This might be the most David Lynch mashfuck of the week.



 

Did you make it to the 30 minute mark?  I should have probably said, just start around the 30 minute mark.

I might have been in a more susceptible frame of mind, but I started to take it seriously for a couple of minutes.
 

This weekend is the big festivities for the Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary, concluding with their special this, um, Sunday?  Ok, whatever.  Tonight, instead, they're rerunning the first episode, hosted by George Carlin, which I personally have no reason to watch.  I have the DVDs, why would I want more commercials?  (Actually, had they bright idea to also run the contemporary '75 commercials, it might be worth it.)

So I guess I owe some kind of commemoration, being, as I am, somewhat of a lifelong fan of the show, through the good and the bad.  I used to compare it to being a fan of a perennially disappointing sports franchise, like the Mets or the Cubs.  Regardless, I got season tickets, rain or shine, I'm there.  Usually yelling at the team from the top of the bleachers.  Or to mix the metaphor further, treating Lorne Michaels like George Steinbrenner ("What the hell were you thinking trading Ben Stiller so soon!?!"  "Norm MacDonald was the best inside game you ever had!!!"  "You passed up Stephen Colbert for...Jim Fucking Brewer!?!?!?!")  Like Bill Burr watching the Patriots at the local strip-mall chicken-wing joint.  As the years go on, the yelling subsides into quiet contempt.  "Oh, you invited Trump and Elon Musk to this year's special?  Even though Aykroyd couldn't even get a ticket?  Fucking typical, you starfucking weasel!"

But let's stick with the love of the game.  There'll be plenty of time for the other thing tomorrow night.

The old saying that Lorne Michaels loves to repeat is that everyone's favorite era of SNL is the one they watched in high school.  People have said the same basic bullshit about all manner of pop culture, from music to movies, and, lord, it must be true for a small ton of basic bitches who see these things as culturally transactional as Gap blue jeans and Converse sneakers.  Not for me.  It does help that in my high school years, SNL was going through something of a renaissance, maybe a second golden era, the '88-'91 period when Dana Carvey and Phil Hartman were war horses and new blood feature players were infusing new energy.  But I was also in high school in 1993, which began a terrible slump as Carvey/Hartman left, the "bad boys" took over, and by 1995 even Entertainment Weekly was making fun of how lame the show had gotten.  (And that's gotta hurt, because Entertainment Weekly is the official entertainment magazine for Gap shoppers.)

I only rarely was able to see vintage SNL on television.  I do remember, when I was about 6 and staying up too late in the summer, my mom saying that she had to watch SNL, but if it was a new one, I had to go to bed.  This was 1981, btw, for context, and SNL was on the brink of cancelling the only season in the show's run.  Fortunately for me, I see Chevy Chase rolling out in a wheelchair, and I got a couple more hours of TV.  Only later did I start collecting the "Best of"s, taping the edited Nick at Nite airings, and a local PBS which ran 45-minute edits.  (For reference, SNL episodes without commercials run approximately 66 minutes.)

I would watch the show more regularly during the Eddie Murphy years, and honestly, I think this era is woefully underappreciated.  Clearly it lacked the same spark as the original cast, as everyone was constantly reminding, but there was some pretty great stuff.  Obviously Eddie - and fwiw, in love of physical media, can we get a 2 or 3 disc set of a comprehensive Eddie Murphy collection?  The old hour-long VHS was tip-of-the-iceberg stuff.  Also Tim Kasurinsky and Mary Gross were as much standouts as Joe Piscopo, and even Jim Belushi had his moments.  Unfortunately, we're not likely to see much of this era on Sunday, as it was during Lorne Michaels' respite, and, as we all know, he will make extra sure that everything about the special will be about him.  Shame also that they'll likely eclipse the phenomenal '84-'85 season, that unique peak where (going back to the sports metaphor) they paid well above the cap to get an all-star roster of Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Christopher Guest.  (Crystal and Guest also did not receive invitations to Sunday's gala.)  And poor Rich Hall, emigree from Not Necessarily the News, whose Snigglets were a brief but satisfying amusement.

To be fair, I also doubt that there will be much time spent on the disasterous '85-'86 season - the one with Randy Quaid, Robert Downey Jr. and Anthony Michael Hall.  Or most famous for Damon Wayans, the most talented of the new cast, flaming out and virtually quitting on live television.  (Wayans would go on for a season and a half of In Living Color which, for that season and a half at least, would make SNL look as dated as an Osmonds variety special.)  Between this season and Michaels' previous, little-watched The New Show, it looked like he might be washed up after all.

