Saturday Night Live

the january jones episode was terrible across the board. the John Hamm episodes were pretty great.

I'll also admit that, entering my 60s, the cultural references to TikTok and Tidal and whatnot increasingly lose me. I'm sure that makes some difference.

I recently tracked down a sketch I've been looking for for ages, Ricky Nelson in a Twilight Zone episode ending up in the homes of Leave It To Beaver, Father Knows Best, Danny Thomas, and I Love Lucy. Great use of the entire cast, some playing multiple roles (Dan Aykroyd as Rod Serling, George Burns, and Alfred Hitchcock.) While not as hilarious as I remembered, it was way more complex than "Grace Kelly farting for five minutes."

Sounds great. Can you provide a link?

https://archive.org/details/saturday-night-live-s-04-e-12-rick-nelson-judy-collins-02-17-1979

Starts at 13:45.

Cool, thanks! Have you seen the video linked here? Film noir: your favourites

The trope of "SNL isn't as good as it used to be" is only slightly younger than the show itself. Almost always, the person saying that thinks it was best in their own personal adolescence (when staying up late was a lure in itself) or young adulthood (when the references felt fresh).

There’s certainly some truth to this, but the first season I was able to watch every week was the cast of ringers in ‘84-‘85 — Ed Grimley! “I Hate When That Happens!” Eddie Murphy hosting! The film about the magic door-opening mat! Ringo Starr not getting any bids at an auction of Beatles memorabilia! The Question Is Moot! — but the next season was the return of Lorne, where it fell off a cliff and nearly got cancelled. So yeah, in this instance, from one season to the next, “it wasn’t as good as it used to be” definitely applied.

Love the ending of that season:

In the final sketch, Billy Martin is shown dumping gasoline around the studio and then setting it on fire. The entire cast is shown to be trapped in a room as a parody of TV show cliffhangers. Credits rolled with question marks on each name, signaling that the viewer didn't know which cast members would be returning the next season. Cast members were reportedly angered by an ending added to the sketch, in which Michaels has the opportunity to rescue the cast from the fire, but chooses to save only Lovitz.

Almost always, the person saying that thinks it was best in their own personal adolescence (when staying up late was a lure in itself) or young adulthood (when the references felt fresh).

I loved the show when I was 12-14, then rarely watched it for the next 15 years. When I started watching again regularly, it was in the late 2000s, and it seemed surprisingly solid, but then it started to sour on me again a few years ago. It occurred to me recently that maybe I liked it during that stetch because the cast was mostly around my age.

Sarah Sherman is not funny on SNL

^co-sign. her material and her delivery both 'read' as zany humor, a bit like kiddie cartoon show host on meth, but the material is really weak. the weak material may not be her fault, but her delivery can't fix it.

Her delivery on SNL in other people's skits definitely scans as "look at me! look at how absolutely WACKY I am", but I do think she's brought some pretty solid material - her Meatballs skit was great and I wish she could get more like that on the air.

Starts at 13:45.

The trope of "SNL isn't as good as it used to be" is only slightly younger than the show itself. Almost always, the person saying that thinks it was best in their own personal adolescence (when staying up late was a lure in itself) or young adulthood (when the references felt fresh).

nah, the late '80s Phil Hartman era was the peak and most of that came before my adolescence (and certainly young adulthood), he bleeds over a bit I guess but the Chris Farley era was not good

I guess I wouldn't say it isn't as good as it used to be, though, I'd say it was only good from like 1986-1990.

its more for babies now and little kids and has paid sketches for things like street fighter 6

i watched a sketch a few weeks ago and thought to myself that social media has ruined snl bc i’ve already seen all of these jokes as tweets

that's definitely an issue.

comedians have been recycling jokes forever. using unoriginal material is their bread and butter.

but SNL doesn't have the guts to say "stop me if you've heard this one"

I think that's a good point, though. SNL now competes with hundreds of thousands of versions of itself on social media; people who grew up with the show, absorbed the way it handled the absurd side of politics (they weren't the first, obviously, but they had their own style), and replicate that all over Twitter and Facebook.

iow, thanks to social media now everyone's a comedian

Comedians are like opinions: everybody has one.

I keep two comedians in my closet

(xxpost) More or less, yeah. Maybe always true, but absent social media, you never heard the other 100,000 versions before SNL got to it. Even with Tina Fey and Sarah Palin, when the internet wasn't quite the swamp in 2008 that it is today, I don't remember being exposed to much about Palin (relatively speaking) before Fey took her on.

The trope of "SNL isn't as good as it used to be" is only slightly younger than the show itself. Almost always, the person saying that thinks it was best in their own personal adolescence (when staying up late was a lure in itself) or young adulthood (when the references felt fresh).

