It's Better Than You Think

This weekend, Saturday Night Live had it's season premiere. I watched part of it. It wasn't particularly funny. But thats okay. I'm confident it will be. Seriously. No, seriously.

I've always found it strange that people long for the "old" days of Saturday Night live. Have you seen some old shows lately? They hold up as well as clothes from H&M. But like many a comedy, something gets passed down from generation to generation as "funny" and it is automatically and forever to be deemed "funny" (think Caddyshack, which as many of you already know, I find to be completely unfunny).

As a general rule of thumb, the genre of comedy tends to not hold up very well (I don't think that any of my sophomores laugh at Charlie Chaplin) and I understand that. But it has always really confused me that people find "Jane, you ignorant slut" to be the defining moment in Saturday Night Live comedy history. The show was no doubt good and also groundbreaking (and Eddie Murphy was always hilarious), but watch some of those old skits now and they aren't funny. We have just been told they are. Want further proof that the talent wasn't THAT good? Ask yourself right now what Chevy Chase and Dan Akroyd are doing. Chevy Chase is probably verbally abusing reporters asking relevant questions of his life and Akroyd is probably watching The Great Outdoors and fondly remembering his funny days.

But what has been funny is Saturday Night Live over say, the past ten years.

We know that the show has spawned Mega Movie Stars like Adam Sandler, Michael Myers, and Will "I drive a Dodge Stratus" Ferrell. Say what you want about some of their movies (Ladybugs and Punch Drunk Love to name two), but these were three guys who are now world famous who were once making Schmidts Gay and Harry Carey skits. So they've come a long way to say the least. And it's not just the legendary skits I'm talking about that were awesome. Obviously, More Cowbell (now in the dictionary), Celebrity Jeopardy, Wayne's World, and Opera Man stand out as classics, but think of all the secondary skits over the past decade that have been hilarious. Watching Alec Baldwin talk about Schweaty Balls, listening to Kattan babble as a substitute teacher, and Ferrell do Neil Diamond have been so fun. And regardless (I mean irregarless) of what you thought of him running on the field during the 2004 World Series celebration, Jimmy Fallon and Tina Fey on the news were always awesome.

But then Will Ferrell left and it became hip to crush the show. In fact, it seems it is always hip to crush the show and talk about how it's reign is over, but then it seems to rise from the ashes. No one ever thought the show would survive the Eddie Murphy departure. Dana Carvey thought he was too important, left, and the show powered on. Farley died. Sandler, Hartman, and Myers all left. The show surivived. The most devastating blow was thought to be the departure of Will Ferrell. And the show did dip. But guess what? It's surviving (by the way, if this isn't further proof that we are all expendable, no matter what we do, then I don't know what is). But I actually think the show might do better than survive. It may triumph.

The loss of Tina Fey has certainly hurt (she was actually a better writer than anything else) and some of the young talent isn't amazing, but what we have learned with two recent skits is that this show can still be A) Totally relevant and B) Utterly hilarious. As we all know by the picture above, SNL's crowning achievement of the past year was clearly JT telling us that the first step in a nice gift is to cut a hole in the box. And before that, The Lazy Sunday rap had me cracking up.

Granted, these are only two out of hundreds of skits, but there is potential (I don't even know they name of the skit, but the one where Amy Poehler runs around like a spaz and yells "Rick! Rick!" was freakin awesome!) with young cast members like Andy Samberg and Jason Sudeikis (a Colbert/Stewart clone). Plus, the show still gets amazing and super relevant musical acts (Arcade Fire last year, Kanye to kick off the season). How MTV hasn't learned from SNL is still fascinating (scroll down to read the rant about THAT!).

While Saturday's show wasn't the best thing I have ever seen, I still don't understand why it is cool to crucify the show. Comedy in general is hard, but I get called a complete idiot when I say that Wedding Crashers, Beerfest or Superbad are unfunny, so why don't the SNL haters get crucified? Why is it acceptable to say the show sucks? More than acceptable, it's almost become part of the TV watching culture.

"You watch Saturday Night Live? God, that's crap. You should be watching good stuff like Grey's Anatomy."

Huh?

Anyways, the show is still on network television, so it has the FCC to cater too. It can never fall back on dental dam jokes, foot masturbation scenes, or lots of swearing like R rated films and cable shows can. It has to constantly be creative while never being able to play outside a very limited set of boundaries.

But in an era where so little comedy is comedic (where's the funny Dane Cook? Why is Knocked Up called a hysterical romp when all really is is an R Rated version of Hitch or any other romantic comedy?), SNL CAN be good. They are clearly on the cutting edge of change (embracing youtube for the unedited version of Dick In A Box was genius) and they are always willing to try something new. Couple that with the fact that the show STILL can reel in the big names as hosts and you have a real potential for some funny stuff.

Yes, it needs to be more consistent and I'm not even really sure why I defend the show, but it's consistently made me laugh over the years. So the next time you say "SNL is dead" remember that the same words were spoken when Akroyd, Martin, Murphy, and Chase left.

Also remember that if they HADN'T left, you would never have had this.....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8by7_SNwyO8&mode=related&search=