On the surface SNL might seem progressive, forward thinking and even edgy but in my opinion, SNL is a conservative show that represents the status quo.
Consider a recent sketch in which Elizabeth Warren as played by Kate Mckibbin presents her plan to pay for medicare for all. The first example about reigning in Military spending is greeted with a defeatist and fatalistic deadpan from Mckibbon “so immediately dead in the water right.”
The next joke about taxing Amazon fairly is not conservative in nature and I agree with the sentiment. check out the last bullet point of the plan to pay for medicare…
Turn JP Morgan into a non-profit.
Two jokes out of three highlighting the perceived impossibility of successful healthcare reform these jokes also book-end the bit. The take-away is medicare for all is doomed as Warren continues to explain with a dizzying whiteboard of complex charts and data meant to highlight the near impossibility of understanding and thereby being able to reform the system. She concludes with (clip) “I could explain it to you, but you would die”.
If only Fox News had these current SNL writers for its failed 2007 comedy show, the ½ hour news hour it might still exist today.
https://www.popmatters.com/1-2-hour-new ... 22998.html
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Live from New York its Status Quo live
SNL has been conservative or at best centrist from the beginning holding traditional viewpoints about society and politics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gQFvf19Jec
Saturday Neoliberalism | Renegade Cut
8:30
“If you listen to Donald Trump you might mistake SNL as a far left television series with performers taking revolutionary or firm stance against the status quo…will often mine humor from reactionary or conservative talking points”...“From 2015 The one on the far left, so far left it can’t be elected…
...
recently a new cast member Shane Gillis was hired and then quickly fired for racist and homophopbic comments. Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon wrote an article in response:
https://www.salon.com/2019/09/18/even-w ... tive-show/
Even without Shane Gillis, "SNL" has always been a conservative show. Variety reports "SNL" hired Gillis to counter "the appearance of a liberal bias." But "SNL" favors the status quo (Article goes on…)
(...)
...“According to sources, the long-running NBC comedy show and series mastermind Lorne Michaels were actively looking to cast a comedian for its new season who would appeal to more conservative viewers. This was meant to counteract the appearance of a liberal bias on the show.” Which is the first funny Shane Gillis-related thing I’ve heard.
(...)
But if you’ve made the conscious choice that your target demographic is instead triggered snowflakes who are super-sad the entire world does not revolve around them and their dumb ideas, sure — a guy like Shane Gillis makes sense. It certainly makes sense if you’re “SNL,” a show whose edginess has always been a clever facade for its far from progressive environment.
...
The article goes on to highlight SNL originally had a misogynistic work environment...
Jane curtin on sexism on SNL, ‘thought women shouldn’t be there”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA2mc_KBkE0
(...)
Again from Salon
When she was there 10 years later, Julia Louis-Dreyfus remembers the vibe as “very sexist.” And yet another decade after that, former show writer Rosie Shuster observed the trajectory of Janeane Garofalo — already a successful film actress and standup comic when she joined the cast — by telling New York magazine, “There’s no word for when you castrate a female. But that’s the feeling I get watching what’s happening to Janeane.”
Julia Louis-Dreyfus on snl sexism from the New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/arts ... .html?_r=0
As we speak, you’re preparing to host “Saturday Night Live.” Do you look back fondly on your years there as a cast member?
Fondly-ish.
Because women on the show in that era were not given equal treatment?
At all. I did not come out of “S.N.L.” as any kind of name. I didn’t do anything particularly great when I was there. I didn’t. It’s fine. But I learned a tremendous amount. It was a very sexist environment. Since I’ve gone back, I can tell you it’s much more of an equal-opportunity environment.
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SNL has moved into the present in some ways which can be seen in a skit like “girl at a bar”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTMow_7H47Q
“What I’m wearing this shirt and your not going to let me nut?”
Yes SNL has made strides with representing women. It also appears efforts are being made to incorporate diverse viewpoints at SNL...
From the Washington Post
Jay, one of seven writers who joined SNL in 2017, told Vice News that year she wanted her work on the show to incorporate themes the show had overlooked in its four-decade-plus history, such as the “urban culture stuff that they may not necessarily have their pulse on, gay culture … just who I am,” she said. Bowen Yang, the gay Chinese American comic who was hired as a featured player after writing for SNL last season...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-ent ... bout-race/
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https://www.advocate.com/commentary/201 ... male-trash
...
A fictional Mike Pence made an appearance in the lazy skit, which imagined how everyone's life would be had Trump lost the electoral college. Care to guess how the homophobic VP was portrayed by player Beck Bennett? As a DJ wearing a sleeveless shirt; Pence hates gay people, so obviously he must be gay.
This trope is repeated in other episodes when Bennett plays Vladimir Putin, where the cozy relationship between the Russian dictator and the illegitimate American president is often depicted as sexual in nature.
(...) saturday neoliberalism cut about blaming victims
The brainchild of this tired show is head writer Colin Jost, the smug, smirking co-host of the show's Weekend Update. After Jost told New Yorkers they should be appreciative that Amazon will soon invade their city with a new HQ and make traffic worse and rents even more expensive, I myself was gobsmacked when Jost not only joked that Hillary Clinton's loss to Trump was due to her outreach to minority groups, but that he backed up his assertion by tweeting out a wildly reductive New York Times op-ed that decried "identity politics." Don't you love being mansplained that minority groups don't deserve to be name-checked by presidential candidates?
