Saturday Night Live is such an abject failure it’s not even funny. I know it goes through stages of relevancy but this is ridiculous. Nothing it has presented lately has left a lasting impression on my mind. At the end of it I only have one thought in my mind: “Why”. Why did I decide to stay in on a Saturday night when I could be out living it up, singing Karaoke, drinking, going to a concert, joking with friends, going to bed early, writing blog posts, clipping my fingernails, literally anything is a better use of time than the succubus of time Saturday Night Live.
I have come up with a way of charting the decline of the average episode. Obviously this isn’t true for all cases, but for a majority of their recent output. Without a breakout star, there isn’t anything drawing you to it. Rather, people watch it out of a mindless obligation, like moths to the light. Each time people watch it hoping “Maybe it will be good tonight”. Such thinking is hopeless delusion. Perhaps some time in the future it may regain its marbles and begin to offer biting satire. Until such time, it continues to get smoked by “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” despite having an entire week to write it. During that week period, the writers work diligently to water down jokes to a point so bland it could be served as airplane food.
Below is the breakdown:
1. Cold Open – This usually is an extremely weak political sketch taking on some relevant topic that’s been blaring loudly on the front page of the New York Times for about a month. If the open is anything other than a spoof on a current event (cultural or political) it will be a particularly weak show.
2. Guest Monologue – Whoever the guest is gets a chance to ramble on for about 5 to 15 minutes. Generally speaking since the writers don’t write it this happens to be one of the funniest moments of the show. Those who are ‘flash in the pan’ popular fail at this segment, resorting to childish skits. Better guests bode well for a better show. Exceptions do appear but as a rule of thumb it is fairly solid.
3. Immediate skits following the Monologue are more enjoyable than what comes later. Saturday Night Live front-loads the quality of the program knowing how old its target audience is getting. Writers know as a fact how hard it is to stay awake until 1 AM for people above the age of 50. Thus, these skits tend to fare better than the rest of the show.
4. Andy Samberg Sketch – Andy Samberg is Saturday Night Live’s token young person’s comedian. Most of the sketches mock things the elderly would find funny (Vincent Price, Communism Jokes, William Howard Taft jokes). These are called “Digital Shorts” and vary in quality. What Andy tries to do is create something ‘meme-worthy’ where he consciously knows people will share it on their friends’ Facebook Walls. Digital Shorts with a song involved have a better shot of accomplishing this goal. Laser Cat episodes fail in this attempt. But all Andy Samberg sketches try to create the false illusion that Saturday Night Live is a cool, hip show intended for relevant twenty something viewers.
5. Weekend Update – Weekend Update inspired comedians such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to create their own successful shows. Now Weekend Update consists of those shows’ rejected jokes. In the off-chance the material is good; the Weekend Update person makes sure the delivery sucks to completely kill the joke. As a side note, this segment can be funny if they make fun of local New York politicians. I’m not sure why, but they have a knack for eviscerating any New York based politician. To be fair though, New York politicians make jokes about them too tempting and easy.
6. Last Half Hour in the Program – If you’ve made it this far you’re pretty tough or a masochist. This is the dregs of the show. No matter how good the program has been this is truly terrible. You know how people bring magazines with them into the bathroom? Well, in this case, the writers bring a blank notepad with them whenever they use the restroom. Whatever they write in that couple minute period becomes a full bodied skit. It is generally about as good as the excrement those writers pumped out of their bodies.
7. Final Ten Minutes of Saturday Night Live – These ten minutes wish they were as good as human excrement. You should probably turn off the TV before this happens.
My hope is you learn from these basic steps. I don’t want people ruining their Saturday nights for such nonsense. Even Wednesday afternoons in college in between classes watching recent repeats on Comedy Central sounds like a true waste to me. Perhaps one day I’ll see a change in this, in how Saturday Night Live gets better writers and better material. Who knows if that will happen, though I’d like to be one of the ones who finally bring the franchise back to greener, funnier pastures.