Saturday Night Live Feverish

By Blake Townsley

Howdy folks, and welcome back to Friday. Sure has been a rough couple of weeks for celebrities, huh? In the last two weeks we’ve lost Gary Coleman, Rue McClanahan, Dennis Hopper and Ronnie James Dio. It’s been quite a shakeup in the standings of my annual celebrity death pool. If John Wooden passes this week, we’ll have had two new leaders in two weeks with a little more than a month to go. I’m starting to consider the legal ramifications of driving a truckload of cocaine out to Lohan’s house in LA.  

But I’m not here to talk to you about the sadness of those recently passed. I want to talk about an entertainer on life support, one potentially in need of a Do Not Resuscitate order, Saturday Night Live.  

At first blush, putting Saturday Night Live out of its misery seems like an unthinkable idea. The show has been declared dead and come blazing back more times than Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhies and Michael Myers put together. It’s survived hundreds of critical suggestions that the show has outlived its usefulness, and casts that made no one laugh. And despite a season that made it harder to defend than at any time in recent memory, the fact remains that the show still has the potential to be a cornerstone of the cultural landscape. You only have to look back as far as the 2008-2009 season to find a time when people were buzzing about the Tina Fey-as-Sarah Palin sketches that opened seemingly every single week’s show. 

 So what’s wrong with the show? The current cast is as talented as any to have graced the stage in several decades. I can’t think of a current regular on the show that I dislike for any reason, unlike any year that Chris Parnell was dragging down sketches with Horatio Sanz, Will Ferrell, and Amy Poehler. Even the featured players are excellent, with pretty much all of them slated for regular status down the road. My only exception to that? Nasim Pedrad, for reasons we’ll get to in a moment.  

Some have argued that the lack of female regular cast members is the leading cause of the season-long epidemic of unfunny episodes. Certainly the Betty White show seemed to lend credence to this theory, as regular female cast members from the show’s recent past showed up to ease the burden of hosting on Ms. White. No less an authority than Seth Meyers tweeted that the show could easily have gone two hours with all the funny sketches they cut, pointing his followers to Hulu, where the dress rehearsal versions of those sketches could be seen. While it’s true that Kristen Wiig is doing the lion’s share of regular sketches for female characters on the show, and I really really miss Amy Poehler’s razor sarcasm on Weekend Update, I don’t know that the lack of female performers is to blame for the weak showing. Abby Elliott and Jenny Slate were both featured pretty regularly this season, and were really funny. Hell, even Bobby Moynihan is hilarious dressed up like an Oompa Loompa version of Snooki on Weekend Update.  

I think the problem stems from something a little simpler, and at the same time perhaps more difficult to fix. It seemed to me that the writers on the show were suffering from a massive case of writer’s block. Perhaps a better way to phrase it is “lack of inspiration.” The 2008-2009 shows were great because Sarah Palin provided an easy target for mockery, and the confluence with Tina Fey’s slightly exaggerated, hilarious impression made it easy for the writers to deliver memorably funny lines. The Betty White show gave the writers a chance to revisit famous sketches from seasons past, sketches in which the joke structure was well known and easy to repeat.  

But the election ended, and Palin temporarily faded into the background, the show lost much of its topical bite, and all those former female cast members went back to their regular jobs. The writers were once again on their own to come up with the funny. Let’s face it, there hasn’t been much that’s been funny over the past eighteen months. Whether it’s the BP Spill, or the lunatic rise of the Tea Party to national prominence, or the inability of the government to shit or get off the pot with regard to healthcare, the American landscape hasn’t seemed particularly joke-worthy. But Saturday Night live has found the dark humor in situations like that before, and handled them with caustic wit and a weird grace.  

It seems like this time the will to fight has gone out of them. Instead of ridiculing our lovely members of Congress for taking twelve months to debate healthcare for their constituents while the economy lagged and people struggled to make ends meet, Saturday Night Live did jokes about teens with weird crushes on their suburban parents, and got January Jones and Megan Fox to try and host their way out of the cardboard boxes they seem to be made from. Rather than focus on finding the hottest hosts possible, maybe you should try actually being funny about current events. It is your bread and butter after all. 

So while I’m confident the show can recover, and even faster if it decides to regain its bite on current events, I’d like to offer one other piece of advice to the show. You need to bring back Michaela Watkins immediately, if not sooner. She was unceremoniously dumped from the show when Lorne Michaels decided that she was too old to do well with the show’s younger viewers, aka “not pretty enough” disease. While I’m up for debating the level of Ms. Watkins’ beauty with Lorne any time, the fact of the matter is that she is far more hilarious than her replacement, Nasim Pedrad. I can’t think of one single thing Ms. Pedrad did this season that didn’t make me cringe in embarrassment for her and the show. As one of Michaela’s Weekend Update characters might say, biiiiiiiiitch pleeeeeze. There’s some bad karma going on over at Studio 8H, and it’s due to Lorne’s horrible decision to fire Michaela Watkins. Do the right thing, Lorne.  

But if you won’t do that, at least lead off every show with What Up With That? Jason Sudeikis kills me in that sketch every time. Until next week, kids, take care of your favorite celebrities. I think someone’s hunting them, and I’m afraid Keith Richards is next.

(Credits: Image by dno1967)