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Saturday Night Live celebrated its 50th season with an iconic ‘SNL 50’ logo, a movie about its past and a struggle to get 1 million viewers under 50 to tune in.
Saturday Night, a highly fictionalized movie about the show’s opening night back in 1975, couldn’t even crack $10 million at the box office against a reported budget of $30 million.
For its 50th anniversary, it couldn’t even make it to $50 million.
1 million viewers in the theater and 1 million viewers under 50 is all that SNL has anymore.
With less than a fifth of the weekly show’s audience being in the 18-49 range, 50 would be on the young side for a Saturday Night Live viewer. No matter how the show chases young trendy stars and musical guests, its usual viewer is closer to Joe Biden’s age than the kids onscreen.
Adding the big ‘50’ to the SNL logo just confirms that the show, which likes to pretend that it’s the work of the chaotic subversive young people featured in Saturday Night, is a tired institution.
50 years later, Saturday Night Live isn’t edgy, subversive or innovative: it’s just dead.
Like the rest of the media, SNL took a beating during the election, but like the rest of the media it can never go away no matter how few people actually watch it because it’s an ‘institution. SNL is NBC News and The Tonight Show. It’s where elderly liberals in major cities go to be reassured that the world as they know it has not changed and Trump can be dismissed.
But after the 2024 election, the canned laughter and sneering platitudes ring hollow.
Saturday Night Live has to look back at its past because it has no future. When the institutional memory that sustains its corporate self-importance disappears, so will the lame skit show. It won’t survive the end of network television and probably not even the end of late night TV.
Saturday Night Live only came into being because Johnny Carson didn’t want to work saturday nights. Today that’s not a problem because there are so few late night viewers that NBC cut The Tonight Show back to four nights (and even cut the band from Late Night with Seth Meyers) while putting out an ad of a mopey aged Fallon sitting in an old time setting under monochrome photos of Carson and other hosts harkening back to the show as an ‘institution’.
Saturday Night lies about that (like so much else) with a scene of Carson phoning producer Lorne Michaels on opening night and delivering a threatening foul-mouthed tirade. In reality, Carson quickly negotiated a guest-booking arrangement and used it to get out of work.
But the artificial attempt to make SNL seem like a beleaguered insurgency from the start, when it was an institutional tool all along, tells a larger story about Saturday Night Live.
SNL wasn’t a daring, original subversive show. It was a corporate ripoff of National Lampoon, which was actually daring if not especially subversive except of the mores and pieties of the older generation in the usual way of Ivy League college pranksters trying to shock their families.
The first half of the twentieth century had been defined by the humor that came out of the lower class vaudeville acts, kids from poor Irish, Jewish, and English immigrants, like George M. Cohan, the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin, who then took over the film industry. But as the counterculture rampaged across the second half of the twentieth century, what had once seemed heartfelt, witty and inventive came off as bombastic and ersatz. The giants of another era were reduced to hosting their own TV shows and then swept off the stage.
The new humor came from their privileged Harvard and Yale educated grandchildren. Their protagonists were not outsiders like the Little Tramp, but disaffected insiders feeling caged by convention, and wanting nothing more than to break loose, have a good time and shock their parents at the country club or the more serious faculty at their Ivy League school of choice.
Establishment comedy pretended to beat on an open door, playing rebels tilting at establishment windmills when they were the establishment. And their obsession with ‘selling out’, conforming and settling down was an establishment neurosis. The only people they shocked were the powerless old folks, housewives and clergy who sent in outraged letters, only to be mocked and dismissed as irrelevant by the new emerging cultural establishment.
“What we do is oppressor comedy,” P.J. O’Rourke, who after his National Lampoon tenure became a conservative humorist, bragged in sharp contrast to the revisionist attempts to depict the humor magazine and Saturday Night Live as struggling insurgents. “We are ruling class. We are the insiders who have chosen to stand in the doorway and criticize the organization.”
The raw energy of National Lampoon’s Harvard graduates, their anarchic humor, was co-opted into a corporate product by Saturday Night Live. Lampoon’s John Hughes went on to invent the teenage drama and most of the self-aware precocious teenage dialogue with movies like Pretty in Pink. Like O’Rourke, he became a political conservative, and was posthumously #MeToo’d.
