Wednesday, October 05, 2022

Saturday Night Live Project For Me Oh Joy

I've long defended the honor of current Saturday Night Live vs. old Saturday Night Live, including here:

One of my favorite things about being a human being is the ritual bitching and moaning we all do about Saturday Night Live. It's a rite of passage to say the show SUCKS! now and that the first seasons were just pure magical comedy where the laughs collapsed on top of each other until nobody could take it anymore.

1) I tried myself recently, and will give anybody who can sit through 10 minutes of the first season $100. Most of the shit's not only terrible but unwatchable; there's a reason they show the same 4 fucking clips every time there's a highlight reel. Sure we all look back with fondness on a classic like the Bass-o-matic but for every one of those there's 100 sketches that nobody born after 1956 could possibly sit through and call "funny".

 I also compare SNL to the Rolling Stones rather brilliantly in the same brilliant post, but I'm trying to make a point here, that the show is pretty much exactly the same as it always was: each episode has one or two good sketches, sometimes a classic, and then a bunch of others that are blah or terrible or just fine or whatever. Every season, rinse lather & repeat. We can all have our favorite eras and casts of course, but the notion of one era somehow being worthy of some sort of comedy nobility over another is purely a happenstance of generational or anti-recency bias.

For you people - and only you people - I will watch two entire episodes from every season, one in the Fall and one in the Spring, and report on them. I have a feeling my premise will be borne out as true and once again, I will reign supreme. Amen, me.

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