Saturday Night Dead

For at least as long as I've been watching Saturday Night Live, people have complained that the show isn't as good as it used to be. Some of the complaints can be chalked up to simple nostalgia, but in the last few years it has grown impossible to deny that the flagship of sketch comedy is sinking.

As a true believer in the beauty of sketch, I take offense at the standards of writing and performance that air Saturday nights at 11:30. I've done my tour in the bush leagues of sketch and have friends who are still cutting their teeth at the Groundlings and elsewhere. So, am I a pro? No. But I do know what good sketch comedy looks like.

Most sketches are either character or concept pieces. A few years ago, SNL became obsessed with trying to turn concept sketches into character sketches. Take the cheerleader sketch Will Ferrel and Cheri Oteri - a funny one-off concept sketch. But because the bit hit once, they did a dozen or so more variations of exactly the same skit. Same jokes, same setup, same everything. Goth Talk, Mango, The Lovers - it's tough to recall a funny concept that didn't turn into a never-ending loop of the same damn thing.

But the days of repetition gave way to something even worse. The dominant structure for recent sketches seems to be to come up with a zany character and then just have them clown around. What the hell is supposed to be funny about Tracy Morgan's Brian Fellows character, or Maya Rudolph's Donatella Versace, or anything performed by Horatio Sanz? These skits have all the comic sophistication of one of the fraternity brothers putting on a wig and a skirt.

There will always be skits that bomb, or concepts that look better on paper, but in many recent SNL sketches it's impossible to tell what the joke is even supposed to be. If you watch closely, you'll notice a few seconds of pause between when the sketch ends and when the crowd applauds. Why? Because the sketches are so directionless, so lacking in structure, so wholly unsatisfying that it's hard to know when they're over.

I know what most of you are thinking - if SNL is so lousy, why don't you just stop watching? You're right and I wish I could. But as bad as it gets, I keep coming back for more. I'm in an abusive relationship with SNL. I just wish the writers and performers would go to counseling so things would be like they used to be.