But here comes what I think is easily the second best cast of SNL's run - Carvey, Hartman, Hooks, Miller, Lovitz.  A. Whitney Brown as the unsung satirist conscience.  Al Franken on a leash (or satellite head gear).  Writers, whose names I wouldn't recognize for years, like Robert Smigel, Jack Handy, Conan O'Brien, Bob Odenkirk.  I thought it was apparent early on - I wore out my VHS copy of the opening Sigorney Weaver-hosted episode - that the chemistry was back on track.

By high school, interests like girls and drugs began to distract me from normal appointment TV, and if I didn't have a friend kind enough to tape the show, I usually missed out on most of the SNLs from '94-'00.  Thankfully, there were several such friends, providing my exposure to things from Ben Stiller, Seinfeld, Letterman, Kids in the Hall, Dana Carvey, The State, Mr. Show during this time.  Watching any TV in real time would become a rare feat.  I did note that of the SNL I saw during this time, very little impressed me.  I do remember liking Norm MacDonald's Dave Letterman impression (with Mark McKinney as Paul), which I assume Dave did as well.  I also remember being distinctly unimpressed with Jim Brewer or Chris Kattan.  I also noticed a pattern which I can say persists to this day, which is consistently weak writing, with few exceptions.  As with most shows of this duration and catalogue depth, it isn't difficult to compile a couple hours worth of sketches from the pas 25 years which could potentially convince anyone that this remains one of the most brilliant innovative shows on television.  But that's an awful lot of down time you have to skip over.

On this side of the century, the show has wobbled on, maintaining a solid, oh, let's say .200% batting average, at best, some nights worse than others.  There's a steady infusion of truly inspirational talent occasionally - Maya Rudolph, Andy Samberg, Will Forte, Bill Hader, Kate McKinnon.  Maybe some lightning in a bottle classic ("What Up With That?").  But the modern trend towards young sexy Us Weekly-esque hosts and strictly Top Ten commercial musical acts has had a very limiting effect on its entertainment spectrum.  The formula has so long been cast that any deviation starts to feel refreshing, whether it truly is or not.

Which brings us back full circle to what made the first four seasons so electrifying.  Yes, they had talent to spare, but also ideas, revolutionary and transgressive attitudes about comedy which complemented that decade's stand-up explosion.  The sheer variety in styles of humor, which we rarely see on the show these days, breaking convention and taboos but rarely breaking face (of course I'm looking at you, Jimmy Fallon).  Could our modern equivalents of Leon Redbone or Loudon Wainwright even have a chance to appear on today's show?  A short film parodying Maya Deren?  A Mr. Bill 8mm film sent in by a fan?  And don't give me this, "Well, they had to put on whoever to fill time."  Because it wasn't filler, ever.

Running its natural course, the show maybe had to calcify and harden into a stagnant relic at some point, regardless of how ever much new blood you pump into it.  The fact is that the show is still run by a fossil like Lorne Michaels, and (much like his peer Jann Wenner), Lorne has long chosen to lean into his starfucking prerogatives and illiterate, imitation Gatsby pretensions.  Some Boomers have always been Yuppies at heart.
 

To go out on a limb a bit....  I don't think Sabrina Carpenter is quite the equivalent to either Paul Simon or George Harrison in contemporary music.  Could they not get Norah Jones or Alicia Keys?  Are these women already too old?  (Since Sabrina's use seems to be there an age joke.)

The Adam Sandler piece was genuinely moving.  And, yes, we know the first is the best.

Some clips as they come in.






 

Dare I say that the jist is that there will likely not be a 60th anniversary.  Who are these rich executive slubs on stage?  Lorne goes right for Sabrina Carpenter, like a vampire perhaps.  I'm not convinced that she has 50 year longevity potential, but whatever.  I'm curious why they haven't uploaded Sandler's piece yet, because I think it may have been the highlight of the night.
 

Jinnistan wrote:

As a bit of counterprogramming, the predictable hate has been seething through the feeds, including this horrendously reductionist take from The Guardian.  The problem with faux-woke scolds is their seeming inability to reckon with multitudes and complexities, such as maybe rather than seeing SNL as an homogenous institution, to try to understand it as an evolution, one in which the qualities have always been in flux.  Simply, it is just as retarded a take to call SNL "bad, actually" as it is to pretend that the show that exists today continues to be every bit the bold innovative show it has been in its best years.  Trolls notoriously do not have that kind of patience.

