Saturday Night Live

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.

JOKE SWAP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NE_kbJQ8r8

reliably the funniest thing on the show year after year

Having to do a little business at the Verizon store, and they just had to have security escort out a real life Kathy Ann (Cecily Strong's junkie Weekend Update character). It was *uncanny*.

I wasn't watching but I guess Haley made a surprise appearance to zing Trump and offer a mea culpa. I imagine the backlash will fade as quickly as her campaign.

Yup, cold open:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwPQn7i-6JQ

In other news, a new chapter in the Jost-Sherman Saga

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

wtf, Shane Gillis is hosting an upcoming episode?

man, this was actually the funniest episode of SNL this season, in large part because Ayo Edebari is so good; good thing too because I actually forgot about Haley showing up pretty quickly, normalizing that shit could have tanked the whole thing. Glad she didn't pop up again later in Update or something.

Nikki Haley cameo was very odd, would like to read a step by step account of how that came to happen.

Nixon famously did a cameo on Laugh-In in 1968 and it was so unexpected that it drew a lot of punditry about how it helped his stodgy image. Ever since then presidential candidates have tried to duplicate that, mostly badly.

I understand why Haley would want to do it, was thinking more of the motivations of the snl people, Ayo Edebari etc. I wonder if there are diverging motivations e.g. Lorne + other senior people on the show inviting Haley on in the old-school spirit of the show being outside/above partisan politics, Ayo and the cast going along with it on the reasoning that Haley attempting to laugh off the civil war thing just makes her look like an asshole?

wtf, Shane Gillis is hosting an upcoming episode?

note the sturm und drang of squirm & yang at left here:

Thank you, Dakota Johnson, @jtimberlake, @jimmyfallon, @BarbaraCorcoran, @mcuban, and @TobeNwigwe! Goodnight! pic.twitter.com/hsklV8ZraU

— Saturday Night Live - SNL (@nbcsnl) January 28, 2024

Nixon on Laugh-in was from an extremely different era, when there was more cross-aisle collegiality than we can muster now. At that time, people could disagree strongly but then go have cocktails together. That is a vanished world.

Sarah Palin on SNL was a cheap-as-fuck stunt but, in retrospect, comparatively harmless. She lost and never regained a position of influence that would allow her to significantly harm people that I love.

Obama slow-jamming the news is a bit cringe but I don't really care because, again, harmless. No one got hurt by that.

Trump on Fallon getting his hair fluffed? For some reason I just think that's unforgivable because Trump is unforgivable. He harms people I love.

Haley? I dunno because I just don't think she has a lot of power to harm people I love. She'll be off the national radar in a month or two and we will have much, much grimmer things to focus on.