Those of you with Satelite will know that the series channel is showing old reruns of Saturday Night Live on Saturday nights (apparently the television executives do not see any logical inconsistencies anywhere in that sentence).
I actually don’t have satelite, but my parents do so when I visit over weekends I sometimes watch the SNL reruns.
Now prior to this, my total knowledge of SNL was that
1) Tiny Toons once did a spoof of it (called weekday afternoon live), with as special guest start
a Bart Simpson rip-off.
2) It gets mentioned in a very powerful line in Coyote Shivers’s song Sugarhigh
3) Andy Kaufman used to be in it (which I know from having watched Man on the Moon)
4) Will Wheaton says they used to be great but they sold out
Now whether or not the current reruns are set before or after the “selling out” I can’t say, not having enough context, and to make things even more difficult the exec’s seem to think chronology is something that happens to other people, so the first episode I saw was Will Ferrel’s last guest starring Winona Rider shortly after that whole “shoplift my way back into the limelight” business, the second I saw (several months later) must apparently have orriginally been done during the 2000 elections, as it shows Will Ferrel making a huge spoof of Bush’s “middle of the road” campaign and complete lack of commitment on any point at all (man was America ever in for a shock … middle of the road… yeah right).
What I can say is that I haven’t actually enjoyed it all that much. The sketches aren’t funny for the most part, the music has no soul… frankly the only thing that makes it worth watching is the in-between dialog – that’s the only bit where these talented commedians, these master fun-makers actually seem to have the balls to make some fun of things. Sketch based satire is of course one of the hardest forms of comedy to pull off, but I’ve seen most of these actors in their other work and they do have what it takes… so why is it that on this show, the moment they stop improvising to talk and start to act a sketch, they wilt like last weeks daisies ?
My theory… Will was right, this is a sold out show, talented performers are only as good as the network allows them to be. Oh well, I suppose I’ll just have to keep watching “Whose line is it anyway”, at least they are (still?) not afraid to make fun of anything.
