Saturday Night Live

I find TDS a bit overrated as a whole but it's way way more than Weekend Update's constant barrage of one-liners - I think Norm's years were the only "pioneering" aspect of it, as I can't think of anyone doing deadpan comedy quite like that before

uh, Bob & Ray? "...ly Ballou here."

i mean i realize comedy was invented around 1968 at the latest but

SCTV was so much better at mocking the conventions of the newscast though, and so were Monty Python. It isn't even close.

The Daily Show breakthrough was of course using actual news footage from other channels and directly making fun of the coverage by name.

i mean i realize comedy was invented around 1968 at the latest but

― touch of a love-starved cobra (Dr Morbius), Monday, February 16, 2015 4:33 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Of course this started with Aristophanes classic "I'm not wearing any chiton, scrolls at 11" joke in the lost play Gadflies

NY Times writer Alessandra Stanley

stanley is a notoriously unqualified incompetent hack, move along

paper of record, old grey badbreath

The best eras of snl imo
1. hour-long reruns on comedy central in the 90s
2. the first few seasons after i was allowed to stay up for new episodes, before i started having better things to do on a saturday night
3. the invention of the dvr

I might be slightly older than you but the nick at night compressed episodes from the 70s cast were essential for me. Where else would I have seen this shit:
― panettone for the painfully alone (mayor jingleberries), Friday, January 30, 2015 1:37 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark

Also a few years back when Netflix had every episode (minus the sketches where they would've had to pay for music royalties).

How qualified do you have to be to write about television?

xp a lot of those were pretty butchered, though; some were 20-30 minutes

That 10 seconds of Larry David was probably the best part of snl40.

I might be slightly older than you but the nick at night compressed episodes from the 70s cast were essential for me. Where else would I have seen this shit:
― panettone for the painfully alone (mayor jingleberries), Friday, January 30, 2015 1:37 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark

These started in syndication in the early 80s. Musical guests were rarely (if ever) included, but sometimes the monologues were. Watching these made you want to see the whole episodes; watching the whole episodes made you want to only see the 30 minute edit.

That 10 seconds of Larry David was probably the best part of snl40.

― billstevejim, Tuesday, February 17, 2015 1:20 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I was thinking how weird it was that he was a stronger actor than most of the veteran performers

Yeah, it really felt like a lot of those people hadn't performed in any capacity in years.

@AlbertBrooks
I think it will take another 40 years. RT @mattthomas: Still waiting for the #SNL40 Albert Brooks tribute.

Ha, there was actually a lot more Brooks on the special than I thought there'd be...and there was only 10-15 seconds of Brooks.

I tried to watch but it opened with Fallon, which reminded me that SNL came to specialize in suck-up comedy, where you bring on celebs like DeNiro or Palin and the joke is "Here's someone famous we impersonate, but they have a sense of humor about it. Win-win."

I'm not sure who was the first person in office to host -- DP Moynihan, maybe? -- but it pretty much indicated the surrender of any ambition to satire. (except on behalf of the status quo/govt, as in the infamous Gulf war press conference sketch)

According to Horatio Sanz (iirc), Jim Downey was always pushing for "balance" in the political jokes--as many targeting Dems as GOP. Because what we needed in 2003 was a bunch of jokes about Tom Daschle.

O'Hehir on SNL's nonsatirical political humor:

http://www.salon.com/2015/02/14/tina_feys_sarah_palin_when_saturday_night_live_finally_got_political_satire_right/

In Tina Fey's book she goes on about how much she hated it when they did the skits where they brought on the actual celebs. She said it was the weakest laziest thing to do. The first one I remember was DeNiro and Pesci coming in and beating up Jim Breuer and whoever else.

Robert Smigel has talked about how much he hated it as well; there was a joke about it in one of the TV Funhouses.

it's apparent how weak it is to everyone but Lorne and the chimps in the studio audience I guess

Fey's Palin sketches were the first time it seemed like something they did had an actual impact - Palin was such an unknown entity/weird wildcard factor towards the end of the election, and her "media personality" were a huge part of her selling point in terms of a last-ditch McCain/GOP effort to stop Obama. But the Fey impersonation really helped to cement her image as a loony.

it probably helped that Fey was off the show at that point and probably could have just walked if they wanted her to do something lame with the Palin character

In Tina Fey's book she goes on about how much she hated it when they did the skits where they brought on the actual celebs. She said it was the weakest laziest thing to do. The first one I remember was DeNiro and Pesci coming in and beating up Jim Breuer and whoever else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qRZvlZZ0DY

most SNL stunt cameos are more than 6 seconds.

The show did its best to get Giuliani a third term.

Is comedy inherently conservative?