Back to Collin Josts take on Amazon Head Quarters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CWfpMkYFlo
Out
Opinion: Colin Jost Is a Douchebag
BY ROSE DOMMU
Jost’s support of the new Amazon headquarters proves he isn’t the irreverent voice of liberal reason, he’s just another asshole.
...
Jost’s jokes, however, completely miss the point. New York City courted Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, offering $1.5 billion in tax cuts which could grow to $3 billion when combined with existing incentives, essentially paying the world’s richest man to move his company to a city that’s not exactly wanting for business. The New Yorker called it “the equivalent of every city resident Venmoing $348 to Bezos,” which made me want to throw my phone into the empty Amazon Prime package I’ve been using as a trash can. "The idea that [Amazon] will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks at a time when our subway is crumbling and our communities need MORE investment, not less, is extremely concerning to residents here," tweeted newly elected NY Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. While supporters of Amazon’s move make much of the jobs and revenue the new headquarters will create, critics are more concerned with what the tax cut means for the subway system, for community development and infrastructure.
All of this seems lost on Colin Jost, a private-school educated doctor’s son who nabbed his job at SNL straight out of Harvard. Jost’s extreme level of privilege allows him to dismiss educated criticism by people concerned for the most vulnerable in their city as whining, and this isn’t the first time Jost’s jokes — an alliteration I both appreciate and hate — have proved what an entitled asshole he is. In 2016, after Tinder expanded it’s gender options to include 37 different identities, Jost called the feature “Why Democrats lost the election.” It’s clear that Jost, whose point of view has been called the “smug style in American liberalism,” can’t empathize with anyone outside his worldview.
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SNL’s great new character Jules doesn’t know about privilege. Neither does SNL
Jules thinks he sees things a little differently only because he’s blind to his own privilege. But SNL itself appears to suffer a similar lack of self-awareness.
(l-r) Musical guest Anderson Paak, host Claire Foy
BY JOE BERKOWITZ
A major highlight of this week’s Saturday Night Live was the debut of a hilarious new character–who inadvertently pointed out a glaring flaw in the rest of the episode.
Meet Jules, a foppish dandy who comes from wealth and “sees things . . . a little differently.”
With his carefully tousled hair and jaunty kerchief, Jules is a pitch-perfect parody of a certain kind of annoying, faux-enlightened rich kid. He means well (maybe?), but he’s so proud of his unearned, uninformed point of view that it ultimately doesn’t matter. Weekend Update hosts/co-head writers Colin Jost and Michael Che welcome Jules (Beck Bennett) to talk about–of all things–the economy. All he can offer on this topic, though, are smug, self-congratulatory platitudes that don’t quite add up.
When pressed to comment on GM announcing 15,000 layoffs last week, Jules talks out of his ass thusly: “So, I don’t love taking, like, cars places? Because they’re just so, like, 1984 the book to me. They’re like these Orwellian machines straight out of . . . George Orwell, if that makes sense? So instead of driving a car, I like, like, laying down on a longboard and using my arms the way a dolphin uses his fins. Sure, it takes longer, and I’ve been hit by a couple cars, but the thing about getting hit by a car is that, for just a moment, I get to fly.”
It’s a great commentary on people who are as steeped in classism as fish in water, but don’t quite realize that water exists.
Somehow, Saturday Night Live’s writers didn’t realize the rest of this episode effectively exemplifies the same attitude.
Remember back in 2016 when the show that had welcomed candidate Donald Trump as host the previous year seemed overly confident Trump would lose in the general election? Well, that same show now seems pretty sure that the Mueller investigation is about to make all the bad things go away, so everything can turn back to normal like Cinderella’s pumpkin-coach.
...
By alternately projecting a superior confidence that Trump is finished ...painting the Mueller Report as some kind of epic reset button, and whitewashing President George Bush’s complicated legacy in between, SNL seems just as out of touch with socioeconomic reality as Jules is.
If the introduction of Jules was meant as a subversive commentary on the show’s own politics, it would be a triumph of self-aware meta-housekeeping.
Unfortunately, the writers see things a little differently.
Joe Berkowitz is a writer and staff editor at Fast Company.
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https://spectator.us/late-night-lusting-mueller/
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The pinnacle of Trump-era comedic banality, Saturday Night Live, set a new standard for worshipful absurdity last week when they offered up a Mueller holiday tribute song, ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You,’ professing their anxious desire for him to issue a Final Report that lands Trump in the Big House. ‘I just want to sleep at night. Please make sure your case is tight,’ the assembled comediennes sang, while a portrait of Mueller wearing a Santa hat levitated overhead. The cutesy carol made reference to Trump-Russia bit-players such as Roger Stone and Alex Van Der Zwaan – the latter a man so obscure that you have to be a real obsessive to have the slightest idea who he is. It says much that SNL writers apparently assume their viewers are as fanatically invested in every minute twist-and-turn of this saga as they evidently are.
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https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9kge ... propaganda
All of this is preamble to say to SNL, I come as a friend: Your cold opens are terrible, cringeworthy pieces of self-satisfied liberal propaganda that are sometimes so bad they seem like parodies of themselves.
Even if you avoid SNL you probably hear about these cold opens, which are consistently politically themed—though "themed" may be too strong a word because they are mostly just recaps of the political news of the week performed by A-list celebrities. Thanks to star power, these sketches inevitably draw headlines, ..And honestly, if you're a fan of Very Famous People Appearing Together on Screen,... you'll get your money's worth. Look, Robert de Niro and Stiller are doing a Robert Mueller–themed reprise of a scene from Meet the Parents! Look, they got the real Stormy Daniels to play herself and deliver wooden #Resistance-worthy lines to Alec Baldwin's Donald Trump!