I'm British and never really saw any snl until I was in my 30s when a digital channel over here repeated the first couple of seasons from the 70s, and the I started watching sketches on youtube, so without the bias of youthful affection I can say that the funniest era of the show is the mid 2000s to early 2010s period, otherwise agree the hit to miss ratio is fairly consistent throughout the whole run, and that any 'current affairs'/topical reference stuff is now always the worst part of the show because all the jokes have already been flogged to death on twitter well before saturday night

That’s a pretty solid era, definitely top three. I’d probably put them second behind the late 80s cast, one spot ahead of the original cast. that first iteration of the show wasn’t really amazingly funny all the time, but that was just a solid gold cast with A+ ringers.

xp That Hader, Armisen, Forte, Wiig, Samberg, Meyers-helmed era was pretty classic imo, not something I realized until after it was over.

This was a pretty bad year (95)

Repertory players

Morwenna Banks (first episode: April 8, 1995)
Ellen Cleghorne
Chris Elliott
Chris Farley
Janeane Garofalo (final episode: February 25, 1995)
Norm Macdonald
Michael McKean
Mark McKinney (first episode: January 14, 1995)
Tim Meadows
Mike Myers (final episode: January 21, 1995)
Kevin Nealon
Adam Sandler
David Spade
Featured players

Al Franken (final episode: May 6, 1995)
Laura Kightlinger
Jay Mohr
Molly Shannon (first episode: February 25, 1995)

Oof

I love that lost-in-the-sauce year between Bad Boys of Comedy era and screaming Will Ferrell era

Just lots of screaming Farley and weird little Chris Elliott bits

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xtzmxr

the only thing I recall seeing from that season is this sketch with Mark McKinney (as DaRYL from KITH), Chris Elliott and Janeane Garofalo about internet chatrooms, and it's funny but I never would have guessed it was from snl

This was a pretty bad year (95)

what's weird is I believe and kind of vaguely remember that was a bad year of SNL but on the whole that's a lot of very funny people!

Anyway, I used to be a "why can't SNL be good like it was when I was an adolescent" guy but now I realize looking back that it was never very good. Was Phil Hartman a genius? Yes. Is the concept of "Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer" brilliant? Yes. But the actual sketches are belabored workings out of a single idea that can't bear the weight, just like sketches are now. Maybe "never very good" is too harsh. It was a live show! It was meant to be performed and watched in the moment, not forever! It was good at being the thing it was being. But I'd rather watch "Trading Places" than anything Murphy did on SNL ever. That was made to last, and it did.

Lol

In reruns, the "O'Callahan and Sons" sketch is replaced with the short film Vacation because Jay Mohr admitted plagiarizing "O'Callahan and Sons" from comedian Rick Shapiro.

what's weird is I believe and kind of vaguely remember that was a bad year of SNL but on the whole that's a lot of very funny people!


Yeah, that ‘94-‘95 season is pretty weird (and bad) in how Michaels seemingly tried to emulate Ebersol’s strategy in ‘84-‘85 of bringing in some ringers, but with decidedly less success. I love Chris Elliott, but 10 years after he’d established himself as a solid comedic presence (and just 2 years after he starred in his own well-received sitcom), it seemed like his talents would’ve been put to much more effective use pretty much anywhere else. Adding him to the cast felt desperate (more on Lorne’s part than Elliott’s).

S20 is such a trainwreck: Farley's coked up; Sandler & Spade in particular are frequently checked-out; McKean's there to do Clinton and also play Spade's Dad; Myers is waiting for his next movie; Nealon's wishing he left a year earlier; Elliott & Garofalo don't really fit anywhere; Meadows hasn't blossomed yet...

I assure you all that nothing in that cast list stands out as much for an American as Morwenna Banks does for someone watching a lot of UK comedy - four seasons of Absolutely then three episodes of Saturday Night Live.

But I'd rather watch "Trading Places" than anything Murphy did on SNL ever. That was made to last, and it did.

I mostly agree (I can probably recite Trading Places from memory at this point), but I still think the “White Like Eddie” short film, from when he hosted in late ‘84, is the greatest thing Murphy’s ever done.

S20's sign-off sketch...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wf31yBoGA4

the only thing I recall seeing from that season is this sketch with Mark McKinney (as DaRYL from KITH), Chris Elliott and Janeane Garofalo about internet chatrooms, and it's funny but I never would have guessed it was from snl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MibMGMSZWg

Iirc, this was their first internet sketch.

S20's sign-off sketch...

this week's episode was great!

“Thank you Rob Schneider for your years of courage” might be the funniest sentence in human history pic.twitter.com/XRx6pv6wex

— Drew Landry (@MrDrewLandry) June 26, 2023

Who’s Afraid of Lorne Michaels?

(not the best article, restates much of what we already know, but unequivocally for the record: Lorne Michaels sucks)

#onethread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNnpxFhgWc8

Another season, another Sarah Sherman Jost Roast

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QlNBlBMN6Q

Saying Jost's face looked like Thomas the Tank Engine was funny. The rest was just throwing her arms around and yelling.