The stars pick their faves!
http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/lists/carrie-brownstein-broad-city-and-more-on-best-of-snl-20150217
Brooks:

My favorite skit is Richard Pryor's word association game with Chevy Chase. Nobody had seen that particular kind of thing before. There was probably no whiter man working than Chevy Chase, so it was a very good combination of people. It doesn't happen very often, but when a comedy sketch takes on another dimension where you almost think someone's gonna get punched — it's just great. Chevy cracked a smile on some skits, but he held it together in that one.

But you can't talk about the show without talking about Tina Fey's Sarah Palin. It was the melding of a performer and an event; the timing was so perfect that it probably influenced an election. Look, Saturday Night Live has done impressions forever. But here was a person who was not established enough where just doing an impression [of her] was so meaningful that it formed the perception of who this person was. You forgot you weren't watching Sarah Palin. That could only happen a few times.

That Pryor sketch is easily the best thing from the first season. And, like "Love Is A Dream", it's the kind of thing you're unlikely to ever see on SNL again.

also the never-discussed Bergman parody where Louise Lasser and Chevy Chase fool death by telling him to go pick up a pizza

couldn't guess whether that block quote was gonna be from Mel Brooks or Brooks Wheelan or what

Please, nobody is asking Brooks Wheelan for his take on anything.

a O'Hehir's article was good enough that I was surprised it was him when I got to the bottom. But he forgot the Phil Hartman Reagan sketch, which added something missing from the standard Reagan satire of the time.

b Plenty of reasons why we won't be seeing something like the Pryor-Chase sketch anyplace else either.

c No, comedy is not inherently conservative. But tv shows that become "institutions" are.

d I can come up with many many good SNL skits, and still the crap to quality ratio at SNL has been intolerable and I kind of hate that show.

there's a season 1 sketch called "citizen kane 2," with aykroyd as kane, chevy chase as leland, and belushi as bernstein that is absolutely incredible

Agree with Goodman on the Theodoric of York thing. Totally bizarre and hilarious. They reran that episode recently

I caught the Second City touring company last year --- not the A-listers obviously, but still --- and it was depressing to see most of the performers obviously angling for instantly recognizable SNL type cast niche personas. If they had anything going on you couldn't tell, it was just 'oh she reminds me of that one cast member'.

Add to that the whole come-up-with-a-character-that-Hollywood-will-make-a-movie-of thing dating back even to the original cast, resulting in desolate wastes of tv time spanning four decades.

it's almost like they're treating it like a job or a career

it's almost like I'm a selfish person for not wanting better stuff to watch

come-up-with-a-character-that-Hollywood-will-make-a-movie-of thing dating back even to the original cast

i don't recall an instance of the orig cast coming up with one that led to a film? excepting the bizarre afterthought of a Coneheads movie in the '90. The Blues Bros performances on the show turned out not to be sketches in A&B's minds. There were no Lisa Loopner or Cheezburger movies.

but yes, Michael O'Donoghue loathed having recurring characters.

Blues Brothers, Coneheads both resulted in movies. But yeah, the vibe with the OC was different.

The Blues Bros performances on the show turned out not to be sketches in A&B's minds.

Maybe not sketches, but they were definitely recurring characters on the SNL stage.

the movie factory treadmill wasn't really in place prior to Wayne's World.

The touring company is a completely different scene than the regular Chicago cast, though. For one thing, the Chicago shows have tons of local references that the touring company can't use, but beyond that, they're in the theater they're familiar with, they know their audience, and they can take many more risks.

(Although tbf, I haven't seen Second City in Chicago in years, but every show I saw was better than the best-ever SNL episode.)

multiple xps

I saw Tim Meadows and Chris Farley at Second City Chicago and they were nuclear-bomb funny, to the point where I made a point of remembering their names so I could follow their careers.

The Blues Brothers (1980)
Wayne's World (1992)
Wayne's World 2 (1993)
Coneheads (1993)
It's Pat: The Movie (1994)
Stuart Saves His Family (1995)
A Night at the Roxbury (1998)
Blues Brothers 2000 (1998)
Superstar (1999)
The Ladies Man (2000)
MacGruber (2010)

Did WW2 really come ONE YEAR after WW? The only ones of these I've actually seen are the WW movies, the original Blues Brothers and MacGruber.

apart from the first and the last all the movies on that list that I've seen (WW, WW2, Night at the Roxbury, part of Coneheads) basically suck

I'd love to see Toronto or Chicago casts. And the audience for the show I saw was just yelling drunks basically. Still, this thing where performers are supposedly unable to do anything interesting because boo hoo the audience, the audience isn't noticeably more appreciative of predictable junk either so maybe TRY?

it seems weird to complain about seeing a bunch of people trying to launch their careers when you go to see a show by a decades-old institution that is well-known for serving as a career launching pad