Chevy Chase, the patrician descendant of half of ‘Who’s Who in America’, became the perfect public bridge between National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live, parading his way through life with the grin of a drunk stockbroker at an alumni party. The hatred directed at Chase over his disdain for the earnest millennial cringe comedy of Community, down to Saturday Night inserting a fake scene cutting him down to size, is a hatred of SNL’s own prep school roots.
(Chase telling Saturday Night director Jason Reitman “well, you should be embarrassed” was far more prescient of its box office than the fawning reactions of the majority of film critics.)
Saturday Night Live, like Chevy Chase, was never edgy, it wasn’t subversive, and after a short number of years it had shed the anarchic energy of its National Lampoon origins, and became the place where Americans went to see Gerald Ford falling down or Bill Clinton sleazing it up.
Comedy became uncut liberal agitprop and SNL shrunk along with it to an echo chamber of leftists laughing at their foes. Eventually the actual jokes became surplus to requirements. Jon Stewart broke off SNL’s Weekend Update and made it the centerpiece of an entire generation of clapter shows that took the politics much more seriously than the comedy. His alumnus, Stephen Colbert, took over what was left of CBS’ late night and comedy died.
So did late night.
By then the internet had made it all too easy for a few young Ivy Leaguers to get together to publish some comedy and all but impossible for them to make money doing it. At least until podcasts arrived. That’s where some of the latent National Lampoon energy still resides.
Pretending that the arrival of Saturday Night Live on the scene 50 years ago, just as Monty Python’s Flying Circus had gone off the air, was a breakthrough for comedy is one of the many industry illusions nurtured by PR flacks and entertainment writers with no sense of history.
SNL’s big claim to fame is that it’s still around. Less funny, less inventive and less insightful than virtually every competitor from SCTV to The Ben Stiller Show to Mad TV to Mr. Show, it endures because it’s a landmark corporate property where celebrities and politicians go to make fun of themselves. Its high school talent show level cast can’t even handle imitations, bringing in old pros like Jim Carrey or Alec Baldwin, or old cast members, to handle the actual work for them.
50 years later, SNL has lost whatever spirit or energy it ever had. The recruiting pool of young comics and aspiring actors acceding to the whims of Lorne Michaels in the hopes of landing a movie career or at least a successful TV series is shallower than it’s ever been. Unlike the Pythons, SCTV, MadTV or Mr. Show, it was never any good at deconstructing pop culture, had few clever ideas and its talent can’t even handle the imitations that used to be its calling card.
What’s left? Saturday Night’s $9.5 million box office smash is not just SNL’s past, but its future. That 1 million 18-49 audience that Saturday Night Live is struggling to hang onto is its ceiling. Not much of a return on an investment for spending millions on a live high school talent show.
SNL is betting that NBC would never cut an institution, but if it can cut The Tonight Show to 4 nights, whatever corporate behemoth it’s part of (currently Comcast, perhaps next SpinCo) will take the axe to SNL, NBC News and whatever else is left of its unprofitable agitprop sector.
The day is coming very soon when the last memories of John Belushi wielding a samurai sword will vanish and SNL will be one of those institutions which nobody remembers why it’s around.
And then the lights will dim and the curtain will fall as 30 Rock’s studios will be eliminated, marking the end of television broadcasting in Manhattan, and Saturday Night Live will be dead.
I never liked it or thought it was funny, even 50 years ago or whenever it was that I peeked at it before changing the channel. I thought it was pathetic even back then.
MOST SKITS are stupid, but some used to be funny.
The past few years…. “Beware of The Person with the Never-Ending Smile, for when you turn your back, they show their FANGED TEETH!” sc
I wrote that for Obama, Michelle, Hillary, Oprah, Ellen, and others, but let’s add SNL. All I see is their faces behind the fake mask, all showing blood drooling from their Fanged Teeth. I see the same for The View, and other shows with them being so happy, smiling, laughing, but in real life…. look out!
