I want to retract my previous praise of SNL. After Louis Ck was no longer in control, the show sucked. The music sucked, and even the weekend update sucked.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Bill Joel since the benefit last night. I chased the girls around the house earlier- “A bottle of Lily, a bottle of Rosie, perhaps a bottle of Tunchie instead.”
What they don’t know won’t hurt them, I guess.
guachi
I remember when I was a big SNL watcher in the late ’80s. Watched every episode and even the reruns. The skits in the second half were typically good, but often not the kind that were big laugh getters.
My favorite was a skit (not live, it was taped) with Phil Hartman and Jan Hooks playing an older married couple remembering younger days. Not humorous in the least, but incredibly sweet.
*edit* and here’s a link! http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xgwchp_love-is-a-dream_shortfilms
amk
You blood thirsty monster. Leave the critters ALONE.
freelancer
You apparently made it to the Zog skit.
Keith
Unfortunately, the Weekend Update is when I started watching. The only funny part I caught was when CK forgot his line during the Zog skit and lauged about “the something ether”.
eemom
Bill Joel? You’ve been listening to a couple Bill Joel tunes?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
I will respectfully disagree on this point. I think Fun. is a pretty good band- and I don’t care for much in the modern (read: current) pop/rock vein.
Hill Dweller
Seven is a good movie, but Brad Pitt is awful in the final scene. His inability to destroy said scene with overacting is a testament to the direction and other performances.
freelancer (iPhone)
The late bar skit is pretty funny.
Narcissus
The very last skit was good
Yeah what he said
Eljai
I switched my car radio to an 80s station the other morning after NPR’s election coverage started pissing me off again and I landed on Billy Joel singing “My Life” and before I knew it I was singing along at the top of my lungs, but if you tell anyone I will have to kill you. On the other hand, “go ahead with you own life, leave me alone” seems like an appropriate lyric to say to damn near any republican running for office these days, so maybe I just lucked into some on the spot music therapy.
Triumph
The last skit was awesomesauce. Not sure learning of the existence of “Fun” was worth it all, though.
This will surprise no one who knows be, but I hate Fun.
Paul W.
I liked it, it’s too bad you watched a different show.
nice strategy
John, check the lyrics to that fun. song. A young soldier’s doubt. Good stuff.
meadrus
“Seven” is a steaming pile of adolescent nihilist horseshit.
trollhattan
Silver shoves Willard below 15%. Good night, Willard; good night, y’all.
magurakurin
@meadrus: I don’t know if I would go that far, I’d reserve that for the likes of Babble and Crash, but Seven was way, way to dark for me and the Brad Pitt character didn’t seem to deserve his “punsihment” at all. I would say the film was nihilistic. It seemed a bit like a failed art film. I felt that the Morgan Freeman character was in Purgatory. In the plot he is about to retire and get out of police work and through the film there are many shots up to the skies through darkened alleys and such, as if the character was looking upward to Heaven he would soon enter. But at the end he is denied and will have to continue his wait. I never watched that film again, just too creepy.
The Sailor
I thought Seven was a good movie. But I never want to see it again. Which is how I know it was a good movie. Something that disturbs me that much …
PeakVT
Check out the cover of this week’s New York Magazine.
JGabriel
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Question: Why do privation and deprivation mean the same thing?
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Dream On
Don’t feel bad – I have no idea or guess who Lous CK is. At all.
Saturday Night Live (for I believe this is the SNL that you refer to) is a right of passage. Every generation remembers what they saw between age 14 and 17 as “the best”. Myself, I remember Phil Hartman and Dana Carvey as being “the best”, even though I have no real reason to believe this to be true. One generation’s Jon Lovitz is another generation’s Ackroyd. And Rob Schenider’s “xerox man” is another Chevy Chase’s… something. As for “It’s Pat” – well, it is and was always basically fun dated junk.
And then we grow up.
Haven’t watched the show in years.
JGabriel
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PeakVT:
Nice photo. It looks like giant hand reached down and charred a third of Manhattan.
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Dream On
@magurakurin: I remember “Seven” too well. I got a ride with two college friends, found the film almost evil in its cruelty, and would have left the theater if I had a ride to get home. I did not, and had to suffer through it. While I sometimes feel Gwyneth Paltrow deserves any fate she and her Coldplay husband experience, I know her character did not.
