Saturday Night Live

Eddie cursed in bakeoff, and I could have sworn Cecily said "Merry Fucking Christmas" in weekend update. Eddie was OK. I doubt most younger people know his characters (like, the fame of Gumby, let alone Buckwheat, at this point is several times removed), and he flubbed a bunch, breaking twice, but I did appreciate seeing him enthusiastic for once. My 12-year old didn't think any of it was funny, fwiw.

He skinned a few things but in the whole I thought he was much stronger on stage with cue cards than most guests.

Also Cosby can fuck right off with his freak out bullshit re: Murphy’s monologue.

The statement from Cosby’s representative was some pure “fuck me for ever finding Cosby funny” horseshit

jeez guys show your kids some gumby, that stuff is timeless

I had no idea who Gumby was when the SNL version first debuted and i laughed so hard at the sketch that I tracked down who he was pre-internet. (It helped that some syndication channels picked up on Murphy’s impact and started including Gumby in their afternoon cartoon lineups.)

Eddie aside, I only ever knew Gumby as a keychain.

In some ways Home for the Holidays was one of the best-executed things I've seen from SNL in a long time -- the concept was simple and timeless almost to the point of triteness, yet the delivery of each line, the timing of the editing, etc., was perfect and it made me laugh extremely hard as a result.

They did the same thing but for thanksgiving, or Xmas last year. I don’t remember.

They showed last year's xmas skit at 10pm, similar, with the current niceness and flashbacks to the hassles of the run-up.

I watched both Gumby and the Murphy Gumby sketch as a kid fwiw, but we are definitely very far removed from both Gumby and from the type Murphy plays it as (grizzled Jewish actor with a legit yiddish accent).

absolutely, the concept of "Catskills comic" is fusty even tho Shecky Greene still lives

Lol it is truly terrible that kids today will not understand Eddie Murphy’s revival of his 35 comedic characters

35 year old that is

well it's not terrible but they might well be confused

kinda like when Mel Blanc does a Joe Besser impression at the end of a 1946 Looney Tune

it does kinda blow my mind that Murphy's revivals are equivalent to Buster Keaton doing his silent bits on early '60s TV

I'm going to guess that most 12 year olds in 2000 didn't know what Blue Oyster Cult was

Watched this with a late-20s friend who had no idea who buckwheat was and also didn’t recognize Chris rock.

Tracy Morgan’s “I made my millions on the road” home made me laugh the hardest.

That was brutally funny

That was brutally funny

I had no idea who Gumby was when the SNL version first debuted and i laughed so hard at the sketch that I tracked down who he was pre-internet. (It helped that some syndication channels picked up on Murphy’s impact and started including Gumby in their afternoon cartoon lineups.)

― totally unnecessary bewbz of exploitation (DJP), Sunday, December 22, 2019 11:27 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Yep, I too initially only knew Gumby as a bizarre and hilarious Murphy creation. We also had UHF stations digging Gumby out of mothballs, which a) put Murphy's bit into context, and b) was pretty psychedelic. The Museum Of The Moving Image in Queens had a fascinating Art Clokey/Gumby exhibit some years ago, and holy hell, putting those shorts together was beyond painstaking.

I want to say there was a more traditionally animated Gumby show in the late-80s, possibly inspired in theory if not practice by Murphy's rendition.

true. plus there was a Gumby movie in 1995.

A- clokey is tha god
B - go find Art Adams and Bob Burden’s excellent comics take on the character

Lol I loved the "I made my millions on the road" joke. I knew something like that was coming and it still killed me.

for some reason they showed Gumby stop motion on TV when I was like 4 at some ungodly hour in the morning (5am or something). So I was already a Gumby fan but I moved by the time I was 12 and absolutely no one I knew at that age had any idea who Gumby was.

https://theoutline.com/post/8583/michael-che-feud-snl-jack-allison

can we just talk about how that guy's twitter handle is 'jackallisonLOL'

the outline is just the worst

i watched 'Papyrus' again last night, and it may never be beat, just perfection

What's bad about The Outline?

It all depends on what you compare it to.

as a bearded white guy with glasses who also thinks snl sucks i want to feel kinship but

xp how does it compare to SNL

When he said “his show sucks” I assumed he meant Che’s standup special on Netflix which does suck.

I'm not a Michael Che booster or anything but I got about a third into that article and my overwhelming takeaway was "white man mad he can't say any old thing to black man and not get called on it"

Like, yes there's a point about the insanity of the SNL submission fine print that I agree with but... you're a fucking entitled man-baby who should die

nah that policy is bonkers and needed calling out

SNL/Lorne assholery would be more tolerable if the show wasn’t so relentlessly dull and cowardly

I actually don’t mind Che in update but he comes off as a real fuck here and shame on him for that formatting

Argh zing-touched! fuck=dick

I'm not sure what was ambiguous about "yes there's a point about the insanity of the SNL submission fine print that I agree with" that required rebutting

I just don’t think this guy is out of line for calling Che out on it.

the entitlement here is SNL’s

The entitlement is coming from both of them and the fact that dude wrote a gigantic "poor me, a famous person keeps making fun of me after I made fun of his work" pity party article is fucking dumb.

But hey, solidarity

I think when Che starts sharing messages that the bearded dude is a Trump-supporting cocaine addict who spends all his time at strip clubs, that it crosses the line where it honestly should be grounds for dismissal. But as long as Brett Stephens is still at NYT, that idea is clearly not mainstream.

im always baffled by comics that publicly shit on comedy jobs. here’s some unsolicited advice for people who wanna work in comedy, lol don’t do that. I mean, unless ‘twitter personality’ is your professional ceiling.. it’s a bad idea.”

Second, life is long and full of unexpected turns. Imagine, for instance, that one day you are up for a big journalism award. Imagine, next, that someone you’ve insulted sits on the prize committee. Or suppose you apply for a dream job at a major publication, and your CV gets passed around. It’s fine to make unnecessary friends, but extremely unwise to make unnecessary enemies.

poll these career advices

Personally I'm in the camp of "Che can be amusing on Weekend Update but his solo special was meh."

I am also in the camp of sometimes being amused that comics start out making observational jokes about parts of life that more or less everyone experiences (being at a coffee shop, having relationships, etc.). Then as their careers progress, they subtly shift into making observational jokes about the life of being a reasonably successful comic (planes, airports, hotels, nightclub audiences, having Netflix specials).

I begin to suspect that most comics would be funnier to us if we were all constantly flying places, staying in hotels, and standing on stages saying things.

good observation there, YMP

Patton Oswalt had a bit of a "what's the deal with being an extremely successful comedian?" slump some years back, but managed to get at least one funny bit out of it (being paid obscene money for drunken audience members to shout his movie roles at him for 20 minutes).

A very famous Danish comic had this journey. He grew up in a rough area, had a lot of great observational humour on both the rough parts of the country as well as condescending elites. Got very famous. Then his next show there's a bit that goes 'so I was on this yacht...' and another bit on what the deal was with bulk discounts, why not just pay for what you need? And then the next show was about how tax rates are two high and people are too envious of those who do well.

"What is the deal with assistants who break their NDAs?"