But beyond that novelty, the jokes are tired references to current events that never build on one another. Instead, they are limply tossed out as obvious applause lines to an anti-Trump crowd.
(..).
..But the show has shifted to the point where its politics are indistinguishable from the Democratic Party's. After the 2016 election, the show gave Hillary Clinton a worshipful send-off, with Kate McKinnon's Hillary singing a topical version of "Hallelujah" before telling the camera, "I'm not giving up, and neither should you." It was a powerful moment if you were a Clinton fan...
...
One problem with that anti-Trump worldview is that it's predictable. But as hamfisted and obvious as it is, it also veers into casual cruelty at times—...Vice President Mike Pence trying to have phone sex with men. Not that I particularly think that SNL was being "unfair" to Pence, whose homophobia is pretty well established, but portraying him as a closet case is a lazy cheap shot that doesn't line up with reality. Pence might be an ignorant science denier who is out of the loop even on things that happen in the administration. But unlike many homophobes, he hasn't been accused of hiding his own attraction for men—why make such a generic joke about such a specific figure?
...
At best, the cold opens just echo the same beats and jokes as all those other programs.... At worst, these sketches just coddle the audience by reflecting all of their assumptions and prejudices back at them: Yes, Trump is dumb, his administration is full of venal lackeys, Jeff Sessions is creepy, Cohen is a crook, all of your obvious, knee-jerk impulses and prejudices are correct. It's not just playing to the crowd, it's spoon-feeding the audience their own spit-up...
Seen from the right light, it's not just an unfunny lead-in to what can otherwise be a fine show. It's a toxic example of limousine liberalism, millionaires putting on a self-congratulatory show with jokes cribbed from the New York Times editorial page—
…
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/ever ... -1.3642198
There is, nonetheless, a place for aligned satire. Saliva-drenched eulogies to the beloved leader (or challenger) do not qualify. If you can bear it, check out a “sketch” from early 2017 that finds Cecily Strong singing To Sir, With Love to a departing Barack Obama. “If you wanted the sky I would write across the sky in letters/That would soar a thousand feet high/To Sir, with love.” You keep waiting for a joke that doesn’t come. Only in North Korea are such panting tributes to leaders welcome on primetime TV.
Don’t forget the famous sequence, broadcast after the 2016 election, that found Kate McKinnon, sad in Hillary Clinton’s white trouser suit, warbling the recently deceased Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. At the close she turns to the audience and says: “I’m not giving up and neither should you.” Excuse me while I gag. What is this doing on any sort of comedy show?
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...
None of these routines reflect original thinking, comedic imagination, insightful satire, or even the kind of crotchety cynicism once embodied (imperfectly) by David Letterman. They are simply taking the conventional news narratives blasted everyday across cable news and Twitter, and putting a trite quasi-humorous spin on it. Which would be nothing new: it’s not like Jay Leno was some fight-the-power comedic renegade. But no one ever thought Leno was leading the charge against the establishment, and certainly no one ever looked to him as a political role model. This current crop of late nighters, in contrast, tend to style themselves as rabble-rousing truth-tellers standing up to the big mean government, while parroting an anti-Trump line that has its genesis in the literal establishment, namely the FBI. They feign subversiveness as a marketing strategy, because there’s nothing legitimately subversive about anything they ever do. In fact, they lend credence to the silly idea that backing Trump is actually the real subversive act, as Americans rightly observe that almost all major mainstream cultural institutions are implacably arrayed against him.
…
...Stewart appeared to be doing something different and, yes, subversive – castigating the media for its illogical deference to power, a sorely needed antidote in the years of George W. Bush. (Whether this schtick was truly subversive is another question, but it did at least seem that way for a time.) The popular TV comedians of today, conversely, are the polar opposite of subversive. Nothing about their daily pillorying of Trump challenges conventional wisdom, because unrestrained personal animus for Trump is the defining characteristic of conventional wisdom. When Bush was waging the Iraq War, he did so bolstered by a media consensus that cast him and his cause in an honorable light, and depicted his critics as screeching anti-war freaks.
...
But Stewart still had a knack for identifying frivolous media narratives, and mocking the absurd pretensions which undergirded them. Now the Daily Show sensibility is the entertainment media’s chief pretension, having seeped into the rest of the TV atmosphere. You can now watch what seems like several dozen multi-millionaire comedians doing the same cheeky news-rundown every day, in a style that clearly harkens to Stewart but lacks any of the dynamism that made what he did appear fresh.
Jon stewart ‘voice of a nation’
Jon made his position on mainstream news clear, unlike many today...5:15
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbMf7V6XQqM
Everyone knew Stewart was a liberal, and that liberals likely comprised the entirety of his writing staff, but his liberalism was not the defining feature of the show. The defining feature was media critique; the deconstructing of stuffy journalistic pathologies that made the 2000s political landscape so ridiculous and maddening. Stewart’s approach was far from 100 percent noble, and it often came packaged with certain hoary pretensions of its own. But at least it was something new, and seemingly, necessary. Now the latter-day Colbert style – shorn of everything that once made it unique – has become the status quo, and not only is it unnecessary (and unfunny), it’s a stale emblem of everything wrong with the wider cultural reaction to Trump.
…
While attempts have been made to become more socially conscious in some areas the classism on SNL is still blatant.
Classist brexit, poor dumb, ...
