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I can't be the only person whose interest in Saturday Night Live waned at the exact same time as being allowed to stay up late enough to watch it.
Looking back, was it ever really all that funny?
Or was it just being young and crude humor coupled with staying up past our bedtime made it seem better?
It sure as fuck doesn't seem to be funny at all anymore.
I watched it religiously with my little brother on a 10" B&W tv with rabbit ears in our bedroom from 1975 until I went to boot camp in 1981. Our lineup was Monty Python, SNL, and then SCTV. We thought it was consistently hilarious. Since then I watched it occasionally through the years through the different cast eras. I have only seen snippets of it in the past 15 years replayed on other shows once they decided to go all loony lefty libtard.
ReplyDeleteI vastly preferred SCTV, and it appears to have aged much better.
DeleteThe first few seasons were funny in a hit-and-miss sort of way. The cast of Belushi et al. Some seriously funny stuff, mixed in with 'New Yorker' kind of not-so-funny cartoon stuff.
ReplyDeleteLater casts? Very hit and miss. The Eddie Murphy "Gumby" was some funny stuff, but...
I think it may have been a situation like with "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" where the watching was much better done altered by chemicals...
And, yes, by the time I was allowed control of a TV, I was way underimpressed by SNL. Saturday night at 11:30? Time to be with gamers or girls or both!
I remember back when SNL was all the rage. It was the biggest topic of conversation at the watercooler every Monday morning. I watched it a few times, but never thought that it was very funny. It always seemed like they had to hit you over the head with their supposed humor to get a laugh. Yeah, even in its heyday it was Saturday Night Meh. Now SCTV. That was another story. I have the entire series on dvd. Still funny after all these years......
ReplyDeleteBack in the early days, when the original "Not Ready for Prime Time Players" were on, it was often hilarious. After they all left, along with a lot of the original writers, Season Six was so shrill and one-note "Reagan's evil, Reagan's evil, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare" that I just stopped watching. Even in those first five years, though, there were a lot of skits that just didn't work. That goes with the territory in that sort of show, I think---I've talked to older people who remembered the same thing about Laugh-In.
ReplyDeleteWatching the old episodes is hard if you've ever done drugs and then given them up. The amount of drug altered behaviour on display is astounding. Surely Mr and Mrs Middleamerica didn't realize how much of what they did was drug fueled...
ReplyDeleten
It was only briefly funny, say for about 5 seconds an hour, in the first couple of seasons.
ReplyDeleteThen it got worse.
Consistently.
If anyone thinks TDS was bad, go back and watch NDS for years after the man resigned, FFS, without which SNL episodes would have been about 2 minutes long. (I guess if you live in polyglot New Yawk, watching Canadian refugees diss your country is funny.)
Then ponder that Shrillary, Biden, et al are all the foam and detritus that washed up in politics because of that era.