SNL isn’t NOT Funny, You’re Just Pretentious
Graphic by Téa Sklar
Every Saturday night, I sit down with a crisp Dr. Pepper in one hand, iPhone in the other, and I prepare to watch my favorite show in the world: Saturday Night Live.
It’s been running for 51 seasons, something fairly unprecedented when it comes to late-night, sketch-focused comedy. SNL has been a TV staple matched in longevity only by names such as The Price is Right, Sesame Street, Survivor, and my mom's favorite/ my guilty pleasure, General Hospital. There’s more on the list, but I’m not here to talk about them. I’m here to talk about the best live comedy show in the world. Better than late-night whoever, better than your fav shitty stand-up. SNL is a titan of its kind and can never be topped.
That being said, there’s always one pretentious asshole who wants to piss in my cornflakes. “It stopped being funny 20 years ago!” they tell me. Have I, or will I ever, listen? No. Because they’re wrong.
The show didn’t even “stop being funny”; it just evolved with its time. That’s what good, quality network television is supposed to do. They were always joking about current events and trending things all the way back to when the show first aired. One episode I saw re-running at a McDonald’s had Will Ferrell dressed up as Osama Bin Laden giving a pep talk to the Taliban. That’s equivalent to Colin Jost dressing up as Pete Hegseth, talking about how we kidnapped the President of Venezuela. It’s always been about the evolving news and turning the headlines into something comedic. Did we forget that’s kind of the point?
Good comedy comes from some of the smartest people you can imagine. You have to be quick and sharp, which requires you to know a lot about the world and how things work. You can’t just go grab a mic at some bar in Kentucky and get a laugh out of everyone in the room. You need priors. There has to be more than one hamster on a wheel in your brain churning out every opinion you think the world just has to hear. Because nine times out of ten? Nobody gives a shit.
Not every episode is going to be perfect. A bad host combined with a weak script doesn’t always combine for the best shows. But SNL is more than its bad weekends. Example of someone who has never flopped on SNL? Ariana Grande. She goes into 8H and makes that studio her BITCH for the week. I’ve yet to watch a skit of hers and not laugh at least twice. It’s always fun and bright on` the other side of the grass. Why can’t people just laugh to laugh anymore?
And everyone who complains about SNL laughs at the dumbest shit imaginable. Their humor is always described as “dark humor”, which means it’s something else nobody will find funny in the slightest. But I guarantee if they went back and watched how that show used to play, they would be clutching their pearls and calling it horrifying. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too. Are they allowed to push the boundaries of comedy? I say yes. In my eyes, they straddle the line between tasteful and mildly offensive very well. (Keep in mind, I am a white woman, so take that part with a grain of salt and let me know what you personally think.) Even now, Che will give a line during weekend update that I laugh my ass off at, but the audience goes “oooo.” Like, can we make up our minds? You should all be serving on the front lines, not complaining about them making jokes about P. Diddy and Epstein liking little kids. Pick a hill to die on and just stay there.
I watch SNL alone now. The one time I watched it with my friends here, they didn’t get why I was laughing so hard. Your humor is either underdeveloped or overcomplicated, both of which I hate. I wanted to be an NBC Page in the 90’s so bad. The cast was electric, the writing was wonderfully done, but I’m just as excited to become one in the 2020s as I would’ve been back then. (NBC, I know you hear me knocking. Let me in the studio.)