SNL This Season? *Yawn*

So since I was a kid, I have loved improv sketch comedy. It was a great laugh-escape drug from my overly serious, toxic family, whom I gradually became allergic to 😂

Originally, it was The Carol Burnett Show - she was my hero.

The sketches were hilarious, the entire cast was hilarious, but Carol was unafraid to contort her face or do weird voices, as a woman - she wasn't afraid to look "unpretty" for a minute to make people laugh, which was especially brave for a woman at the time.

I used to do impressions of Carol's impressions of the Queen, Nora Desmond, and The Pigeon Lady, just to crack my friends up.

And who can forget the Gone With the Wind Parody, where she plays Scarlett, who doesn't just make a dress out of her curtains, when she descends the stairs to make and entrance, she's actually wearing the curtain rod as well! 😂

A few years later, after I was allowed to watch it (or would sneak and watch it at friends houses), I transitioned to SNL as a favorite ...

... and it's sister show, SCTV from Canada ... 

You should be able recognize all the original cast members of both shows, by now - but did you know they were all almost exclusively alumni originally from Second City - Chicago or Second City - Toronto improv sketch-comedy troupes?

In fact, the SC in SCTV stands for Second City.

Only Larraine Newman came from LA's The Groundlings, but it was still on-stage improv sketch-comedy experience.

This will be important later, keep reading.

I loved these shows so much that I used to write little comedy sketches for my neighborhood friends and I to put on for our parents, which we thought were hilarious, but were often met with crickets by parents. 

In fact, I think they weren't even sure the sketches were over, when we were done ... so it took several seconds to clap afterwards. 😂

To be fair, only one of our parents sets watched or even understood SNL humor - and also, we were 9 😂

And we weren't redoing SNL skits, we made up our own.

The only skit I really remember was kind of a medley of parodies of 70s commercials we parodied that we thought were dumb. 

One sketch was a parody of this commercial for a laundry stain-remover product, oddly called "Shout"  - and I didn't understand why,.

I mean, I did, but I didn't. 

The commercial would say "Shout it out" meaning the stain.

What a ridiculous name for a laundry product.

And worse, if you're going to name it something so ridiculous, why not play up the name and at least make the commercial funny?

So I redid it - I made it a parody sketch, where some little girl comes in crying about grass stains on her new dress and the narrator says "Don't fret, shout it out," so her mother takes a bullhorn and shouts:

 "HEY -  GET OFF OF HER NEW DRESS, YE GRASS STAIN DEMON!"

Then the mom sprays down the little girl with a hose, hooked up to a bottle of Shout, and the little girl runs away screaming, forever traumatized by Shout 😂

Sorry, I know that was 9-year-old humor - but I still think that's funny? 😂

Okay, not the funniest - but now that I think about it, I wonder if it was less about being unfunny and more about some of those parents being very serious, and sometimes very addicted - either to substances or religion - as the reason only a few parents laughed rather than staring blankly at us and blinking? 😉 😂

Who knows, maybe it was both - we weren't as funny as we thought we were as 9-year-olds AND our parents had some serious issues, which we now know they did, for sure.

Then again, it takes so little to make me giggle anyway. 

Humor is my coping skill, always has been. I can get to an anxious place where I lose my sense of humor for a day or so, but I always remember it and get it back, thank God.

As an aside, I could only do this with good friends, never at school  with the rich, cool kids or with teachers - our parents' reactions didn't exactly give confidence, right? 

And there's no way I could do any of that now, anytime, anywhere, except maybe with my husband, or my little sister, because she gets it and we can play off each other like that, and she's not afraid at all to do any of it!

Otherwise,  I became too socially anxious/self-conscious!

Shout out to my childhood gurlz ...

... especially the neighborhood galz - Margie, Susan, Jerrie Lynn, Jackie, Darlene, Amy ...

...  school friends, Robin, Shannon, Chris(tine), and Elissa ...

...  church friends, Heidi and Damaris ...

.

Wherever you are now, and despite being surprisingly very different people than we were then - thank you for subjecting yourselves to those ridiculous skits that I coerced you to into doing! 😂

I know that unlike most other kids in our affluent community, most of you weren't dealt the greatest hands in life, either, but we had each other, and we had a fun, safe escape from all that - we had a great time, didn't we?  😊

But back to my point - all of this to say, this year, not even a slight smile with SNL, this season, all the skits are bombing.

