Saturday Night Live

Speaking truth to antisemitism

It’s impossible to sugarcoat what Ye, The Artist Formerly Known as Kanye West, said that got him in hot water late in 2022. You can’t announce you are going to “go death con 3 ON JEWISH PEOPLE” and then act surprised when your conduct sparks a firestorm. After getting kicked off Twitter (though Elon Musk would later reinstate him), Ye was subsequently suspended from Instagram for posting an image of a message he sent to Russell Simmons in which he said, “I gotta get the Jewish business people to make the contracts fair.” Given the magnitude of Ye’s superstardom and his history of erratic behavior, this would have been a globe-spanning media event in any case.

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This season should be Saturday Night Live’s last

The 48th season of Saturday Night Live premieres tomorrow, and this one should be its last. The show has never felt more out of touch — a stale, punch-pulling iteration marked by a dim vision of what comedy can achieve in a politically and socially divisive moment. This is a target-rich environment, but SNL seems firmly of the opinion that taking shots against our current feckless leadership class is verboten. At a time when online comedy is exploding and hilarious sketches and specials abound on YouTube, SNL operates as if they have no competition. This offseason saw the show's biggest staff turnover in almost thirty years. This might have been an opportunity: if Saturday Night Live wanted to be relevant, the talent is obviously out there.

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Ye he Kan! Why Kanye West’s SNL stunt showed real courage

Kanye West is an egomaniac. Who isn’t these days? He’s also very brave. It takes courage to wear a Trump hat to sing on Saturday Night Live. Kanye — or ‘Ye’, as he wants to be called — said he was ‘bullied’ backstage by people telling him he should take it off, and you can imagine that is true enough. The Saturday Night Live audience booed Kanye on stage, but he remained undaunted. ‘We need a dialogue not a diatribe,’ he said, not unreasonably. The SNL brigades clearly did not agree. Their idea of dialogue is just anti-Trump diatribe. Good for West; he makes the world more interesting. And for him to stand by what he thinks as the rich, elite world he belong to harangues him takes guts.

Shane Gillis is going places

It is a hot summer night at the truck warehouse that is home to Magooby’s Joke House, and 2014’s Baltimore New Comedian of the Year is in need of another cold Bud Light. Shane Gillis, the Pennsylvania man who was nowhere close to a household name until he had the misfortune to be fired by Saturday Night Live in 2019, and then the follow-on great fortune to become famous for being incredibly funny, does not love the impression he gives as the apex predator of beer-drinking. But he is a week removed from leaving fellow comic Ari Shaffir, no lightweight himself, passed out in intense liver pain on the studio floor of The Joe Rogan Experience because he dared come at the T. rex. “So who is your trainer? Your trainer has to be incredible.” “My dad. He’s an alcoholic.

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The welcome return of The Kids in the Hall

The Kids in the Hall was the best sketch comedy group of the early 1990s. Sure, Saturday Night Live had Phil Hartman, Chris Farley, Norm Macdonald, and Janeane Garofalo — and sketches like Celebrity Jeopardy!, Phil Hartman’s Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer and Motivational Speaker Matt Foley. But there were plenty of duds, too, like The Rickmeister and the ESPYs. The Kids in the Hall was less loud and more intelligent than SNL. They took more risks with sketches like the prescient Politically Correct Art Class, and no one skewered corporate culture better than the Kids (see Not Working Out and Can I Keep Him?). There were absurd characters like the Chicken Lady and the Sizzler Sisters, but their best sketches were the ones they played straight, like Parenting and Salty Ham.

Can right-wing comedy be funny?

Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx try to do a couple things in their new book, That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them. For starters, they hope to show their liberal readers — and the book is clearly written for those on the left — that there is such a thing as “right-wing comedy.” It is not an “obvious oxymoron,” as many on the left assume. Conservatives’ “post-9/11 blunders” made them easy targets for the left-leaning (and increasingly left-wing) Saturday Night Live, Stephen Colbert, and David Letterman. While comedy and “left-wing oppositionality” seemed a “blissful marriage,” there is no reason to assume the “eternal, exclusive nature of that union.

Norm Macdonald’s comedic danger

Norm Macdonald claimed to have coined the phrase ‘fake news’ two decades before Donald Trump brought it into the political lexicon. That’s just one of dozens of examples of how the late Canadian-born comic left a mark on American culture. As host of Saturday Night Live’s long-running ‘Weekend Update’ segment during the mid-1990s, Macdonald often used the term when welcoming audiences. ‘I’m Norm Macdonald,’ he would begin, ‘and now, the fake news.’ What followed, however, almost always jumped the rails of what could reasonably be described as news satire.

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CNN broadcasts BDSM

Did anyone else catch the sordid humiliation porn screened on CNN Thursday? The nine-minute clip featured a MILF-cum-dominatrix who works under the name Alisyn Camerota and a promising new adult star called Jeffrey Toobin (onlyfans.com/jeffreytoobin). It was Toobin's first appearance on the AVN-award-winning network since his eight-month stint in a dungeon. The little-pig-boy, 61, was locked up after one of his cam-shows went awry at his other employer, a top-shelf skin mag called the New Yorker. 'It's been a while,' Camerota begins. 'It has been a while indeed,' Toobin replies with a wry smile. Camerota then 'recaps' where Toobin has been for the last few months, as the two giggle to themselves. https://twitter.com/alisyncamerota/status/1403071356925775872?