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/ever ... -1.3642198
Then there was the breathtakingly appalling skit on Great British Bake Off that starred Emily Blunt and Cecily Strong as contestants from “the only town to vote unanimously for [sic] the Brexit”. Blunt’s hair is roughly tied back. Strong’s is a shaggy mess. They speak in varyingly competent approximations of regional accents. If you haven’t already got it, the joke here is that the characters are stupid poor people. The classism would be staggering even if Blunt and Strong weren’t both from hugely privileged backgrounds.
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/20 ... ching-down
S.N.L. ran a fake ad for the very real new MTV reality series Floribama Shore. ...sporting thick southern accents, fake orange spray-on color, and, in Null’s case, a classic farmer’s tan run the gamut of dim-witted, right-leaning stereotypes. (She’s a promiscuous Christian! She’s a Benghazi truther! They didn’t know they were related! All of them are too dumb to get out of the path of a hurricane!)
The sketch isn’t entirely punching down. The ultimate target, here, seems to be MTV for plumbing new depths of low-brow entertainment. (…)This sketch could have easily been lost in the mix were it not paired with a second southern stereotype sketch featuring Mikey Day as a beleaguered, accented Kmart employee grappling with backwards customers at the returns counter. (...)
From a pregnant couple too dumb to know it’s the woman, not the man, who should pee on a pregnancy test to Cecily Strong’s twanged performance as a caustic woman with a cell phone trying to make her unsuccessful return of a Tide stain removal pen go viral, the sketch goes all in on portraying the class of people who shop at Kmart as largely backwater hicks. (...)
“Return Counter” certainly isn’t the first time S.N.L. has tried out this particular construction. A recurring mid-aughts sketch called “Appalachian Emergency Room” featuring Seth Meyers as a beleaguered, accented, mulleted hospital receptionists grappling with backwards patients in the E.R. played by Jack Black, Johnny Knoxville, Lindsay Lohan (...)
Those sketches were the product of a far less divisive time in America’s history. In more recent sketches like the recurring “Close Encounter” bits featuring an accented Ryan Gosling, Cecily Strong, and Kate McKinnon, the source of the humor is McKinnon’s increasingly bizarre tales (and Gosling’s irrepressible giggles), not a tired joke about uneducated hicks and alien abductions.
(…)These two class-baiting bits also come pretty quickly after a recent S.N.L. sketch skewering the out-of-touch DNC where Kate McKinnon’s Nancy Pelosi and Cecily Strong’s Dianne Feinstein said the party had learned its lesson from the last election and couldn’t appeal just to “coastal elites.” “We need mouth-breathers from Wisconsin,” McKinnon's Pelosi said. “And window-lickers from Ohio as well,” Strong’s Feinstein added.
...
Cathy anne works at pizza hut
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktf0Q5O-VNs
...
Four girlfriends (Bryant, Strong, McKinnon, and Waller-Bridge) gather at Buddy’s State Line Bar to drown their sorrows about Gerald from Guitar Center (Bennett), the hot hick each of them has dated in the past. Then, when Gerald shows up, each lady takes a turn kicking the crap out of him while quietly, privately confessing that they still love him and want him back. The asides to Gerald are all fun and well performed, and Bennett seems pleasantly dazed by the constant pummeling, but the best part may be the terrible Southern accents. Waller-Bridge’s dialogue is almost impenetrable, and pushes both McKinnon and Bryant to the breaking point.
....
Mikey Day: Hey, hey, hey, I know you all are regulars but you’re getting too rowdy, okay? And your friend is dancing too wild, [Cut to Kate McKinnon Dancing wild on the jukebox] all right? I’m getting complaints.
Kaylee: Oh, okay. What is this, the Ritz-Carlton? What’s wrong with Janetta? What’s up with you, Janetta?
[Cut to Janetta]
Janetta: I met by my ex-boyfriend.
[Cut to three ladies]
Kaylee: What? That’s the only kind of good boyfriend there is.
Crystal: Ex.
Kaylee: So, which one?
[Cut to Janetta]
Janetta: Gerald. From the guitar center.
[Cut to Kaylee and Crystal]
Kaylee: Oh, the one we all slept with and now hate.
Janetta: Yeah.
[Cut to everyone]
Kaylee: Oh, Jenny! Where have you been?
Jean: Hell, good! [Cut to Janetta and Jean] My brother Tren just got out of three nights’ prison, left the police to seat middle at in the yard he had planned with. He did a big old surprise with a dynamite.
Jean: I tried to get a cake today [Cut to Janetta and Jean] at Walmart. They wouldn’t write on it what I wanted on it.
[Other ladies are hooting for her] [Cut to Jean and Gerald]
You act like I said bad things, okay? I miss you. You smell so good, it’s like menthol cigarettes and bar lines. Which one of us do you like best? Please say me. [Jean punches Gerald] Well – Kaylee, your turn.
Jean: Well, I got to get out of here. I got a date with your son.
Kaylee: Okay, have fun. Tell him I folded his laundry.
[Ends with a video clip of Buddy’s State Line Bar]
...
Saturday Night Live Hates Poor People
Nicky Smith
Trump ratings boom undermined by a complete lack of class consciousness.
(...)
