Posted on 05/13/2018 4:27:07 PM PDT by Kaslin
Saturday Night Live hasn’t been running for my entire life, but sometimes it feels that way. When the show debuted I was still in high school, as hard as that is to believe today. I’ll definitely confess to being a fan of SNL early on, particularly when Belushi was still with them, though I sort of lost track of the show in the 80s and 90s. But after all these years, is the seemingly eternal Saturday night offering from NBC finally on its last legs?
Christian Toto seems to think it’s possible. Not for a lack of advertising revenue or even ratings, but simply because even some of the shows most liberal fans seem to be growing tired of the schtick. It’s all gotten too predictable. As Toto points out, while everyone knew that producer Lorne Michaels was a liberal at heart, there used to be an unpredictable edginess to the writing. You couldn’t be sure who they would go after on any given week and they would frequently surprise us. But not anymore, and even some well known leftists from the entertainment community are growing tired of it.
“SNL” alum Rob Schneider made waves recently by saying the show’s liberal crusade is hurting the laughs. Comedy demands empathy and surprise, two elements in short supply on “SNL” circa 2018.
“The fun of ‘Saturday Night Live’ was always you never knew which way they leaned politically,” he told the Daily News. “You kind of assumed they would lean more left and liberal, but now the cat’s out of the bag they are completely against Trump, which I think makes it less interesting because you know the direction the piece is going.”
Schneider added “SNL” player Alec Baldwin’s take on President Trump is another problem.
“To me, the genius of Dana Carvey was Dana always had empathy for the people he played, and Alec Baldwin has nothing but a fuming, seething anger toward the person he plays.”
In short, SNL traded in their edge for an echo chamber. Good natured ribbing, such as Chevy Chase playing a bumbling Gerald Ford, has been replaced by the anger and debasement of Baldwin’s Trump persona. Weekend update basically covers no news unless it’s something that can be used to mock Trump. At this point, even Vice is getting sick of it.
Toto goes on to offer a series of seven moves that SNL could use to bring back the funny and possibly something of a more ideologically diverse audience. These include having Lorne Michaels go on a national apology tour, dumping the cold open, reading some conservative satirists to see what they find funny these days and – possibly the boldest and most outrageous suggestion – replacing Alec Baldwin with Darrell Hammond.
Would that breath fresh life into the show? Maybe. I can’t see how it could get more offensive to at least half the country and, frankly, boring at this point. Putting last night’s show in context with Toto’s article, I found myself wondering today whether SNL was already noticing the same thing. I’ll let you be the judge, but check out the video of the strange Mothers Day skit they put on where the mothers of some of the cast members complain about all the Trump bashing and politics. It was clearly scripted, but why include that theme?
I only saw half the show but thank the good Lrd Alec wasn’t on it, with the worst impression of ANYONE in 100 years, and there wasn’t much trump ripping. Trump ripping was hurting all these shows and they are learning that $ works.
Yeah... about 25 years ago.
Are they running out of 12 year olds that think it is funny?
Idiocracy, the movie, had two funnies in it about pop culture shows like SNL: A show, “Ow! My Balls!”, that was of people getting racked, and the year’s best movie, a two hour movie of a butt that on occasion farted.
Idiocracy wasn’t far off.
SNL is NBC
NBC is Comcast
Comcast is an American enemy
SNL is an American enemy
QED
Snl has been running longer than I have been alive. It was around season four when U was born.
will farrel last of the funny men on SNL
It’s cheap programming. They’re fine.
All going to “get woke comedy”; which is ironically neither “getting woke” not is it “comedy”.
Yup. When they left, millions of us abandoned watching SNL.
Show was funny in different eras until it went stale. Everyone has a different jumping off point. For me Will Ferrell leaving was one point where the show lost its edge. It was supposed to be gross out humor. But it lost its way. Will did a horrible Bush but he was retardedly running like his films.
The 70s episodes were fairly funny. Live comedy is hard to hit out of the park every week.
Meant funny not running.
Not as creative anymore - the 70’s and 80’s were hilarious, but the whole make fun of Trump thing has grown tiresome. SNL’s current crude potty humor is the domain of 4th grade boys.
...and MSNBC!
Will Farrell is as funny as a burn ward.
I wish. Along with Simpsons.
Oh, yeah. From the linked article:
Your cold opens are terrible, cringeworthy pieces of self-satisfied liberal propaganda that are sometimes so bad they seem like parodies of themselves.
It's oft been said that the cruelest form of parody is unconscious self-parody. Overused tropes come under that category very easily.
It's not just playing to the crowd, it's spoon-feeding the audience their own spit-up... It's exactly the kind of smug, smarmy bullshit that makes conservatives angry enough at the Hollywood elite to vote Trump just to stick it to them.
That wasn't the only reason, but yeah, that was one reason. Evidence of both of these points was the #METOO thing, originally directed against Trump and boomeranging so hard their heads are still spinning. Lack of self-awareness means you can't duck because you don't see it coming.
Time for yet another new cast, I think. SNL does regenerate after a bad spell, but not with the present offenders onboard.
The last good cast they had was in the early to mid 90s....Dana Carvey, Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, Phil Hartmann, David Spade, Chris Rock, Rob Schneider. Maybe you didn’t care for this one or that one but all of those regulars had success in other shows and in movies.
Who do they have now who has had success as a comedian or in other comedic roles? *crickets*
They don’t have the talent and their radical Leftist slant has turned a lot of people off.
Interesting. That sounds right.
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