A traumatic experience, and a genuine debate about style versus message. I think most David Fincher movies fall on the wrong side of this. What point and value is it to convey cruelty with style? Stanley Kubrick did it in “Clockwork Orange” – but man, I still don’t know what I feel about that one. And he was a visual provocative genius. Fincher is not.
NotMax
SNL’s curse is that it became established as mainstream rather than edgy and experimental.
It’s been a rapid downhill slide since the Charles Rocket faux pas.
Chris
SNL is a steamy pile left behind in the park grass, but as long as it gave me at one time…
Charles Barkley 1v1 Barney the Dinosaur
Phil Hartman as Clinton jogging to McDonalds
Harry Shearer and Martin Short as synchronised swimmers, one of whom can’t swim
Will Ferrell in about everything – MORE COWBELL
Chris Farley in the cheesefry booth for Da Bears (I’m from Chicago, so I should add Cheezburgers from Belushi as well)
Eddie Murphy, James Brown Celebrity Hot Tub, and Kill My Landlord
and Lazy Sunday Chronicles of Narnia
I’ll forgive it.
scav
@JGabriel: While poor in themselves, they were afire with ambition to beat flammable and inflammable at the pairs competition in the Word Olympics?
SiubhanDuinne
@Chris:
No love for Toonces, the Cat Who Could Drive a Car?
Schlemizel
I get that William Joel – I would never call him Bill ;) can be kind of schlocky but some of his stuff does get you to sing along. Then there are several of his songs that I really like on an emotional level, they mostly don’t get air time. “And so it goes” is really a lovely song about the fear of a new relationship. “Leningrad” has meaning because I am of that generation and met ‘evil commie’ kids through an exchange program in the 60s and discovered they were humans not monsters. “These Are the Days To Remember” hits me too, probably an age thing.
Yeah, he’s schlocky & trying to pull heart strings but he is pretty good at it but he crafts decent songs to do it and the sing-alongs are just fun.
Josie
@Chris: Steve Martin and Dan Ackroyd as “Two Wild and Crazy Guys” – too old?
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
Chevy Chase interviews Richard Pryor for a janitor job… or Pryor and Belushi manning the Samurai Hotel.
Schlemizel
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko:
Can you even try to imagine the outrage if SNL tried to anything like the interview bit today? The show would be pulled in mid-episode & replaced with a “technical difficulties” card before Pryor got the word “honkie” half way out of his mouth. In many ways we have moved backwards on the whole topic of race.
I wonder if they would even allow Eddy Murphy’s “White Like Me” bit on TV today.
BTW – Pryor did the samurai shtick as well as Belushi, that was a funny piece
Bobby Thomson
@guachi:
Yep. Never really felt like watching that show again after Hartman was gone.
Bobby Thomson
@Dream On:
Because it’s objectively true. I wasn’t in that age group at the time.
Jim Pharo
The food was terrible — and such small portions!
SNL is always uneven. I thought Louis CK was disappointing more or less across the board — and I LOVE me some Louis CK. Seen his act a bunch of times, etc. And Kate MacKinnon is not really growing on me. Nasim Pedrad remains tragically underused. Teran (whatever his name is) who handled the Thing Called Doocy in the opening, was thereafter absent. Even Jay Pharaoh (sadly, only a very, very distant relation) was taking the night off.
Frankly, Update was one of the few highlights, though Jason Sudekis’ R-Money seemed pretty perfunctory to me. I’d guess a lot of writers had no power, etc. during the week, and it showed.
Bill E Pilgrim
Bill Joel. Works down in accounting. Hell of a guy. Has a little band on the side, for weddins, office picnics. Those guys rock. They alternate with Bob Marsdale and the Whalers, Bob’s in sales, over in the seafood division.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Bobby Thomson: I agree. I wasn’t anywhere near that age group at the time and thought those guys were hilarious, and not much before or since.
I also had seen Hartmann and Lovitz as members of The Groundlings in LA before they were on TV, and thought they were funny there also. Lovitz did his pathological liar schtick between acts while they moved things around behind him, he’d say “They asked me to talk to you a little here while they move props, because…er, (glancing sideways).. I RUN the joint here, yeah, that’s it…”
catclub
@JGabriel: same reason sanction and sanction mean opposite things
catclub
@SiubhanDuinne: I just saw a piece of music that was from ‘Paunsanias the Betrayer’ by Handel
and thought ‘Toonces the Betrayer’
Not sure why. I
Maxwel
LSU wins if their coach is mugged and spends the game in the hospital. Roll the dice, Les!