If you’re looking for glaring hypocrisy right now, look no further than Cathy Anne, a Cecily Strong character that’s made several appearances on “Weekend Update.” Cathy Anne is Al Jolson for poor people—hicks and rednecks. She’s dumb, slack-jawed, with an overbite, always sucking on a cigarette she’s unable to light. She’s weighed in on James Comey, Pizzagate, and being an undecided voter. She’s a rube, a caricature of poor people that approaches the offensiveness of blackface performers. This mirrors the DNC and the Hillary contingent’s dismissal of working class people that voted for Trump or Bernie Sanders.
In a decade or two, Cathy Anne will be just as cringe-worthy as “The Arakawa Group,” a sketch from 1992 where Mike Myers, Phil Hartman, Rob Schneider, and Dana Carvey play broadly drawn bucktooth caricatures of Japanese people. Great art can save people, but SNL does not qualify. Nevertheless, they’ll persist—don’t expect the back-patting to end anytime soon.
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Alec baldwin winning emmy
Alec admiting the satire isn’t having the effect you would hope, have humanized him...won emmy for portrayal
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/ent ... 675836001/
https://www.emmys.com/video/69th-emmy-a ... edy-series
Here is your emmy mr president
https://slate.com/culture/2017/09/alec- ... peech.html
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https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ ... ns-1121808
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'SNL' Star Colin Jost's Guide to the Hamptons: Where to Eat, Drink and Run Into Seinfeld
There is also good golf in the area — Montauk Downs for a public course is so beautiful. When I'm at work during the day, I fantasize about walking the course at sunset.
Gurney's Montauk
"It's so easy, has a great spa and is a good spot to set up and have drinks. But they charge $1,500 for a daybed on the beach: Do you get to keep the bed or live there?"
...
Someone described Jost as “more like ‘funniest guy at a yacht party’ than ‘W eekend Update host.'”
...
Collin as pete why aren’t i doing better? There doesn’t seem to be a joke here. This is Jost breaking the fourth wall and asking his audience a question he doesn’t seem to be able to answer.
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Thomas frank, these are friends, college roomates 38:30
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPYlE72OzZA
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https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/26/politics ... index.html
When Colin Jost stepped onto the Studio 8H stage in Pete Buttigieg's trademark rolled-sleeved white button down and blue tie, he wasn't just another comedian on Saturday Night Live mimicking a presidential candidate.
Jost was a SNL comedian imitating a former college dormmate.
Buttigieg and Jost have known each other for almost two decades. The two not only both graduated from Harvard University in 2004, but they both lived in the same dorm -- Leverett House -- during their time at the Ivy League institution and both graduated with honors in History & Literature. The two were not close at Harvard, then-friends and advisers told CNN, but the 2020 campaign offers them an unexpected reunion.
The two former college housemates met again this week before Buttigieg appeared on "The Tonight Show" with Jimmy Fallon.
Standing in a green room as the mayor prepared for the interview, he and Jost joked about how life had led each of them to this moment: One as a top writer and performer on the country's premier comedy sketch show and another running to be President.
…
...
Tim heidecker snl cool
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi2f_9vBbjw
…
Perhaps the most baffling entry of the night, though, was a fake commercial in which Carell (wearing a bald cap) played Bezos, celebrating his company’s recent decision to open new headquarters in New York City and northern Virginia. Rather than poke fun at the immediate community blowback that has faced the decision, or complaints from losing cities that Amazon chose two affluent, coastal areas after a long selection process, the sketch emphasized Bezos’s fractured relationship with Donald Trump.
Yes, Trump has targeted Bezos in tweets in the past, but that’s not a particularly fresh news story, nor has Bezos been anything but diplomatic when asked about it. But Carell played Bezos as a swaggering Lex Luthor type, hinting that he only chose New York and the Washington, D.C., area for his headquarters because those are the two locations Trump lives in, all the better to troll him, super-villain–style. He threw in various references to recent Trump bugbears, including a picture of the Super Mario World character Toad and a re-branding of Amazon’s delivery service as “Amazon Caravan.”
It’s topical humor at its worst, where a joke lives and dies merely as a reference to something else in the news, despite the lack of an obvious connection. There’s plenty for SNL to make fun of in the Amazon fracas, but the head writer and “Weekend Update” co-host Colin Jost seemed uninterested in the story, saying in his monologue, “New York basically won the lottery and we’re like, ‘Eh, but the subways might be slightly more crowded.’”
Clearly, to SNL Bezos is the hero of the week, because he’s a rich guy who can stand up to Trump. The show has no qualms about mocking tech CEOs: In the Fox News sketch, Ingraham interviewed a nervous Mark Zuckerberg (played by Alex Moffat) about Facebook’s recent crises, and Moffat played him as a sort of malfunctioning robot vainly pretending to be a regular guy. But in an effort to further mock Trump, the show made a baffling decision to present Bezos as the suave antithesis of the president. It’s a perfect example of how tough it can be to thread political humor properly these days. Not everything has to be about the president, and not everyone Trump criticizes has to be a hero.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
DAVID SIMS is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers culture.
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https://spectator.us/late-night-lusting-mueller/
Hopes for Mueller as a savior-figure are perhaps expressed most fervently in the realm of TV comedy, where the unifying theme is universal contempt of Trump. Hating the president is one thing: that’s natural, and perhaps even healthy. But the hate exhibited by contemporary late night comedians is so predictable and banal that it feels like a dreary commercial monoculture, with nothing interesting or surprising ever said. Firing off zesty jokes about Trump’s personal vulgarities is, today, the farthest thing from subversive humor, and generally evokes not laughter but a keen awareness that the joke-tellers are all operating from the same wearisome premise. So in search of a comic foil, the TV hosts have latched eagerly onto Mueller, the former FBI director and George W. Bush appointee.
