The recent skit with Obama pushing the Bill down the steps of the Capitol repeatedly was hilarious - the song was I'm Just A Bill from Schoolhouse Rock.
Why limit it to only people who were cast members for 4+ years? That excludes lots of good people like Chevy Chase, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Chris Rock (I KNEW I was right about him being a cast member!), Janeane Garofalo, Jim Breuer... the list goes on. Is it just to keep the quiz to a manageable size?
The reason it’s stop being funny is because, to quote a recent YouTube comment I saw, ‘it’s more left wing than a KFC bucket’. Whether left or right, once you let political bias get in the way, the material will become subpar.
It's currently funnier than it's been in years. And sooner or later, people are going to need to stop crowing about political bias and accept that the current administration is a laughingstock. Not because it's a Republican administration, but because Trump is a walking punchline.
Comedy is at its best when it works against seriousness. When the administration is a laughing stock comedians have it harder actually. Just about every Trump impression that I've seen is cringeworthy, and none have been as funny as this or this.
The best one I've seen was some random guy on Twitter after Trump clapped his flippers over Goya beans. The guy did a whole skit around different kinds of Goya beans ("Here we've got black beans...some call them Chicago beans"), and it was an absolute riot. I think part of the reason it was so good was that he focused more on the beans than Trump himself, although he certainly got his digs in. I can't seem to find it now, or I'd link it. It was very creative though.
I'll agree it isn't very funny (big time leftist here) but it hasn't been very funny in a long time. It hit rock bottom around 2009 or so. And the last couple of years have been better than that (now it's just mediocre instead of bad). But it hasn't been actually funny since the early 2000's (being generous). In the 90's they made fun of Clinton (both) constantly, and it was funny. In the 70's they made fun of Ford and Carter and it was funny. They made fun of W constantly and it was usually funny. Nothing wrong with political humor, but it still has to be funny.
I'm not a big Rob Schneider fan but he truly hit the nail on the head when he said: “To me, the genius of Dana Carvey was Dana always had empathy for the people he played, and Alec Baldwin has nothing but a fuming, seething anger toward the person he plays... I don’t find his impression to be comical. Because, like I said, I know the way his politics lean and it spoils any surprise. There’s no possible surprise. He so clearly hates the man he’s playing.” SNL is suffering from TDS and will not be funny until they get therapy for it.
This is a great observation. When I think of the best SNL impressions, they're more sideswipes than broadsides. Although I also think of a glaring exception, which might be the best of all SNL's impressions: Tina Fey as Sarah Palin. It wasn't as hostile as Baldwin's Trump, probably because Tina Fey seems like a much kinder person than Alec Baldwin, but it wasn't what I would call a loving sendup. She basically just riffed on the fact that Sarah Palin is a moron.
Sadly, it's not just the political part that is no longer funny. The few non-political clips I've seen over the years have been boring and their skits go on way too long. Some of the skits I've seen were cringeworthy as the comedians would pause for the smattering of chuckles expecting full-on laughter. I think if the show was not steeped in an early history of being one that spit out some of the best comedians it would have been cancelled 15 or more years ago. When was the last time it was truly, consistently funny? Mid-'90s I would guess.
It's never really been funny all the way through. It is as good or bad as its best stars. Kate McKinnon, Kenan Thompson, and Cecily Strong are hilarious, and the two Weekend Update anchors are excellent in that role. So it basically comes down to how those people perform in a given week. Some of the names on this list...can you recall great skits built around Tim Kazurinsky, Ellen Cleghorn, or Chris Parnell? Whether the show is "good" or not for a period depends on whether they can mine talent like Eddie Murphy, Will Ferrell, Amy Poehler, or Bill Hader. The skits themselves have always been middling, mostly because it's really hard to write great comedy with six days' notice. But great performers elevate and you remember them. Go watch the last 45 minutes of any "prime" SNL season. It's still garbage.
I only watch a few clips every now and then, but I haven't watched a full episode in a long time. That said, TV programs wouldn't still be going on for nearly 50 years if nobody watches them.
I personally still enjoy it. Maybe it really isn't as good as it use to be, or maybe its some combination of nostalgia and mere-exposure effect, or maybe its both. I don't remember who said it (maybe one of the original cast members), but someone claimed "People have been saying SNL has gone downhill since episode 2". Still I do agree it has been too political in recent years and there are a lot of sketches that don’t go anywhere. The show definitely has its moments, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement
Personally I mostly just watch clips on YouTube. I feel like spending 1.5 hours a week seeing it is too much of an investment, plus the skits aren't always good enough to be worth seeing the whole way through.
And just adding on to that, I'm too young to have really seen the "good" SNL. I've seen some YouTube clips here and there and of course I've seen non-SNL works by the star comedians who used to be cast members, but overall I haven't been exposed to it much just because it's before my time. I genuinely do enjoy some modern SNL skits but not all of them and I think the cast members are funny but not comedic geniuses... hence my choice to pick out the funnier-looking skits on Youtube rather than watch all of them on TV.
It's a comedy sketch show. It used to be a huge deal because it was one-of-a-kind, but now you can find sketch comedy all over TV and the internet. Now the show is mostly surviving on its legacy and the fact that 11:30 pm on a Saturday is a weak time slot for any other show. Its biggest contribution now is serving as the launch pad for a lot of great comedic talent (from Bill Murray to Eddie Murphy to Chris Farley to Amy Poehler and Tina Fey and many beyond and in between). It does lean on political comedy a lot, mostly because that's always "current events," so the show can use its live format to capitalize on that.
That even translated well to the UK - although the other three episodes of Black Jeopardy did almost as well.
The rest, not so much. We (meaning those Brits that I have spoken about that have actually watched any of it) found Turd Ferguson's hat funnier than what he was saying. We also don't get the concept of "a roast", or why anybody would want to attend one, let alone find it funny.
Can we just admit that it was never funny?
LOL! Better than anything SNL's come up with in the last 40 years.
That even translated well to the UK - although the other three episodes of Black Jeopardy did almost as well.
The rest, not so much. We (meaning those Brits that I have spoken about that have actually watched any of it) found Turd Ferguson's hat funnier than what he was saying. We also don't get the concept of "a roast", or why anybody would want to attend one, let alone find it funny.