian accent Mario has in subsequent games:

https://www.siliconera.com/voice-actor-says-wario-originally-intended-german-character/

Wario Was German:

Wario originally spoke German in Mario Kart 64 -- his voice actor says it's because Nintendo told him Wario was German. But Wario's voice was later re-recorded with an Italian accent, and he's remained Italian ever since.

Full story: https://t.co/Gue1ge4Prj pic.twitter.com/qNSfpVxd7A

— Reggie-800's Nintendo Secrets (@reggie_800) August 26, 2020

that's what baffles me about SNL, no matter what they're lampooning they come off like it's something they just found out about yesterday. like with Donald Trump they were just like "so this guy's like Dan Quayle right? he misspells words and has weird hair? also there's something with him and Russia, can we do something with that?"

Waluigi is half Lithuanian half Tongan iirc

xpost - I don't think it's a lack of current, timely news that is the problem, it's figuring out a funny, original take on it that seems to be a challenge

As the review/essay and its citations argue, a big part of that is because every take has to be filtered through the perspective of an extremely rich, petty, fameo-loving man with multiple servants. Plenty of other humans are able to come up with funnier, deeper takes in a shorter timeframe.

As for non-news-based material, Bob Odenkirk argued in the '80s that writing every sketch in three days while sleep-deprived - then throwing away anything that didn't get approved first time - was a bad way of developing material, and proved it by rewriting and developing rejected sketches into an admired show with a better hitrate in the 1990s. Tim Robinson rarely got material onto SNL at all after being demoted from cast member to writer, but five years after that was able to use his rejected material in the most acclaimed sketch show of the last, oh, five years. For the last three years, John Mulaney's guest-hosted episodes of SNL have been widely noted as the best, and in each of those he has used his position to mount sketches that had been rejected during his five years on the show, five years earlier.

Norm's monologue summarizes it pretty well. "See, they fired me because they said I wasn't funny. But now, this is the weird part, it's only a year and a half later, and now they ask me to host the show! So how did I go, in a year and a half, to not even being allowed in the building, to being so funny, that I'm now hosting the show? Then it occurred to me: I haven't gotten funnier, the show has gotten really bad! So yeah, I'm funny, compared to...well you know, you'll see later"

xpost - it's almost as if Lorne's gut reactions to draft skits are uniformly terrible

ok folks lets get back on topic

pls stop the future i want to get off this ride pic.twitter.com/AO4XeMCGe1

— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) May 8, 2021

well another thing is SNL skits last like 6-8 minutes, once the joke is revealed there's little for the characters to do but just yell at each other and start throwing shit. last time I watched a full episode there were a couple where I thought "did this end 2 minutes ago and they're just improvising to fill time?"

there must be an snl thread

there is but fuck Elon Musk, we can discuss anything that sucks in here

michael o'donoghue would've told musk what's what!

i love elon musk erasure

always, don't wanna be with him

muskerasure love

who is Elon Musk