The pinnacle of Trump-era comedic banality, Saturday Night Live, set a new standard for worshipful absurdity last week when they offered up a Mueller holiday tribute song, ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You,’ professing their anxious desire for him to issue a Final Report that lands Trump in the Big House. ‘I just want to sleep at night. Please make sure your case is tight,’ the assembled comediennes sang, while a portrait of Mueller wearing a Santa hat levitated overhead. The cutesy carol made reference to Trump-Russia bit-players such as Roger Stone and Alex Van Der Zwaan – the latter a man so obscure that you have to be a real obsessive to have the slightest idea who he is. It says much that SNL writers apparently assume their viewers are as fanatically invested in every minute twist-and-turn of this saga as they evidently are.
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None of these routines reflect original thinking, comedic imagination, insightful satire, or even the kind of crotchety cynicism once embodied (imperfectly) by David Letterman. They are simply taking the conventional news narratives blasted everyday across cable news and Twitter, and putting a trite quasi-humorous spin on it. Which would be nothing new: it’s not like Jay Leno was some fight-the-power comedic renegade. But no one ever thought Leno was leading the charge against the establishment, and certainly no one ever looked to him as a political role model. This current crop of late nighters, in contrast, tend to style themselves as rabble-rousing truth-tellers standing up to the big mean government, while parroting an anti-Trump line that has its genesis in the literal establishment, namely the FBI. They feign subversiveness as a marketing strategy, because there’s nothing legitimately subversive about anything they ever do. In fact, they lend credence to the silly idea that backing Trump is actually the real subversive act, as Americans rightly observe that almost all major mainstream cultural institutions are implacably arrayed against him.
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To understand how late night comedy got so uniquely tedious, it’s instructive to consider Colbert in particular. He first emerged as a protegée of Jon Stewart, whose Daily Show received such adulation in the early-and-mid 2000s because Stewart appeared to be doing something different and, yes, subversive – castigating the media for its illogical deference to power, a sorely needed antidote in the years of George W. Bush. (Whether this schtick was truly subversive is another question, but it did at least seem that way for a time.) The popular TV comedians of today, conversely, are the polar opposite of subversive. Nothing about their daily pillorying of Trump challenges conventional wisdom, because unrestrained personal animus for Trump is the defining characteristic of conventional wisdom. When Bush was waging the Iraq War, he did so bolstered by a media consensus that cast him and his cause in an honorable light, and depicted his critics as screeching anti-war freaks.
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But Stewart still had a knack for identifying frivolous media narratives, and mocking the absurd pretensions which undergirded them. Now the Daily Show sensibility is the entertainment media’s chief pretension, having seeped into the rest of the TV atmosphere. You can now watch what seems like several dozen multi-millionaire comedians doing the same cheeky news-rundown every day, in a style that clearly harkens to Stewart but lacks any of the dynamism that made what he did appear fresh.
Everyone knew Stewart was a liberal, and that liberals likely comprised the entirety of his writing staff, but his liberalism was not the defining feature of the show. The defining feature was media critique; the deconstructing of stuffy journalistic pathologies that made the 2000s political landscape so ridiculous and maddening. Stewart’s approach was far from 100 percent noble, and it often came packaged with certain hoary pretensions of its own. But at least it was something new, and seemingly, necessary. Now the latter-day Colbert style – shorn of everything that once made it unique – has become the status quo, and not only is it unnecessary (and unfunny), it’s a stale emblem of everything wrong with the wider cultural reaction to Trump.
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Housing crisis skit, blaming borrowers, lazy, greedy
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/won ... al-crisis/
Setting aside the question of the banking sector's culpability, one clear conclusion from the new paper seems to be that too much blame has been assigned to the poor. More affluent households borrowed excessively as well, and many of them also relied on dangerous unconventional loans.
After the crisis, banks withdrew credit abruptly from low-income clients. As a result, the rate of homeownership among the poor declined even further, from 43 percent in 2000 to 39 percent in 2015, Adelino and his colleagues write. Homeownership among better off households has also declined, but less so.
Pushing so many poor would-be homeowners from the market might not have improved the overall stability of the housing sector, Adelino said. On the other hand, Americans have long regarded an investment in a home as the way to establish a comfortable, middle-class standard of living.
“The burden of the reduction in credit was borne — I think, in that case, disproportionately — by low-income households,” he said.
“There’s a lot of class bigotry involved,” Fiderer said. “People think, 'Oh, well, what happened was people who shouldn’t have bought homes bought homes because of easy credit, and that’s what happened.'”
https://archives.cjr.org/the_audit/cnbc ... p?page=all
The people are revolting
….
Bernie, here to ruin everything, burn it down
(obama americans don’t want to tear down system)
Seth meyers on louis statement, worked at different times
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj5EMbZUYps
Net Worth: $500 million
Lorne Michaels is an American-Canadian television producer and writer. His net worth amounts to $500 million.
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https://www.pajiba.com/subcategories/sn ... el-che.php
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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011 ... late-night
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https://www.salon.com/2013/09/26/saturd ... too_white/
Live from New York.
The complete, uncensored history of Saturday Night Live
Pg 8-9
In the decades to come, the success of SNL sparked a renaissance in topical, satirical, and political humor…
...and helped bestow upon the comedy elite the hip-mythic status that rock stars had long enjoyed.
Pg 147
One charge that plagued SNL was that the show was a boys club, which meant women had to struggle first for admission and then for recognition.
