In case you happen to have missed the giant Post-it notes bearing cast member names hanging from buildings around New York City, or the fawning retropectives that have hit the internet in the past couple of weeks, the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live, America’s most beloved sketch comedy TV show, is upon us; with a star-studded anniversary special scheduled for this Sunday.
The press thus far has mostly consisted of breathless praise. SNL, gushed New York magazine, “feels unbound by time, as if it had always existed and always will”. The New Yorker said it had “reinvented television”.
The show’s longevity and reinvention is certainly noteworthy. Its staying power in part a result of its true variety, it represents many things to many people: a frat house for silly bits and occasional surrealism; a backdrop for prickly political impressions; a place for experimentation in short film that presaged YouTube and TikTok; an eager stage for paradigm-shifting musical performances; and a launchpad like no another in entertainment that has anointed an impressive roster of stars.
But whether the show produces anything close to consistently amusing comedy has always been debatable. Like any TV show, Saturday Night Live has its stable of diehard defenders, but it has also drawn criticism for its pedestrian and underwhelming humor. We hear lots of its greatest moments, but far less about the wearisome fare that bulks the show to its 90-minute runtime – a Mikey Day-led talking-head interview with two “Nintendo developers”, one of whom has suffered a recent scrotal injury, say, or “Gen Z Hospital”, a true nadir in which an extremely wooden Elon Musk plays a doctor fielding inquiries from cast members conversing in TikTok-ese. “Gang gang”, Bowen Yang intones gravely.
Since 1975, SNL has claimed to be a haven for scrappy outsiders and the kind of cutting-edge comedy that’s beholden to nothing and no one. But despite its superficial patina of underdog spikiness, throughout its history SNL has tended towards sympathy for the powerful and the influential.
The show’s philosophy has almost everything to do with its creative director and showrunner, Lorne Michaels. How far the show can go, who it casts, and where its comedic sensibilities lie have always (aside from a five-year blip in the 80s) been dictated entirely by him.
“Lorne’s father died when he was a teenager, and it plunged the family into financial precarity,” the critic and journalist Seth Simons said. “Lorne took away from that that he never wants to be poor again. In Lorne, [a forthcoming biography of Michaels] it makes clear that he is very much a member of the upper class, and SNL functions as a way of ushering people into the upper class.”
In the biography, Tina Fey, who based the character of Jack Donaghy in 30 Rock partly on Lorne, says that Lorne teaches you how to live your life. “He tells his employees to make sure that they take vacations in suitably luxurious, expensive locales. He gives advice to people like Jeff Bezos and David Zaslav,” says Simons. “I think there is no other figure like him who has had the job that he has had for as long as he has had it, and that has changed culture so radically.”
Lorne gives great freedom and levity to the show’s writers, but he still shapes the politics of the show in his image. The former cast member Taran Killam recalled on the podcast I Was There Too that Michaels told his charges not to “vilify” the then presidential nominee Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election. “He’s like any New York taxi driver. I know him, I’ve seen him around at parties for years and years, and he just says whatever it is he’s thinking, and that’s his thing,” Killam says Michaels said. “You have to find a way in that makes him likable.”
Not all staffers were on board. According to new reports, the SNL writer and comedian Tim Robinson said at the time: “Lorne has lost his fucking mind and someone needs to shoot him in the back of the head.”
“At the end of the day, Lorne Michaels is very close to a lot of people in power, and he plays this really big role in all kinds of comedy entertainment,” said Steven Thrasher, a journalist, academic and former SNL writer.
“The first year I worked at SNL was also the first year that Jimmy Fallon was a cast member. And of course, Jimmy Fallon goes on eventually to host The Tonight Show. When [Fallon] had Trump on just a week before the election, and he grabbed [Trump’s] hair to show it wasn’t a wig, that was a major rehabilitation moment,” Thrasher said. “I think that shows not just what SNL does directly, but the role that Lorne Michaels has in creating an entire media environment through which a person like Donald Trump is rehabilitated.”
Thrasher was an SNL staffer during the Monica Lewinsky era of the Clinton presidency. In one episode, Lewinsky herself, in a heroic display of good sportsmanship, made an appearance in a sketch alongside Tim Meadows that was rife with sexualized double entendres. “It was a strange thing because she was, in ways I think we can see much more clearly now, being really abused in the public eye,” Thrasher said.
SNL didn’t seek to subvert this narrative but rather to reinforce it, at the expense of both a vulnerable Lewinsky and the viewers at home. “The laugh is on the audience,” Thrasher said. “That’s something I felt often when I worked there. A lot of the writers went to Harvard, and a lot of them just had outright disdain for the people that they were making the show for.
“There would be things in the scripts that would just outright make fun of people. They’d say, ‘The NBC audience, like lambs to the slaughter, will laugh at this joke.’”
SNL maintains its image in the public imagination as a site of good-natured chaos, where temporary creative snafus always give way to a good laugh, and where nourished performers always win the day.
“During my first two years there, the average work week was around 90 hours,” the former head writer Adam McKay, now best known for his directorial efforts, wrote in 2015. “There were times we basically didn’t leave the office except to grab five hours of sleep. On Tuesday, you write all day and all night. I once wrote for 20 straight hours and got dizzy because I had forgotten to eat.”