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Even Elon Musk couldn’t make SNL funny

When my editor asked me to watch Elon Musk on Saturday Night Live, I desperately wondered how to refuse. 'Actually, I’m busy on Saturday night.' Useless. There are a million ways to watch live television after the event. 'I’m a bit sick right now.' Too sick to watch TV and write about it? 'I can’t hear Pete Davidson’s voice without wanting to punch a hole in wall.' True, but not the sort of thing you want to admit in public. Damn it, I agreed. Journalists are asked to visit Syria and Afghanistan, after all, so I can hardly complain about having to watch Saturday Night Live. As The Spectator’s unofficial comedy critic, moreover, I have had to experience everything from Sarah Cooper’s mirthless Netflix special to Charlie Kirk’s bewildering satire on right-wing punditry.

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Elon Musk is too funny for Saturday Night Live

My secret hope is that Elon Musk uses his Saturday Night Live platform this weekend to launch a comedic assault on political correctness so brutal it is seared forever onto the collective retina of the biggest audience the show has had in decades. Provided he used SNL to tear with equal vigor into each faction of the intersectional oppression spectrum — ethnic minorities, LGBTQIAA+ folk, fat activists, the blue-haired and non-binary, flat-earthers and feminists — and managed while doing so to be undeniably funny, I believe Musk could get away with it. He could also create a cultural moment the value of which as a non-fungible token would be more than perhaps even he could afford.

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Every business is essential

Governors across the country are deploying their unilateral power to institute draconian measures which close small businesses, mostly those in the service industry. They use outright Orwellian language to justify doing so, all in the name of the greater good of halting COVID-19 cases. But it’s not working anymore. Total cases are higher now than they’ve been since the spring and people are losing their livelihoods. No federal relief has come and there is a nationwide feeling that the dam is about to break. When people were told they had ‘15 days to slow the spread’, they listened. While they obliged, they watched crowds gather in protest of their personal causes and politicians ignore their own rules.

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MSNBC wages war on Tulsi the dove

MSNBC dropped all pretenses of neutrality at last week’s debate, not that its pretenses were ever remotely credible to begin with. Most of the time they’d at least attempt to play it straight, however perfunctorily. Of course, no one should have been under the illusion that running a debate well was within the repertoire of Rachel Maddow — one of the nation’s leading conspiracy theorists — whose very presence as lead moderator undermined the legitimacy of the entire affair from the outset. Even with the albatross of Maddow, though, it is conceivable that they could have striven for something resembling an impartial approach. Not surprisingly, that all went out the window when one particular candidate was targeted for open contempt.

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Has Saturday Night Live finally found its feet in the Trump era?

The trouble with Trumpworld is it’s so often beyond parody. How could a comedian ratchet up the president ordering Big Macs for a visiting championship football team to make the moment funnier than it already is? It’s a problem which has plunged late-night comedy writing into an identity crisis, one that has blighted America’s flagship sketch show Saturday Night Live. The Trump era has seen SNL bag Emmys and reach record audiences. But it’s achieved this through polarization: hitting the same tired Trump tropes each week and playing to their coastal-elite base. Its viewers have noticed: 39 percent of them surveyed by The Hollywood Reporter said the show had become too political.

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WATCH: SNL sends up the Virginia blackface scandal

For the first time in what seems like decades, Saturday Night Live turned their sights on the Democrats – and delivered what Cockburn considers one of their best sketches of the season. ‘State Meeting’ takes place in the Virginia State Capitol, where an African American ethics committee chief (Kenan Thompson) addresses a room of mostly white colleagues to check whether they have ever worn blackface. Unsurprisingly, many of them have – and they ask whether their excuses for doing so are good enough. ‘I have a question,’ asks Beck Bennett’s state senator. ‘What if your blackface was just part of your costume as a black person?’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrpQVSVa2QI ‘Does it count if you did it all the way back in the Eighties?

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Why SNL’s Tucker Carlson skit was a misfire

Cockburn never wants to criticize people for trying to be funny, even if they fail. He’s fallen flat on his own comedic face more than once so he knows the pain. But last night’s Saturday Night Live spoof on Fox News’s Tucker Carlson show missed the mark in several unfortunate and interesting ways. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sld27PfAF3M&list=PLS_gQd8UB-hISSFxFTxdheRfIDH-XKBCi Let’s begin with what worked. Alex Moffat’s impersonation wasn’t too bad — his impression of Carlson’s ‘listening face’ was amusing, certainly. Moffat was also helped by Kate McKinnon, who did a brilliant and hilarious Wilbur Ross routine, and Cecily Strong did a pitch perfect Judge Jeanine. But the conceit was wrong.

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Why has late night swapped laughs for lusting after Mueller?

For those desperately awaiting the Trump presidency’s spectacular collapse, Robert Mueller has acquired an almost mythic status – forever looming in the background with astonishing ‘bombshells’ that could drop at any moment. Mueller himself never speaks, except through terse court filings, which lends his aura a mystical quality. His newfound fans have been known to light votive candles in his honor, wear apparel sporting his heroic visage, and spend day after day speculating on the internet about the time, date, and profundity of his next miraculous intervention. https://twitter.

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