ALEC BALDWIN, a psychotic, and according to many extras and crew on the movie set of Rust, a murderer too. (Some of them were also revealing in Santa Fe chatter, that Baldwin had dinner with Hutchins the night before and that he attempted, or did, rape her. She had that on him, the magic bullet gets on the set, but “I didn’t pull the trigger. It shot itself.” Even with the FBI saying that couldn’t happen with this gun, he got off on a technicality, all planned by all to get him off. I wrote that he had to get back to the SNL SET TO DO TRUMP! In interviews before this incident, Baldwin really proved his psychotic hatred for Trump, but not as open as DeNiro, another actor who I can’t watch any movie he was in.)
Surely, MUSK is SNL’s next target. Are minors allowed because they’d use X too. Maybe use a Midget. (Oops… am I in trouble. Okay… small person? I hope I didn’t give them an idea.)
Is this about a movie theater thing or that 3 hour, 15 minute mess on NBC last night, or both one in the same?
Misanthropric from day one. Despises the uncool.
SNL was always 90 percent crap. John Belushi’s Samurai Dry Cleaners skit was abysmal garbage and so was his Killer Bees skit.
I can count the few things I enjoyed on one hand. There was Andy Kaufman as a guest comedian, Eddy Murphy’s Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood, and Paul Simon dressed as a turkey on Thanksgiving:
We’re so agreed. “90%” has always been my number to describe the percentage of good/crap on SNL.
Back in the 90’s, we tapped it on VHS and watched later – knowing we be wearing out the FastForward button.
* My nominee for best skit was “The Sinatra Group” with Phil Hartman parodying The Mclaughlin Group.
* None of us wasted our time with any of the painfully dumb Stuart Smallie skits. (Al Franken sucked back then, also.)
Phil Hartman also made a great Bill Clinton.
And Dana Carvey made a killer Bush41 & Ross Perot 🍻
Here’s an edgy new one …
Q: — Why did the Muslim man murder his wife❓ *
* …because she had ) a hair
growing out of the ⚫ mole on her chin❗
😁
“The Joe Pesci Show” with Jim Breuer as Pesci was funny. It always had Alec Baldwin or John Goodman doing great impressions of Robert De Niro as co-host and ended with the fake Pesci beating his guest with a baseball bat. Rudy Giuliani was on it once.
Joe Pesci shopping for the right pinky ring! That was truly original, witty, and hilarious!
And Franken managed to steal the election from Norm Coleman. When he was kicked out of the Senate – for the wrong reasons – I had to celebrate.
You and me both …
“SNL was always 90 percent crap.”
Kind of like your worthless opinions on everything, and Objectivism, but you manage to achieve the level of 100% crap.
Guess you don’t like Belushi, huh.
SNL has been crappy, unwatchable and so far left it’s gone around the world till it shoved its head up its own ass like a retarded Jörmungandr for a very long time but it used to have funny cast members long ago. The original cast were funny. Phil Hartman, Joe Piscopo, (yes, Joe Piscopo,) Eddie Murphy, Dana Carvey, Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, Dennis Miller, Norm McDonald, Colin Quinn and the underrated Kevin Nealon were all hilarious.
The skits were always hit and miss though, even on its best nights. Any Tardmo who watches it now or during the last sixteen years needs a brain enema. Nobody even remotely human wanted to watch eight years of fellatio on Obama and then eight years and counting of TDS. Those mutants might as well just watch CNN and MSDNC. Oh, wait. They do.
Can you never stop yourself? Just once? The subject is not Ayn Rand.
No, I can “never” stop myself. Sorry Cal from Canadia. (Yes I am ridiculing your dead end country.)
Canada isn’t all bad. Canadian bacon is good on pizza and you can enjoy Winter sports there all year ’round.
Islamic rabid beavers have been dispatched to you in punishment for your slander against the Former Great White North. Beware.
Oooloo coo coo o loocoloo, oloocoo coo oloocoloo!
Give the time to local stations to run what they want.
I’d rather watch public access. That stuff is so bad it’s hilarious.
Here is an even edgier idea for a new skit that could get SNL’s cred back …
Jerry Seinfeld could march out in blackface, and sing the following ditty:
🎶 I’m a Kanye Doodle Dandy
🎶 A Kanye Doodle do-or -die
🎶 A real live nephew of my Uncle Tom
🎶 Born on the Fourth of July
🎶 I have a Kanye Doodle sweetheart
🎶 She’s me Kanye Doodle goy
🎶 Kanye went to New York City,
🎶 Just to score some cocaine
🎶 I am a Kanye Doodle Boy ~
Honestly, I think it’s a good analysis.