Pg 159
One of Michael’s rules was, no groveling to the audience either in the studio or at home. In those first five years especially, SNL writers were not pleased when a studio audience applauded some social sentiment or political opinion in a sketch or “Weekend Update” item. The writers wanted laughs, not consensus.
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Everything wasn’t made easy and lazy and served up predigested.
Pg176
Jane Curtain: Garrett was treated horribly, horribly-by the writers, by some of the performers, and Lorne.
Pg192
Jean Doumanian, executive producer: You have to remember, the show had been biased against women for a long time.
Pg222
Barry Blaustein:
Reagan’s election set the tone. There was a kind of impending doom hanging over the country, and there was palpably a move toward conservatism at the network. We tried ideas for sketches that the network would shoot down. The censors would say, “You can’t do that.” We’d point out they did something similar three years earlier, and the censor would say, “Yeah, but that was then, this is now. Things are different.” There would be no mention of the Iran hostage crisis.
Pg365
Sinead
Pg383
It’s not the place for a black guy, it’s not the hippest place, man. We used to always get the black acts the year they were finished. Like the music acts. So we got Hammer when he did “Too Legit to Quit,” when he did the Addams Family theme song, on his way out. We get Whitney Houston on the way out. I’m just telling the truth, man.
Who wrote for me? Me, man. Just me. No black writers and no one really got into that side of the culture. Half the culture’s into some form of hip-hop sensibility, half of the white culture, it’s not just a black thing, but the show’s never really dealt with that part of the culture. Even now.
Pg387
Fred Wolf, head writer
Janeane Garofalo was awful on the show. She had it completely and totally wrong. She’s a very, very insecure person. She was my friend….
Pg432
Norm:
We wanted “update” to be good, but we didn’t think we had to pander. If the rest of the show was pandering, then we thought we wouldn’t have to. So then I started getting the sense that they were unhappy.
…
My response was, I hate applause. I don’t like an audience applauding because to me that’s like a cheap kind of high. They kind of control you. They’re like, “Yeah, we agree.” That’s all they’re doing, saying they agree with your viewpoint. And while you can applaud voluntarily, you can’t laugh voluntarily-you have to laugh involuntarily-so I hate when an audience applauds. I don’t want to say things that an audience will agree with, I don’t want to say anything that an audience already thinks. And so the thing with “update” was not to do these same jokes where you said that, you know, Pat Buhanan was a Nazi or some ridiculous thing that wasn’t true but that everyone would applaud because they’d already heard it somewhere else, Update was never a big pep rally when I was there.
…
Pg441
Ralph Nader
In general, on the weekly news “update” they bat about .275. More than one out of four is really good. But there is some redeeming value to it. When the realistic freedom of dialogue and public discourse is restricted in any society, the quality of satire increases. That’s why the best satire in the world in the latter half of the twentieth century was in the Soviet Union, like Krokodil magazine. Our satire couldn’t come close to the satire in the Soviet bloc countries, because it was the only way they could get anything across.
We’re moving into that arena now, only it isn’t the government that’s doing it. It’s the censorship of the monetized moguls who run the communications industry and the television-radio industry. I think over time, ther’ve been a lot of stupid and gross things on Saturday Night Live, but it does get across some curent events with it’s skits and its “Weekend Update.” That is just a reflection of the decay of our culture. When the culture decays and the communications media decay, then something as weak as a .275 hitter on Saturday Night Live shines.
Pg443
Alec Baldwin
I would say the shows less politically wicked than it used to be. Now they make fun of people, but they don’t make fun of people and make a political statement at the same time. It doesn’t seem that it’s as biting satirically as it was before. They should be having a field day with those two huge oil whores that we have in there now, Cheney and Bush. God, you could be just cooking them and eating them every week.
Pg 450 James Downey
Someone did a survey of college students…
Over the years I think there have been some heavy handed elements to the political stuff we’ve done. I think we’ve done a lot of good stuff too. To me it’s most fun when the tone is silly and there’s no anger and our stance is wiseass, uninvolved detachment. I think that works better for everybody. We don’t like to think we’re getting laughs by just saying, “George W. Bush is an idiot.” There has to be more to it than that.
Pg 480 Rick Ludwin, NBC Vice President for Late Night
There have been a couple of times where I have to play judge Wapner in a dispute between broadcast standards and the writers or performers.
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Another week Smigel did a cartoon about global business, GE being one of them, and their connections to Ted Kacynski, the serial bomber. The notion that global business were running the world was basically the theme of the piece. It was a very clever sketch. When I saw it, I immediately passed it up the line, to whoever was in charge, because I wanted everyone to know what was going on. Standards tentatively okayed it, and we put it on, and it aired once. But then it got pulled from the repeats. And Smigel, I remember was all upset about it being taken out of repeats. I said, “Robert, it got on the air. You were not censored. It got on the first time.” It got on once-but never again.
Pg 481
Robert Wright
The other one ran, but I think it didn’t get repeated.
Pg 512 authors
Throughout the run, of course, the show was treasured by the network for the demographic profile of its viewers - youngish and affluent, the advertisers’ favorites - and today networks read demographic tea leaves more religiously than they do the numbers of total viewers and households.
Pg 522
Al Gore on hosting
...Oh it was great fun hosting. I had a blast and so did Tipper.
