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 Good natured ribbing, such as Chevy Chase playing a bumbling Gerald Ford, has been replaced by the anger and debasement of Baldwin’s Trump persona.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?
No you couldn't.
I would answer “yes” to that question when the first string Not Ready for Prime Time Players was leaving in 1979 or so.
“I thought when it was on, “Fridays” was better than SNL.”
Laughed so hard, I actually fell out of my chair and onto the floor.
I personally stopped watching it a long time ago. It used to be so funny! Remember the "ads" they did like "Try-Openin" and "Schmitts Gay beer"?
Kramer and his Army men......
Frankly I wish they would just pull the plug on N(othing)B(ut)C(rap) and the rest of the networks as well...
The last time I laughed watching SNL it was during an Eddie Murphy skit.
Craig Kilborn’s “The Daily Show” was funny as hell !
When Jon Stewart took over, it took a dive that never recovered.
Now this new cretin just .. simply.. isn’t... funny. He brought in Samantha Bee who just looks at the camera and says “TRUMP IS A NAZI!” and people applaud for no reason.
And I recall that even John Oliver did many, many funny anti-left pieces on TDS and I had high hopes for his show too - But one must understand something very, very important.
The media moguls made it _edict_ that every bit of programming must be anti-right-wing. It must be. So now even good comics are being told that they must tow the line or else they are fired.
I'd take either of those over SNL and a ton of other garbage on TV.
It’s definitely not what it used to be.
Where’s Emily Litella when you need her?
If you’re talking about the special guest starts and their monologue, I would agree. If there is a short up front before that, those have over the years been some of their most cutting edge offerings.
I haven’t watched a skit in ten years.
The show was brilliant in 70s/80s.
I wasn’t aware that Alec “Child Abuser” Baldwin was from Amityville. As if that town hasn’t suffered enough.
I wonder if Baldwin and Ronald Defeo were friends? It wouldn’t surprise me.
My uncles loved SNL. They all stopped watching it, it’s unwatchable.
Even libs MUST be sick of the non-stop Trump attacks, there is more in the world to make fun of!
Alec Baldwin was consistently a great host on SNL, prior to this tiresome Trump schtick.
I don’t know at what point I stopped watching regularly. I think around 1999 going by rechecking the cast list. They had three decent stretches with good performers, the 1975-80 era with the original gang. The mid ‘80s or so (Eddie Murphy, etc.), and into the early/mid ‘90s (Phil Hartman, Chris Farley, etc.). When the latter group started to leave in the mid to late ‘90s, the replacements just didn’t measure up and I couldn’t tell one from another.
I could probably count on one hand how many times I watched after 2000. It seemed to get more hyper-politicized as it went along (not that it was never left-leaning, but it just got vicious and slanderous). When Tina Scarfeyce did Sarah Palin, that was the last straw for me, especially when people were falsely accusing Palin of what Scarfeyce said in her character assassination bits. We need not even mention Baldwin’s similar assassination of President Trump.
bump
I was also in high school when SNL started, and I was a yuge fan. I kind of lost track when they fired the original cast, but picked it up again in the ‘90s during the Eddie Murphy era.
Every once in a while SNL still has a funny moment, but their biggest problem is the size of the cast. The opening credits take 10 minutes.
SNL has always been left leaning, but still was able to poke some fun at the left once in a while. The skits with Obama and the Chinese Premier, and the skit about George Soros owning the Democratic Party come to mind.
But SNL has always been brutal against the right. From constantly making fun of Nixon, writing letters to congress to repeal the 22nd Amendment, to Ford constantly falling and hurting himself, to Reagan being senile, and Tina Fey’s brutal renditions of Sarah Palin.
So either enjoy the funny moments and grow a thick skin (or FF through the unfunny bits as I do) or don’t watch at all.
Either way, it is my prediction that SNL won’t die until Lorne Michaels does.
SNL has been coasting for a loooong time - they stopped being funny and now there’s just the faded memories of when they were hilarious...
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