But I’m not sure y’all remember how ‘dark’ it was in ’75.
Ford was POTUS. There was no social media. No independent sources – unless you count the ‘independent’ commies publishing Soviet agitprop.
And all – ALL – of the current things – were current then – for those with the capacity and time to look.
I’m not surprised SNL disrespected Carson with an unfair – and likely false – scene,
but Carson was the only really funny guy on MSM.
Many of you remember Carlin – who was always funny, but also foul-mouthed, and hyper-misinformed.
I knew what was what because a death in the family gave me a whole library of Leftist propaganda – a complete set of assigned reading from UCSanFranfreako.
In that context, I remember everyone I knew – all older teenagers –
considered SNL to be the funniest show on TV
in a selection of funeral dirges accusing us of everything from the Holocaust to insufficient enthusiasm for the struggle.
When you compare SNL’s early days to really funny people on Youtube today, it’s quite awful stuff – stuffy propaganda and juvenile preaching –
but compared to the 24/7 drumbeat of ‘America Evil, Whitey Evil, We’re ALL going to die if we don’t become Atheists or Communists … ”
It was a necessary breather from the incessant propaganda.
My brother and I watched that show when we were kids. We had an older friend whose parents pretty much let him do whatever he wanted and we’d watch it at their house. His parents would watch it too. They didn’t care how late we stayed up and we would just spend the night anyway.
I think SNL’s continued existence demonstrates that network TV has run out of ideas. The “Big 3″ networks are no longer relevant and haven’t been for decades. They are obsolete and deny it by continually forcing obsolete ideas. I don’t think they get that, so like the elderly lady who still dresses like a teenager they keep trying to impress and only look stupid for it. I remember SNL’s first season and I laughed my ass off, especially the ‘News for the Hard of Hearing”. But that was generations ago. We’ve moved on, so has technology, and so has taste.
I don’t watch network TV at all. To be honest, I don’t even know how, although I could look it up if I wanted to, which I don’t. I see advertisements for network TV shows now and then and they all look awful even though the ads are doing their best to make them look good.
My Samsung TV has 2 or 3 hundred free channels, I have Netflix for next to nothing and I can stream most anything else. Netflix has some of the only former network shows worth watching, too, like “Young Sheldon,” “Arrested Development,” “Seinfeld” and some others.
“Arrested Development” – now THERE’S irony!
Everyone stopped everything to watch this show back then, which was odd to me as I never really “got” much of its humor. (People used to watch TV at certain times for certain shows. You have to be old to remember that).
But I did think it was weirdly funny to see a comedian who I never could stand, Steve Martin, dressed as Tutankhamen chanting he was “buried in his jammies and should have won a grammy” A prefect view of Egypt that resonates today, especially. Maybe it could help in negotiations.
I had a ’45 record of “King Tut” when I was a kid. The flip side had “Hoedown at Alice’s” and some other banjo piece on it. Martin was a good banjo player.
He is an even better banjo player now.
I prefer the Dr. Demento CD, which has a load of other one-off and one-hit-wonder comedy songs on it.
The root problem that renders most of the contemporary SNL skits NOT funny is the lack of TRUTH. All good comedy has some basis in the truth of our shared human experience.
For SNL, the basis for a skit rests on Democrat talking points; therefore, their skits have no basis in fact or reality.
I’ve heard that argument before, but I question it. The idea that humor has to be true strikes me as the leftist position. Were the Three Stooges true? The whole point of humor is that it’s not about what’s right or wrong.
The more comedy becomes political, seeking to reveal some of ‘truth’, the less funny it becomes.
Funny is funny. Who cares what it’s based on?
Left-wing lectures are definitely not funny which is why SNL has been unwatchable for a very long time.
OK Daniel, your point is well taken.
I suppose slap-stick comedy, like the Three Stooges, is in the eye of the beholder and not tethered to some universal truth.
But won’t you agree that those 2024 SNL skits with Dana Carvey portraying, and essentially mocking, Biden for his “obvious” deficits was the beginning of funny again? The precision of Carvey’s impressions of Biden, in and of themselves, was a form of truth telling.