…Our second oldest daughter, Kristin, is a comedy writer working in Hollywood, and she has a number of friends who are on the writing staff at SNL that she knew from the Harvard Lampoon days, so they invited her to come and participate during the week. So we had a little inside track in getting into the minds of what was coming up…
Pg 544
Tina Fey
There have always been women stars on the show, because no matter what’s happening in the table-read room, the audience picks who are the stars. Gilda was a star, and in my opinion Jan and Nora and Victoria were stars of that era. But I think we had enough of a shift in the Makeup of the writing staff, and we had Beth McCarthy as a female director - We just had more women in that room. And so not for any political reason, but they laughed at things that the women were doing that maybe the men didn’t get on the same level. If you were doing your same bit in a room of all white men it’s not necessarily going to play the same. I mean, an easy example is - not that these sketches hold up in any way - we used to write, Lori Nasso and I used to write, these parodies of The View, and some of the men would say, “What is this, is this a real thig?” And I would go, “Yeah, it’s a thing and at least it’s a chance for all the women cast to get out.” And then it played, and they were like, “Oh, okay.” So it wasn’t like they were adamantly against it, but if it had been the guys it wouldn’t have played because the real show wasn’t on their radar. And so I think by the time, Molly and Ana and Cheri did - and again, you know, talk about stars, you cannot say that Cheri Oteri and Molly Shannon were not huge stars at SNL; and you had Paula Pell, you had Lori Nasso, you had Cindy Caponera, you had more women in the room - and by the time Maya and Kristen and Amy and Dratch got there they didn’t have to do the side work of, like, proving that it made sense for them to be on. They just came in, they killed at the table, they had tremendous confidence, and they got their stuff on.
Pg 557
Author
Gore appeared first in a cold open that envisioned the United States as it might have been under a Gore presidency - which was written by his then-twenty -nine-year-old daughter, former SNL staff writer Kristin Gore.
Pg 558
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, host:
You know, when I hosted in 2006 for the first time, Tina was the head writer, so there was already a very female-friendly culture in place and a plethora of capable, funny, very strong, creative female cast members on the show in addition to writers. Oh, and by the way, it wasn’t until, like, halfway through the week that I discovered that I was the first female cast member ever to return as host. Can you imagine that?
Pg 561
Finesse Mitchell:
...Theres a lot of hip and there’s a lot of urban and hip-hop out there, and there’s so many tings that could be funny, but SNL doesn’t necessarily tap into it because they don’t as a whole have that frame of reference. So by the time your trying to convince them that this is what’s really funny and this is what’s going on right now, Chappelle would’ve already done it on Chapelle’s Show. And then there was the aspect of you may write a joke differently and they just may not get it. Or you may do a reverse joke where sometimes it’s kind of obvious that, “Hey, the black guy is the butt of the joke, I get it, that’s funny,”, but then sometimes you can write a segment from the black perspective where the white person is the butt of the joke and they don’t necessarily get it. Sometimes that was frustrating because you couldn’t tell if they didn’t want to get it or if they didn’t get it.
Pg 581
Horatio Sanz:
I don’t think the show itself has ever let its freak flag fly in the last twenty years. I think Lornes very concerned with being neutral so he wants to make fun of everyone. But I think it’s hard. He doesn’t want the show to be this liberal bash rag. In fact, I think he may be a little more conservative than he lets on, and I think he’s prideful of the fact that the show doesn’t go 100 percent left and bash everything on the right. And you also have Jim Downey, who’s bascially the Karl Rove of SNL. He’s always writing the right-wing sketches, and honestly I think a lot of times they’re out of tune with the audience. Lorne really loves them and of course Downey’s a great writer, brilliant, he’ been there forever, but I think Lorne sometimes leans too much on Downey and not enough on guys like Seth. Basically in the last couple of years, it’s been Seth going up against Downey to set the show’s tone on politics, and I think we could definetly been harder on the right. They deserved it, and we dropped the ball as far as getting them.
Pg 582
Robert Smigel
I had a million notes from Standards over the years, but it wasn’t until my last season that the network refused to air a “TV Funhouse.” It was a live-action one that was meant to be about racism and profiling…
When the standards people freaked, Lorne fought them…
The next week I was there before dress rehearsal and Lorne said, “I have a plan.” Obama, in the early stages of his campaign, was doing a cameo in the cold open. Lorne told me he would show my sketch to Obama in his office. “If Obama thinks it’s okay, they won’t be able to argue it.” I just kind of stared blankly and said, “Okay.”
Lorne Michaels:
I showed it to Obama, because if he had any discomfort with it, I didn’t want it to appear. We went to one of the back dressing rooms and watched it. He said, “It’s funny, but no, I don’t think so,” and I went, “Okay.” So we took it off.
Pg596
Brian Williams:
I don’t think we can corectly asses yet, the shows impact on politics or popular culture…
I think it has an immeasurable ability to set the agenda. Now, is it mostly for an audience of the “coastal intelligentsia”? Perhaps…
Pg659
James Downey
I used to write this stuff with Al Franken when we started out; I was a standard-issue Harvard graduate commie and Al was, like, a Democratic Party Stalwart. He was wherever the party was, and I had contempt for the partisan stuff. And I became more conservative over the years, to the point where I’m now a conservative Democrat, which means in Hollywood terms I’m a McCarthyite, I suppose. But I have to say, and even Franken agrees with me - I’ve talked to him about this - that the last couple of seasons of the show were the only two in the show’s history where we were totally like every other comedy show: basically, an arm of the Hollywood Democratic establishment…
We just stopped doing anything which could even be misinterpreted as a criticism of Obama…
Pg 661
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