Even as someone who is pretty lukewarm on a whole lot of SNL, the notion that it can be reduced to 'bad' is absurd. Everyone already knows what the shows baked in flaws have always been (producing an entire live show from scratch week after week is pretty clearly going to affect the level of quality control, especially during those years when they don't have a good enough cast to make the crappier sketches at least palatable), but it's also this very concept which was what is revolutionary about the show.

Unsurprisingly, it seems that much of the complaining in this article has to do with already pre-established complaints about elements that aren't progressive enough for their modern sensibilities, which is not the kind of thing I even want to waste my time reading anymore. We already know what they are going to say. We already know they won't put anything into context. We already know they won't adjust their outrage filters to what decade they are looking back on (and will act indignant if it is even suggested maybe trying not to for once).

At this point, I'm basically just done with how predictable everybody's brains have become. At least the content of those brains considered fit to print. If I wanted bad cultural takes, I'd just go to some stupid cunts twitter feed and be done with their hot take in a sentence or two.

It's telling that this piece is extremely focused on more recent iterations of the show, for example, and on Lorne Michaels' starfucking status-humping tendencies.  Of course the introductory example is how, for the first time in the show's history (and arguably against its own established ethics) they invited on a leading presidential candidate to use the show as a campaign promotional tool, and this was Donald Trump.  Previous presidential candidates have done small appearances on the show in the past, but rarely to the benefit to off-set the more influential impersonations.  Michaels, as we've heard since, told the show to "be nice" to Trump.  I pointed out that Trump was invited tonight (I don't know if he's attending), but it doesn't appear that James Austin Johnson will be allowed to feature his popular, and excellent, Trump impression tonight.

I think Michael's decision to put Trump on the show was rightly villified. But the issue with his comment to "be nice to him" I can at least sort of understand. Sometimes finding the human being hidden inside of the bad reputation can yield better results instead of just instinctively going on a hate parade.

But of course, since there is nothing human inside of Donald Trump, it was dishonest to ever pretend otherwise. And.......he just shouldn't have been on the fucking show. Period.

"A lot of the writers went to Harvard, and a lot of them just had outright disdain for the people that they were making the show for.  There would be things in the scripts that would just outright make fun of people. They’d say, ‘The NBC audience, like lambs to the slaughter, will laugh at this joke'."

I don't know if the writer is aware, but having disdain towards an audience isn't some rare thing. I can only imagine while working in a creative pressure cooker like SNL, and watching as week after week jokes you think are lazy garbage get laughs, and jokes you think are maybe a little challenging but top shelf get greeted with silence, you might grow weary of exactly who you are working to entertain.

One reason this person might not be aware of this headspace that afflicts probably quite a few artists is that they probably lap up whatever approval they get, even if its for a shit article like this one. Some people think the art is in the pandering. Sadly, that's often only where you find success.

"Jane Curtin, the first woman to anchor SNL’s “Weekend Update”, joined the show in 1976..." - Again, I was under the impression that The Guardian is a professional publication?

The way they write this....are they not aware she was there from the beginning? If not, why is this person writing about pop culture for a living?

We get the typical complaints about demographics, but as I've become accustomed to doing is to try to help correct the myth of the "boys club" of the shows early years, which is based mostly on John Belushi's chauvinist opinion on women not being funny.  Ultimately though, this version is an insult to the very evident talents of writers like Rosie Shuster and Anne Beats, who if we take an account of who wrote which sketch could be shown to hold their own against their male counterparts.  I wish more retrospectives would give them their due.  Of course Jane Curtin has her legitimate issues, having been demeaned by both Belushi and Chase during those years.  But, you know, they also demeaned Jim Henson for other unfairly arbitrary reasons.

In fairness to the writer, if they don't even know Jane Curtain was in the initial Not Ready for Prime Time cast, we can hardly expect her to have been aware of the pretty substantial contribution of women writer's and performers from the get go (many of whom bucked against conventional attitudes of what was expected of a woman in comedy). The boys club nature of the show, and many of the writings about it since, do definitely seem to blot out many of the more important female contributions....

But of course she could have dont a little bit more research on this and come to the conclusion that if she wants to blame anyone for this, it's not the show you should be wagging your finger at, it is the shit media you are yet another insignificant contributor of.

"Chevy Chase said the N-word on national television" - Right, in a sketch written by Richard Pryor and Paul Mooney.  They didn't have a problem with it.  Because it was funny, it was shocking, and in context Chase was clearly the butt of the joke.  This article uses this as an example of Chase "punching down".  When these scolds render these things arbitrarily out of context like this, it turns any moral high-ground they are trying to seize into a mudslide.  (And, btw, Pryor also did his own samurai in that episode, but for some reason no one cares, nor should they.)