I would even go so far as to say that SNL cast member, James A. Johnson’s impressions of Trump’s mannerisms and speech patterns are hilarious, again, in and of themselves, because they are so close to the truth. And I say that as a bona fide Trump supporter.. Contrast Johnson’s portrayals with Alec Baldwin’s feeble attempts at mimicking Trump and we can see what a difference a truthful portrayal can make.
Haven’t heard anyone mention the vast number of spin off movies and sitcoms. Caddy Shack, Animal House, Wayne’s World, Coneheads, Blues Bros, the Griswold dynasty and even Seinfeld.
The latter of which has Elaine always pushing Leftist group-think bilge.
Now as for Kramer….. at least he knew enough to “not wear the ribbon!”
None of the aforementioned was as good as Laugh In.
Or “The Honeymooners.”
Give me “The Benny Hill Show” to make me feel silly and happy. Benny Hill is a million times sillier and funnier than Monty Python and SNL put together.
So basically your life consists of listening to dead 1940s music, watching dead 1950s TV, obsessing about dead 1950s philosophies, and bitching about why the rest of the world isn’t stuck in the past, like you.
The Blues Brothers was.
Small correction, if I may, re: the National Lampoon. It was inspired by the Harvard Lampoon but was not related to it, and most of its writers and editors never attended Harvard, Under O’Rourke’s editorship, the Lampoon devolved into a nasty, mean-spirited rag, even crossing over into antisemitism on one occasion, where God damns the Israelis for allegedly colonizing Muslim lands. That issue was published circa 1981. I found the magazine increasingly repulsive and unfunny, and stopped buying altogether it a year or two later.
I hadn’t heard about that one, but it doesn’t surprise me. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
O’Rourke’s “Foreigners Around the World” is nasty, mean spirited and crass. He regretted writing it but I think it’s funny and the illustrations are too. The entry about Brits was too much but the rest were funny, especially the entries about Mexicans and Canadians.
I still have a copy I printed at work. It was one of the funniest and ACCURATE depictions of stereotypes in HISTORY! Now many today would be so distraught and take to the streets, but then they do at most anything PRESIDENT TRUMP suggests or does!
My favorite was Sweden – I think or Denmark – hard to tell the difference – “the Groom walked in to see Sven having sex with the new bride and proclaimed “Hey look everybody, Sven is so drunk he thinks he’s me”!
Most other ones are hilarious too and more TRUTHFUL than most will admit.
Now I need to go find my copy or see if it’s still ALLOWED online!
Funny, as Denmark and Sweden were worst enemies, having fought countless wars against each other. The Danes had an inferiority complex, as the Swedes won more than they lost.
Those Vikings and their descendants. They used to be so warlike they didn’t even get along with each other.
I seem to remember the Brits being the same way but they were like that long before Cnut the Great came along. I seem to remember he took the Throne in Denmark too, a few years later…….
And the German. In an ironic oddity of history, the (former, if you ask me) Norse countries and UK are now governed by the worst surrender monkey pussies in human history. They make even the worms on the American left look like “woke” warriors.
It only took me a few issues to learn that the national Lampoon were upper class twits mocking everybody else. Mad magazine was much better.
Legacy media and legacy comedy… “journalists” using humor to propagate Progressive propaganda.
YouTube, Podcasts and name your favorite platform have blown the legacy media out of the water, and will invariably blow SNL out of the water.
Go Navy!!!
This article refers to National Lampoon. I remember trying to read a parody of Nancy Drew, in National Lampoon. I stopped reading after a few paragraphs. Nancy Drew is too lousy to parody
Hey, loved me, my Drew! Don’t touch that….lol.
He’s certainly funny.
I meant Benny Hill
Saturday Night Live is still alive? Like President Trump said about the Huffpo, “I thought they died.”
I just looked up PJ OI’Rourke’s “Foreigners Around the World” and I can see why he was embarrassed about it. Some of the entries are funny but some are vile, like the English and Israeli ones.
For me the two funniest skits SNL ever did was
(1) Rob Schnieder doing his best Edward G. Robinson and playing Dathan in a send up of Moses coming down from the Mountain with the Ten Commandments and,
(2) Alec Baldwin (yeah I know) doing a send up of his part in GlenGarry Glenross (put that coffee down) only it takes place in Santa’s Workshop where the workers want the new tools (the new leads) to build toys.
