Elon Musk

theres no way all of snl can be as bad as that wario sketch

The show is really, truly, deeply, almost unremittingly bad.

everything was fine until g.e. smith left and the saxophone guy took over

It was all over when Chevy left.

I sometimes wonder if I've missed out on anything after I stopped watching when president dumbfuck hosted but I never wonder for very long.

feels like this current shitty era has far outlasted the dark ages of the early 80s. I basically started avoiding it oh idk some time in 2016 and can’t say I’ve missed it a bit.

Just read in the Washington Post how NBC was happy with how well the show did in digital media, including social media. Which is funny, since the Post always puts a goddamm recap of every episode with Youtube clips on its front page every Sunday morning.

I don't even click on the twitter links anymore. I see that Wario screencap and think, yeah, I'm pretty sure I can grab the gist of this.

you should watch it its shockingly bad!

couldn't bring myself to watch that one but I saw two minutes of "Gen Z Hospital" and it was straight up the worst sketch I've ever seen and I've watched a dozen episodes of Mad TV

like it sucked so bad it that wound up becoming racist

"Here, smell this milk! I think it's gone bad!"

you should watch it its shockingly bad!

i don't think it's more shockingly bad than a recent simpsons episode to someone who stopped watching around season 10. the idea that SNL was ever good seems to be what the newspapers here call a "falsehood".

im not an snl fan or as you say it across the pond supporter but that wario sketch is like barely even recognizable as tv

*i do like the sketch "the californians" lol

I've heard of warioware, but wario wear?!

everything was fine until g.e. smith left and the saxophone guy took over

easily the highlight of the dylan show i saw in 1989 despite having fixed leering ghoul visage

i don't think it's more shockingly bad than a recent simpsons episode to someone who stopped watching around season 10. the idea that SNL was ever good seems to be what the newspapers here call a "falsehood".

right but the Simpsons is like....an actual TV show. it's not easy to wring humor out of the same sitcom characters for over a decade. SNL turns over half its cast/writers every few years and they can do pretty much anything. you'd think they'd luck into a few funny shows here and there. Key & Peele was watched by fewer people and has had like 10x the amount of viral sketches as SNL during the entire internet era. it's weird how aggressively unfunny it consistently is.

the other thing is that it's just a really bad format for a sketch show. like "lets have an extremely competitive cast cobble together a sketch show based on some random celebrity, but all the shows have to be written in a week and must be performed live?" it's as if its designed from the ground up to prevent funny things from happening. I think a lot about "Roundball Rock", which is legitimately very funny (it's one of the Tim Robinson sketches), but like...I can't even make it to the second half. the joke is revealed but there's 6 minutes to go before commercial so there's nothing for the characters to do but just start throwing shit around. if it was an ITYSL sketch it would be 2 minutes

lorne michaels hates comedy

and so does elon musk

haterday night live

im not an snl fan or as you say it across the pond supporter but that wario sketch is like barely even recognizable as tv

I remember when Something Awful would have people do readings of really bizarre fanfics and that's what this sketch resembled to me more than anything (granted this is based on the first 2 minutes that I just watched, I had to tap out after that)

Ego Nwodim as the "Woman in a dark place in her life" during Weekend Update made me laugh. So, it was not a complete waste of time.

the idea that SNL was ever good seems to be what the newspapers here call a "falsehood".

What Up With That is a thing of pure joy.

SNL turns over half its cast/writers every few years and they can do pretty much anything.

Pretty much anything that Lorne Michaels specifically approves of.

Jost graduated college in 2004, started writing at SNL in 2005, and became co-head-writer in 2012.

I bought a DVD of Phil Hartman's SNL bits and even that - even him - even their peak - still had some really cringey limp moments. Maybe I just dont get that certain kinda US comedy I dont know.

this is the only good SNL bit in living memory

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

the show's spirit was broken when lorne put on andrew dice clay over jan hooks and nora dunn imo

dunn did a great, honest intervew a few years ago - https://www.salon.com/2015/04/07/nora_dunn_snl_is_a_traumatic_experience_it’s_something_you_have_to_survive/

where she basically says SNL wasn't a smart enough show to deal with a guy like clay, and it's true. not sure it ever was. but she also says it was the first cast that made it iconic, and everything else since has ridden on though, no matter how talented everyone was. 'the outsiders who became insiders' is a good way of putting it.

We were lucky because we had a really stable cast. And I think as maybe three seasons went on, Lorne added a couple people, but we weren’t introduced to those people as new cast members. It was very strange. Suddenly there was just another person there. And I think it was very hard for those people. Like, Who are you? What are you doing here? Are you a visitor? Or are you in the cast? Then we got Adam Sandler, and he was pretty much just doing his own thing. A lot of these people came on and just did their standup routines on News Update. We had been an ensemble-type cast, and I think we were at our best when we were working together, and the show started to become solo performances and I started losing interest.

