Warning: SNL

There are fond memories of Saturday Night Live here at casa Hopper. I’ve been watching it somewhat consistently since the mid-80s. Not every show every season, but over the years I’ve probably seen a third to half of all the shows made. And from reruns I’m quite familiar with the time-worn classics from the 70s. My favorite performers over the 35-plus seasons have been Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Phil Hartman, Mike Myers, and Will Ferrell.

My wife has a great memory of the show from her youth. Her dad would tape it for her, and the next day they’d watch it together over breakfast. It was a great bonding ritual, and she speaks fondly of it, often.

We can’t do that with our children now, even if they were much, much older.

I was going to title this post, “Ten Reasons Not to Watch SNL”, but as I was compiling my list, I realized that the problems with the show can be reduced to two factors:

1. Sketch writing that just isn’t funny

2. A mean-spirited compulsion to make conservatives and Republicans look bad

The show wasn’t always this way. In fact, I think this season is the absolute worst in years. Normally we DVR the show and watch it at some point during Sunday afternoon. My daughter absolutely loved Zach Galifianakis’ debut hosting job in May of 2010, so much so that we are forbidden to delete it. We tried watching two shows recently with her in the room while her younger sister napped. Both times ended disastrously.

While some skits can be uproariously funny, those skits are a real rarity nowadays. I would guess genuinely laugh-out-loud skits average out to one per episode. Some shows may have two funny skits, but those are unfailingly balanced out with a completely humorless show the next week. So on average you gotta mine through ninety minutes of crap to get one five minute gold nugget.

A lot of the skits suffer from what I call the Dave Chappelle effect. I never watched the Chappelle Show when it was in its heyday a few years back, but I did catch two or three skits, and I realized they all had one thing in common: a long build-up until you get to the payoff. It seems on SNL now that the majority of the sketches start off verrrrrrrrrry slow, and the viewer must suffer for waaaaaaaaaaaaay too long until you get to the laugh. Most of the time the laugh is weak, and it’s repeated in various permutations for the remainder of the skit. Again, this isn’t every skit every time; perhaps 75 to 80 percent of the time would be a good estimate.

The only really funny parts of the show, to me, are the parody commercials. Some are so hilarious I’m literally crying as I watch, vision blurring, laughing so hard I can’t talk. Andy Samberg’s digital shorts can also be funny, but he can be quite erratic. They’re either great or they bomb. It’d put that ratio at about two or three to one.

Yes, all the writers are very, very liberal. Seth Meyers, the newest anchor, is Tina Fey lite. There seems to be some concrete rule against making fun of Obama. And speaking of our floundering president, that has got to be the worst presidential imitation in the history of the show. Obama as our patient, longsuffering intellectual superior. Exasperated because he has to deal with us and all the dummies around him. Heck, I think Chevy Chase did a better presidential imitation of Gerald Ford than Fred Armisen does of Obama. I’m a conservative, and I wholeheartedly enjoyed Hartman’s Reagan, Carvey’s George H. Bush, and Ferrell’s W. I think the skit with W and Gore as the Odd Couple is one of the best in the past decade.

There’s a trend this year that made us realize that we can’t watch the show when the little ones are in the room. Not necessarily watching it with us, mind you, just in the same room as us. That’s an inexplicable proliferation of, well, gay kissing and gay references. I won’t go into it here on the blog, except to state that, guys, it’s just not shocking anymore, just off-putting and disgusting.

I’ve thrown my hands up in defeat regarding the show. Remember the goofiness when Mike Myers did all those characters? Will Ferrell, in the late 90s before he became “political”, was absolutely zany. Remember the Blue Oyster Cult skit with him? Perhaps the funniest thing I ever saw on teevee. I don’t want to even DVR the show anymore, because I just know there will never be anything as funny as that, or even half as funny, at least for the rest of this season. Probably for the rest of the Obama presidency.

But my wife is still willing to give SNL the benefit of the doubt, which means I’ll still be DVRing it, and watching it back the next day, thumb firmly poised between the fast forward and mute buttons on the remote.