The late Norm Macdonald was also excellent.
Norm MacDonald was funny. His Weekend Up Dates on O J Simpson have stood the test of time.
McDonald was the Best “Weekend Update” host of all, and they were all great up until Jimmy Fallon and Amy Poehler left. They were funny but the vanguard of P.C., which was the vanguard of “woke.”
I’m still amazed McDonald lasted as long as he did, with his acerbic conservative wit and constant ridicule of the Hitlery Hag. Lorne Michaels (D-Bag propagandist) must’ve learned the power of conservative truth from Norm, because he fired Colin Quinn for far less.
Baldwin did ads for PETA he called his Daughter a FAT SHELFISH PIG and his version of the kids classic book CAT IN THE HAT and his poor selling Book about Childcare for single fathers just proof he is a total loser
“Jane you ignorant slut”…. Weekend Update….this was edgy even for those times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0hUQH53TFs
Saturday Night Live reached its nadir when it did a paean to the Great (Narcissist) Leader Barack Hussein Osama, with female cast members singing the theme song from “To Sir, With Love” to a smiling photo of Jug Ears himself. In the old days (even if the great majority of its cast no doubt opposed capital punishment) they could mock the tone of the debate by singing “Let’s kill Gary Gilmore for Christmas”.
Completely, unwatchable, right?
sounds to me like a complete incitement to suicide, to me. Although I guess it could’ve been helpful as a laxative.
I loved ❤️😆 that one!
I also loved he send-up commercial Gilda Radner made for Harvey’s Bristol Cream ™
Or “Hey, You Cologne- the cologne for one night stands”
I’m glad I didn’t see that paean to Bareback Hasbeen Osama. I probably would’ve choked to death on my own vomit like Jimi Hendrix did.
SNL was last good when the late Norm Macdonald was doing his Weekend Update segment on the show.
The only time I found SNL funny was when it ran the “Pat” skits which would never get aired today because pronouns and all kinds of phobias.
PJ OI’Rourke’s “Foreigners Around the World Was SATIRE. and SNL, was very funny in the first years. revisionists.
I can distill humor down to its single atomic molecule. It’s from the classic humorist Will Rogers: “Everything is funny as long as it’s happening to somebody else.”
I still cherish his line about our having “…the best politicians money can buy”.
I used ot watch SNL every week I could – in the 70’s when it was funny and had those great comics! Then it began to be more cynical and “mean”. Today it’s like watching DEMOcrats in a hearing!
I’ve not watched much other than the old Jeopardy with “Turd Ferguson and Sean Connery” or the newer skits featuring Kenan Thompson’s “Racist” or something skits – he’s funny. Oh and the Nate Bergatze skits. As far as the others – have no clue who they are!
The show passed up a GOLDEN opportunity by ignoring the comedy team of the biden bunglers – we KNOW why!
SNL especially missed up a call-waaay-back opportunity by not doing a skit about about “Two Wild And Crazy Muslims!” Around a dozen years ago, when news about the Rotheringham Grooming Gang Scandal broke.
And don’t forget that the original Steve Martin / Dan Akroyd characters were immigrants to America; How PERFECT it would have been to make them Muslims immigrants to England !!
I never watched this show anyway But I have seen things about their little skits that are reasons to never watch this program
I am just amazed at how much Daniel Greenfield knows about SNL or, for that matter, most of the topics he writes about. Where does he get all that historical information? I would have to spend weeks doing the research for just one of his articles, yet he cranks out several per day it seems. Does he have a research team?
He obviously foreswore Pot-smoking a long time ago, and has since regaindhis ability for memory.
Like me — as it happens — you could trace, if you wanted to, when he quit smoking pot by checking out which of these skits he remembers immediately, and which he adds his two cents to with the intro — “That reminds me of…” and so on.
😉
What did you write? I’m too stoned to remember.
Saturday Night Live and Comedy Central both area a tremendous waste of TV Time just Boycott them both
So when do drugs your brain tricks you to be sad or nostalgic.
All it is is your brain wanting more drugs.
They are playing the reruns constantly now.
.
I didn’t watch the show back then, and I’m not watching it now.
.
Pure crap.