Villago Delenda Est
“General Francisco Franco is still dead!”
“Candygram!”
“The Bass-o-matic”
“My wife…Morgan Fairchild. Yeah…that’s the ticket!”
Bill E Pilgrim
@JGabriel: Both come from privare in Latin, which means to take from. Deprive is from de + privare, with de implying “completely” or “entirely”.
The problem is with “de”, which we tend to think of as “un” as in “do and undo”, but in Latin and other languages it stands for lots of other things also, from, of, totally, etc.
Rafer Janders
@The Sailor:
No, that means Seven was a well-made movie, was an effective movie. That’s not the same thing as it being a good movie.
Rafer Janders
@Dream On:
No need for the “almost”.
Joel
@Rafer Janders: Yes; like Avatar (h/t Plinkett).
Bex
Sheezboiger, sheezboiger, sheezboiger.
You look fabulous!
Bex
One more…I’m verklempt!”
BobS
@Dream On: That’s not exactly true. There were a bunch of us who were watching at the beginning of SNL who were approximately the age of the performers and were high on some of the same substances as the performers who felt that the anarchic brand of comedy on SNL (with the bonus of great music) was the first time network tv made a show for us.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@NotMax:
Not quite. There was the season in the mid-80s when they brought in the pros: Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest, Martin Short, and Harry Shearer. And they kept Eddie Murphy from the disaster season.
After that, it was just occasional bits (The Pathological Liar, Wayne’s World) and Weekend Update when the anchors were good (Amy Poehler, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers.
Other than that, suckage.
muddy
@Bex: Sheezborgie is what my dog thinks he’s getting at a drive-through.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Chris:
The entire episode hosted by Michael Jordan was great, from beginning to end. I’ve watched a lot of SNL, and it’s the only perfect one.
bjacques
I *saw* the Charles Rocket fiasco when it aired. During the closing credits, after the “Who Shot C.R.” skit went nowhere. “I wanna know who the fuck shot me!” The whole (1979?) season was a disaster. Producer Jean Doumanian was put in charge of the comedy
The stuff that Michael O’Donoghue wrote in the first and second run…very dark.
True story. I got to go to New Orleans when SNL were taping a Mardi Gras special (1977?), with John Belushi as Mussolini (!) on the balcony of the Cabildo on Jackson Square. His line “You guys sure know how to throw a party!” And I got a glimpse of Gilda Radner earlier done up as Emily Litella.
Hell, I even remember *Howard Cosell’s* Saturday Night Live, with musical guest Abba, which was before SNL. I only remember that episode and I don’t even know if there were any others. Fittingly Abba performed “Waterloo.” On a set that looked like a sinking ship.
skippy
very rare, i’ve hardly seen it in reruns if at all, but the charles grodin hosted show was brilliant. the premise of the entire show was that grodin never bothered to show up for rehearsals, so he didn’t know any lines. instead he hoped to ingratiate himself by bringing gifts for the cast, which he handed out in the middle of the skit. also, paul simon qas muaical guest, and at one point grodin put on an art garfunkle wig and insisted on singing sounds of silence with him.
snl often had moments of brilliant comedy, but it was on a large bell curve, you had to wade thru 97% of sh!t to find it.
also, never seen again, but the sketch w/dana carvey, hartmann lovitz & etc in a nudist colony where they admired each others’ penises out loud (ending with “the penis song” – a simple refrain of the word “penis” over and over again) was the funniest moment on 90’s television.
i think it was censored out of existence.
currently, i like the new batch of ladies, almost approaching the gold of poehler, wiig, rudolf dratch and fey. i love the lesbian, and the new brunette who does the girl you are sorry you started a conversation with at a party is very funny. also teran killam is brilliant. the new guy with cock eyes, not so much. writing is slightly better than last few years, but that’s like saying you worked up from a d+ to a c- .
and i know i’m in the huge minority here, but i don’t get the jay pharoh love. i haven’t seen him do anything that aries spear didn’t better 7 years ago on mad tv.
Paul in KY
IMO, the show started sucking when they had 8 years of GWB to spoof & they only started hitting him in last 2 years of his/Cheney’s presidency.