My theory has long been that SNL’s appeal was that it was the only show comedy fans could follow like a sports team, due to its weird format and wholesale cast changes. Lorne is basically like the team owner. It had its good eras and bad eras – the good eras usually looking better than they felt at the time through the benefit of nostalgia – and people could argue about which cast (team) was the best. But even at its most dire you could still check in from time to time to look for signs of improvement. Somewhere along the way – the run-up to the 2016 election, I think – it’s like they forgot how to scout for talent or the weight of the show’s history and weird cultural role started crushing them and it became unrecognizable to me as comedy. It seems like a celebrity cameo farm with a bunch of theater kids running around. It’s like they’re playing a different sport.

it’s like they forgot how to scout for talent

There are funny people in the cast who are not typically funny on the show.

I would agree with that in the case of some of the people who have been on the longest; not Kate McKinnon though, who along with Colin Jost embodies their whole problem.

Chris L otm, I've never been a sports person but yeah SNL was basically my sports team for most of my life.

Is it possible to use the strikethrough tags on the thread title and just make this another SNL thread, y/n

It's not a coincidence that the best bits are almost always the pre-recorded bits, which implies the problem is not necessarily the cast or even the writing but what to do with either in the context of a "live" show, with no second takes, no refining, etc. "Murder Durder," for example, was really funny and silly this week (it's the only "skit" I saw) but I don't know if it would have worked live. It needed the look of "Mare" to seal the deal. So yeah, what sic said: there are funny people in the cast who are not typically funny on the show. The question is why? At least Keenan always seems to acknowledge the half-assed absurdity of what he's asked to do. Yang, too, imo. But most of the other people aren't being funny, they're *acting* like they're supposed to be funny, which makes the whole thing feel sort of off balance. Che and Jost are not my faves, but there's a looseness to Weekend Update that often contrasts with the rest of the show's rote parade of fake game-shows or whatever. Maybe that's always been the case, but it seems pretty stark lately.

I watched like a minute of that Gen Z Hospital shit and, honestly, Musk wasn't much more wooden than any of the cast members featured in that sketch. It was like I was watching some small town's community theater comedy showcase.

That's a good example of what I was talking about. I have no idea if that skit (which I saw part of over my wife's shoulder, while she was playing it for our Gen Z kid) done well would be funny, but everything is delivered in a stiff and ironic soap opera tone. Which might have been funny in a pre-recorded bit that can rely on the timing of music cues, and edits, a soapy look and melodramatic voiceover, but live was just ... people stiffly saying bro over and over.

I will go to bat for "Liza Minelli Tries To Turn Off A Lamp"

Eh, virtually all long-running sketch shows have an abysmal hit rate. But you will find great sketches and performers in every era. Maybe I'm just an optimist, but I also believe in that "SNL was the best when you were 9 years old!" maxim.

Most of the time, SNL is fine; not amazing, not terrible, but amusing. Sometimes it's hilarious. Sometimes it's total horseshit (see: this past week).

For at least the last 20 years, probably even longer (my warm memories of the early '90s cast from when I was 12-14 clouds my judgment a little) SNL has been 35% absolutely terrible, 55% boring and 10% hilarious. I still think this is the case, it just happens that sometimes the 10% hilarious completely misses an episode or two.

pretty sure i've written this exact post elsewhere on the board, but i fell in love with early '90s snl via reruns on comedy central and did not realize that i was watching edited-down versions of the show, which i think accounts for at least half of why, when i tuned into snl in 2000 just to see radiohead perform, i was shocked at how... terrible the show was/is

i've only caught the odd episode since but it does seem even worse now

I feel like "Please laugh" should be their tagline

A funny character still needs to be funny.

fell in love with early '90s snl via reruns on comedy central and did not realize that i was watching edited-down versions of the show

very same here lol

For at least the last 20 years, probably even longer (my warm memories of the early '90s cast from when I was 12-14 clouds my judgment a little) SNL has been 35% absolutely terrible, 55% boring and 10% hilarious. I still think this is the case, it just happens that sometimes the 10% hilarious completely misses an episode or two.

otm

And this one keeps me laughing every time I watch it. Nieces and Pets!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb7b5-31LFY

Huh, Grimes was Princess Peach in the Wario skit.

Mario and Wario are not Japanese (although that was the only mildly funny part of the sketch) but Italian immigrants that live in New York (well Mario at least, Wario is italian but there’s no confirmation he also lives in NYC). Princess Peach is definitely not Italian she’s from the Mushroom Kingdom no idea why the Italian accent on her.

because Italian bippity boopity amirite

wario is german

so then it's pronounced "var-io"