SNL At 50, Past Its Sell-By Date

"Live" but barely

I keep thinking about Saturday Night Live after sitting through the four part navel gaze purportedly about its music. There was actually very little music in it, and an entire episode devoted to the overrated “more cowbell” bit. I finally watched the 50 year anniversary show, which with the benefit of a raft of celebrity guests, was very good. I also watched the concert special, which was good enough though the better performers were all old and had lost a step or two. I also read a profile of the gray eminence behind the show, Lorne Michaels, in The New Yorker, about which more below.

I watched SNL from the very beginning. I was hungry for contrarian material from mass outlets, partly to validate my own views. Before SNL there was something called That Was the Week That Was, or “TW3.” I followed that too. For me, before all that, there were Art Buchwald columns in the then-liberal New York Post, pre-Murdoch, and Mad Magazine.

I felt a sense of ownership with SNL, though even at the start the political satire was always intermittent and not all that sharp. Over the past decade, SNL became unwatchable. It was not worth sitting through for the ‘Weekend Update’ segments, which were usually not terrible. A break in the latter-day monotony was Norm Macdonald’s wicked appearances. He was not political, but his humor was uncompromising.

From The New Yorker profile, I was interested to see that Michaels basically began as a creature of the counter-culture, politics and all. In this respect he reminded me of Steve Martin, whose latest book I wrote about here. As the decades went by, however, they learned how to craft their work appeal to the entire country. In the process, it became tired, juvenile, and now, well past the point of exhaustion.

Some bits in SNL did become immortal, thanks to Eddie Murphy. “James Brown Hot Tub,” Gumby, Buckwheat, and “Mr Robinson’s Neighborhood” were keepers. I’m hard-pressed to recall much genuine political satire in the show, most episodes of which I watched until about five years ago. There was the great Dukakis/Bush debate bit with Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey, the Three Mile Island skit way back with Richard Benjamin. Neither of these were particularly left-facing, but I found them funny. Chevy Chase as a stumbling Gerald Ford was nothing special and not really political. The show did a good job on Sarah Palin, not the most formidable of targets. I liked the first Trump/Biden debate bit with Jim Carrey and Alec Baldwin.

Some of the impressions of politicians were good, Dana Carvey doing George Bush, Darryl Hammond doing Jesse Jackson, though Dana Carvey’s Chinese chicken man bit was racist. At the same time, his recent impression of Joe Biden was brutally on-target. I was a big fan of everything Kate McKinnon, as well as Hammond. Their newest impressionist, James Austin Johnson, seems to be quite good, maybe the best yet, but I haven’t seen much of him because I’ve stopped following the show.

The real value in the show was not political satire but notable characters. Besides the ones mentioned above, Rob Schneider’s Orgasm Guy, Will Forte’s “Tim Calhoun,” Martin Short’s Ed Grimley and Nathan Thurm.

Michaels has become a complete political suck-up, most disgracefully in the post-911 episode that celebrated Rudy Giuliani, who deserved no small part of the blame for the 911 damage, and later shows that platformed no less than Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

We need something new. Water the tree of comedy with the blood of the hacks.