In fact, I'm afraid it might be the death year for SNL and is the first time I've ever turned it off mid show out of boredom. 

Now, I realized that SNL was going to be different, this year, with major cast shakeups, but we've had that before and it turned out okay, so I gave it a chance.

I also give them a couple of episodes to get their footing.

I also realize that new cast members are given less screentime until they prove themselves.

And yet by the third show, it's getting worse instead of better?

So here's what's wrong, IMO ...

For starters, this is a show that was originally built on parody impressions and recurring absurd, OTT characters - and there are few, if any, this season.

Sorry - the recurring Domingo sketch you cold-opened with, last night, instead of your political sketch doesn't count.

It was only moderately funny to begin with, but there's nothing new, here, nothing fresh - it's just the same joke over and over, we're sick of it already.

I mean when the writers and actors themselves would create a sketch, if not parodying famous people or politicians, would then parody someone  in their family,  or their former selves growing up as nerds, or even someone they met on the subway or at a local deli.

And they always kept it fresh, something new, a new situation - not the same people over and over with the same joke.

Like the local diner "Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, no Coke, Pepsi" guy, from a local diner, which the cast found funny.

Or taking a local deli guy with knifing skills and dragging it out to the point of the absurd by making him a Samurai?

Or consummate nerds, Todd and Lisa Leubner, based on exaggerated version of how they saw themselves, growing up ...

Previously, the majority of the cast could do impressions and create recurring absurd characters, willing to go out on that limb and be OTT and absurd, while just the minority plays the "straight men" - but now it's flipped. Most of the cast are "straight men" and only the minority are willing to be absurd.

Virtually no one but Bowen Yang and Marcello Hernandez are capable of doing impressions, with the exception of James Austin Johnson, but only when he's playing Trump.


Chloe Fineman and Mikey Day are your next best bets, and yet still no defining, recurring character skits or impressions.

(The weak attempt at the Domingo sketch as the cold open sketch last night doesn't count - it was kinda funny the first 2 times, but it's just the same thing over and over, nothing new here.)

And in the end, do you know what the real problem with SNL is, this year, Ladies and Gentlemen?

No, not that they're playin it safe because of politics, because they aren't, with the exception of the Domingo cold open rather than political.

The biggest problem is - and I just checked to be sure - not a single new cast member is an alum from an improv troupe -  Second City, The Groundlings, or even the new pipeline for improv sketch comedy talent, Upright Citizens Brigade in NYC.

Sorry, but you MUST have that night-after-night on-stage improv comedy sketch experience, to feel out your audience, what's working, what isn't, and how to adjust.

You CANNOT just put a bunch of snarky, stand-up comedians  or writers who don't do impressions or characters on stage doing improv comedy sketches and expect them to be funny - sorry.


That HAS happened, and it worked - but you better also do impressions, voices, and faces.

In other words, if you've only done standup before, you better be Eddie Murphy or Adam Sandler.

(Or Marcelo Hernandez, who had no improv experience, only standup, but is just a a natural OTT hams.)

At SNL's inception, the entire cast were from either Second City Chicago or Toronto or The Groundlings in LA - or the newest troupe, the SCNYC spinoff started by Amy Poehler,  the UCB (Upright Citizens Brigade in NYC (Kate McKinnon and Bowen Yang being alumni).

This year, we've dwindled down to only only 4 people with live stage improv troupe alumni experience - Chloe Fineman, Mikey Day, Ashley Padilla, and Bowen Yang - with the first 3 being interesting enough to watch, but still no recurring, OTT, absurd impressions or characters.

Lastly, you MUST give the new cast time to together to practice playing off each other and finding their chemistry.

All previous casts will tell you that either they worked together before from SC or the Groundlings  or they played behind the scenes to learn how to play off each other and fine-tune characters.

When you start an almost completely new cast who don't know each other from prior stage-troupe experience, and start filming in September, what did you expect?

Sigh, come on, SNL, you've had bad seasons before, but you're playing it so safe now you're boring the heck out of us like never before!