This was inevitably going to be a complaint in the article, but still no less infuriating. I get people don't like the word. I get that people say it shouldn't be used at all anymore. And maybe it shouldn't. But just because you can grasp this low hanging fruit of outrage and squish it between your fingers, doesn't mean you have a better insight into the purpose of this sketch than Richard Pryor. A word, no matter how unpleasant, does not make something racist. In fact, it can be easily argued that avoiding the n word in a pointed sketch about race is in fact considerably less helpful then using it.

And, ffs, it was put in the mouth of Chevy Chase, the living embodiment of a total cad. We clearly aren't supposed to be an his side when he uses it. It's not celebrating the slur. It's acknowledging it. These fucking people....

Garrett Morris also has legitimate issues with the way certain writers treated him at the time - Michael O'Donoghue was a purported "ironic racist" before that was a thing.  Although occasionally, as when Ray Charles hosted the show, they would find ways to give O'Donoghue his due too.  And, I think it's not even arguable at this point, those early seasons clearly featured a far greater depth and diveristy of Black American music than any TV show this side of Soul Train.  Janis Ian and Betty Carter to The Meters to Sun Ra And Ornette Coleman.  When was the last time we saw a black non-pop star on the show?

At least this shit didn't complain they were culturally appropriating black music by booking these artists on the show.

 

crumbsroom wrote:

I think Michael's decision to put Trump on the show was rightly villified. But the issue with his comment to "be nice to him" I can at least sort of understand. Sometimes finding the human being hidden inside of the bad reputation can yield better results instead of just instinctively going on a hate parade.

But of course, since there is nothing human inside of Donald Trump, it was dishonest to ever pretend otherwise. And.......he just shouldn't have been on the fucking show. Period.

Right, the latter sort of underscores it.  It could be justifiable as humanizing, except there's zero chance that this was the case.  Trump had been on the show before.  And the joke then afterward was how there's nothing behind his celebrity facade.  They even did a follow-up sketch a coulple of weeks later, with Darrell Hammond in the role, mocking how self-absorbed in his own hype the man is.  The fact is that Lorne Michaels had Trump on the show as a candidate for one reason....to suck up to that hype and celebrity.  You could even say that Michaels didn't even think he could win.  Doesn't matter.  It was still a suck up.  And Elon Musk as well, and any number of other hosts.  All of the biographies agree with this pont: Lorne Michaels is obsessed with proximity to fame.  It had nothing to do with compassion, Michaels only told the writers and cast to "be nice" to placate Trump's ego.

crumbsroom wrote:

I don't know if the writer is aware, but having disdain towards an audience isn't some rare thing. I can only imagine while working in a creative pressure cooker like SNL, and watching as week after week jokes you think are lazy garbage get laughs, and jokes you think are maybe a little challenging but top shelf get greeted with silence, you might grow weary of exactly who you are working to entertain.

I can understand the justification, but it's still worth considering the contrast with the original seasons where they would more frequently trust the audience - both studio and at home - to get the jokes without overly catering to them.  Part of this is a cultural shift, of course.  Comedians more frequently feel the need to explain older references more often.  We're constantly told how "no one knows what that means" or "ask your grandparents", etc.  Audiences aren't expected to be literate or have an attention span longer than a few weeks, and our corporate comedy is designed to cater to these presumptions.  And audiences themselves feel more entitled to be catered to in this way.  I'm not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg.  But I do miss the fact that the old SNL audiences were more stereotypical "Hip New York" audiences who didn't need to be talked down to.

crumbsroom wrote:

The boys club nature of the show, and many of the writings about it since, do definitely seem to blot out many of the more important female contributions....

I think this is the reason why a counternarrative is needed.  I think Rosie Shuster deserves a spot right alongside Michael O'Donoghue and Al Franken.  She would also go on to co-create "Church Chat" with Dana Carvey.  She's a legend, imo.  And it's also worth noting that Shuster and Beatts wrote the infamous "Uncle Roy" sketches, with Buck Henry's horny babysitter, because that is usually used as an example of the show's male insensitivity towards issues like sexual abuse and exploitation.  Another matter which deserves its proper context.

crumbsroom wrote:

At least this shit didn't complain they were culturally appropriating black music by booking these artists on the show.

Unfortunately, but not unironically, this complaint has frequently been lobbed at The Blues Brothers, with some claiming that they were making a mockery of the genre.  Which has to ignore the fact that Aykroyd (much more than Belushi) was a genuine and sincere blues fanatic who would have iolerated no such thing.