McKay called this “comedy heaven” and the cheerful, if grueling, workplace narrative has tended to endure, but many haven’t felt the same way. Janeane Garofalo called her years on SNL “the most miserable experience of my life”, comparing it to “fraternity hazing”. Per Julia Louis-Dreyfus, it was “a very sexist environment”. The show’s disproportionate majority of white male comics and writers led to women and cast members of color having to fight harder to be heard and seen; and when they were in front of the camera, the joke was often on them.
Jane Curtin, the first woman to anchor SNL’s “Weekend Update”, joined the show in 1976 and had a front-row seat to the show’s bedrock sexism. “It was stunning because in the improv group I came from in Cambridge, [Massachusetts], there was no sexism,” Curtin told the Hollywood Reporter in 2019. “We were all equals; we all respected each other. We talked about the importance of the Equal Rights Amendment [ERA]. But by the time I got to Saturday Night Live the ERA didn’t pass, which was stunning to me. And I go into this world where they hadn’t even discussed an ERA. It wasn’t a part of their life; it didn’t affect them.” Curtin would soon get her biggest laughs being called “an ignorant slut” in a joke that skewered sexism. She says she found it funny at the time, but the line “still haunts” her.
On the occasions that Saturday Night Live performers have managed to speak truth to power, they have often experienced heavy consequences.
On the 3 October 1992, in a moment cemented in the halls of pop culture history, the Irish pop singer Sinead O’Connor performed a Bob Marley song and ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II while singing the word “evil”, an act O’Connor committed in protest of child sexual abuse perpetuated by the Catholic church. At the end of the song she declared: “Fight the real enemy.”
O’Connor was banned for life from performing on SNL or NBC ever again, she later revealed in her memoir; not that she minded too much.
“A lot of people say or think that tearing up the Pope’s photo derailed my career,” she wrote. “That’s not how I feel about it. I feel that having a number-one record derailed my career and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track.”
O’Connor also explained that the photo she ripped up belonged to her devoutly Catholic mother, who the singer claimed emotionally and physically abused her as a child. O’Connor wrote that she brought the photo “everywhere I lived from that day forward”, with the intent of eventually destroying it, “because nobody ever gave a shit about the children of Ireland”.
But the artist’s impassioned intent mattered not at all to Saturday Night Live at the time, which made quick work of undermining O’Connor in the aftermath. The following week, the Goodfellas star Joe Pesci hosted, and held up a taped-together photo of the pope. “She was very lucky it wasn’t my show,” Pesci said, referring to O’Connor. “If it was my show, I would’ve gave her such a smack.”
Lorne Michaels told Spin in 1993 that he thought O’Connor’s “behavior was inappropriate”, and that he was “shocked, the way you would be shocked at a houseguest pissing on a flower arrangement in the dining room”. Decades later, in the new documentary 50 Years of SNL Music, the boss revealed he had softened. “There was a part of me that just admired the bravery of what she’d done, and also the absolute sincerity of it,” Michaels said, rewriting the record.
Legend also has it that the viciously funny cast member Norm Macdonald was booted from the show after taking one too many cracks at OJ Simpson, a close personal friend and golf buddy of the NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer; who was not amused by Macdonald’s persistence.
Rage Against the Machine, acclaimed distributors of communist-flavored nu metal, were banned from SNL forever after draping their amps in upside-down American flags during their sole performance on the show in 1996. No one at home even saw their protest, but the attempt was enough to confirm their banishment.
While it has balked at its performers punching up at powers that be, SNL has been more comfortable with guest hosts and hosts that punch down – as far back as the earliest days of SNL, you could find white stars like John Belushi embodying Asian stereotypes; in 1985 Dana Carvey played a Chinese shopkeeper in a sketch called “Ching Chang in Love”. Chevy Chase said the N-word on national television. Countless other sketches have aged just as horribly: Fallon had to apologize for performing in blackface in a Chris Rock impersonation in 2000.
SNL also helped the explosion of the career of Andrew Dice Clay, offering him a hosting slot just as his rampantly misogynistic comedy made him a 90s pariah.
It has given a similar boost to billionaire businessmen in more recent years, inviting Elon Musk and Trump to host.
Musk, notorious for his affinity for stale meme humor and, more recently, gestures that look like Nazi salutes, stuck to safe humor about his Asperger’s and his son X’s weird name when he hosted in 2021. But he had already been spreading doubt about Covid vaccines when he assumed the stage in a bandanna covering his mouth and nose: a perfect cypher for SNL’s no-stance centrism.
Trump hosted SNL in 2015, months after he announced his first candidacy for president, which many argued after his victory was ultimately tantamount to an endorsement. “People think I’m controversial,” Trump – who inarguably has good comic timing, said in his monologue. “But the truth is, I’m a nice guy. I don’t hold grudges against anybody.”
Garrett Morris, the first Black performer on SNL, told the Guardian last year that when he joined the cast, he observed the show’s fundamental issues first-hand: “I will say to the end of my days: Lorne’s writers had a lot of racism going on.”
“I would call SNL conservative conservative in the way that liberalism is conservative,” Thrasher said. “Liberalism includes Barack Obama laughing with Donald Trump. Liberalism includes numerous senators voting for various Trump nominees, even if they don’t vote for all of them. For the most part, it’s not challenging power.”
SNL is many things, but a beacon of fearless outsider comedy is not one of them. And that’s fine: but the rest of us should stop pretending otherwise.
Article by:Source: Helen Holmes
