As those of you who read the Cherry section know, I recently tore through Live From New York, the oral history of Saturday Night Live. The first night I picked it up, I read almost three hundred pages at a shot, and I only closed the book when it started to get light out, which surprised me, for two reasons. First, I’d wanted to read the book because I’d seen the excerpts in Vanity Fair a few months back, but I’d anticipated kind of a slog once I had the whole thing in front of me, kind of like the movie previews where you laugh at the clips in the trailer, but you know you’ve just seen every funny bit the editor could wring out of ninety minutes already, so you might as well skip the movie itself. On the contrary — the book is set up and paced well, and aside from the transitions inserted by author/compiler Tom Shales, which tend towards the starstruck and which I started skipping halfway through, it’s interesting and revealing and it moves along at a good clip.

But it surprised me even more that I couldn’t put the book down because, while I like celebrity dish as much as the next girl — more, probably — I almost never watch SNL. Enough Saturday nights find me at home that I could watch it, but I never do, and I never watch the “classic” episodes on Comedy Central either. I don’t watch the show because I don’t like it. I’ve never liked it. I’ve tried to like it, in vain. Back in high school, I used to watch it every week without fail, if by “watch” I actually mean “endure the half hour leading up to Weekend Update, then turn the TV off the second Dennis Miller did that swoopy thing with his pen,” but if I hadn’t had other kids telling me all the time that I reminded them of Dennis Miller, I wouldn’t have bothered with that, either. Three quarters of the show just isn’t funny.

Oh, look — here’s the first indignant “oh, I suppose you think you could do better” email.

I don’t think I could do better, at all. I hesitate to draw any sort of parallel between SNL and what I do on Tomato Nation — different medium, different audience size, et cetera — but the SNL writers have to have ninety minutes of material ready to go by Saturday at 11:30 PM, like it or not, “feeling it” or not, finished or not, and on a much smaller scale, I can relate. I’ve chosen to stick to a consistent schedule on the site, posting a column every week at the same time regardless of whether it feels “ready” or “done” or “good” to me, and if it’s Monday afternoon and I can’t find the zone, well, too bad. It has to go up, so I do the best I can with what I’ve got and tell myself that at least it’s going up on time, so I understand that pressure, at least in part — that moment where you look at the work and say to yourself, “Well, this isn’t the best writing I’ve ever done, but it’s not going to get any better and I’ve got a deadline, so it’ll have to do.”

When I look at a year’s worth of my essays in the archives, I feel like I hit it on the sweet spot with maybe five of them. The rest of them don’t work for various reasons — I overwrote a rant trying to work up momentum, for example, or took too long setting up a joke that capsized the whole paragraph, or crossed up a pair of antecedents and stepped on my own punchline, or structured the thing in such a way that I sounded preachy and canned, got a fact wrong that stalled the piece, bricked a transition, punctuated a dialogue exchange imprecisely, marooned myself on a sidebar with no way back, didn’t correct for usage tics and wound up in Erma Bombeckville, forced an ending and whiffed it, blah blah blah. Take this line from last week’s essay:

…busboys dived behind tables bellowing, “Take cover, SHE’S GONNA BLOW,” like, tell me about it, busboys — I’ve got the entire Foley team from Dumb & Dumber living up my butt right now.

I fine-tuned that for, I kid you not, twenty minutes — most of it spent vacillating between “up my butt” and “in my butt” as the more effective prepositional phrase — and in my opinion it still doesn’t quite work. I chose wrong, for starters, because looking at it now, I think “in” works better, and I also don’t think I cooked the joke all the way through. It needs another layer of detail, one more image to finish it, and I tried, but I just couldn’t come up with it.

So if I’ll waste that much time tweaking a fart joke, why don’t I have more patience with SNL? You’d think I would give them more latitude, but it works the opposite way — a lot of times, I can see why the sketches fail, but instead of sympathizing, I just get annoyed. What’s the most common complaint about SNL? That the sketches go on too long. The cast has to stretch the skits to a certain length in order to allow for set and costume changes, and it’s impractical, if not impossible, to do fifty super-short rapid-fire bits on live TV. I get that. But SNL skits start strong, fall off a bit, fall off a bit more, and then just keep falling off while the sketch drags on into the sunrise and exhausts any goodwill it may have accumulated in its first two minutes, and it’s an ongoing problem. I understand the parameters within which the writers and actors have to work, but I also think that, after almost thirty years, the producers could have figured out a workaround of some sort, and until they do, I just can’t watch it. It’s too painful. I’ve enjoyed a lot of SNL bits in theory — Celebrity Jeopardy, the soccer hooligans, Wayne’s World, Matt Foley, the Sweeney Sisters — but in practice, two or three minutes into the scene, I start sighing, “God, cut it already.” It happens every time.

And I know they can’t just “cut it already.” I know the show has so many more variables to deal with than just the writing of a funny bit — physical blocking, costume changes, make-up, guest hosts who can’t act, guest hosts who can act but who hog the funny, upside-down cue cards, you name it. I know that the show broke new ground when it first aired, and that it plays an important role in political satire, and that it’s introduced countless catchphrases into the American lexicon — although, actually, that’s another reason I find the show so hard to watch a lot of the time. Once SNL finds a character or a sketch that gets a response, that character or sketch goes into the line-up every week until it’s beaten to death or for five years, whichever comes last. It makes perfect sense, of course — if the audience responds to Wayne’s World, you bring Wayne’s World back — but once it’s in the line-up every week, you can’t get away from the catchphrase that goes with it, because your classmates repeat it all the time and USA Today puns on it in their headlines and then it’s not funny anymore. It gets overexposed and becomes shtick, and I’ve addressed that cultural issue before so I won’t get into it again here, but Wayne’s World is a good example. I liked the sketch a lot, especially when they reviewed movies and Garth would bust out with something like, “I found it alienating and pristine,” and Wayne would sort of snort, “I thought it sucked,” or when they’d all yell, “Chick movie!” but then Garth would say he sort of liked that one and Wayne would stare at him for, like, ten minutes until Garth would obediently drone, “Haaaaated it,” and smile all nervously. The little stuff, you know. But I hated that “party oooonn, excelleeeent” business, because it felt so insincere after awhile, like pandering, and the characters didn’t need that crutch, really, but they used it anyway — they had to. A lot of people tuned in for that sketch, and they tuned in for that sketch in order to hear the catchphrases. But it soured a lot of bits, I thought. I couldn’t get through a whole Church Lady, ever. Could not do it. The “well, isn’t that special” virus had infected everyone’s speech so completely that I couldn’t stomach the real thing.

Another element I could do without: the musical guests. It’s kind of an anachronism, not just for SNL but for Conan and the other late-night guys too. Back in ’75, the kids couldn’t see these artists anywhere else on TV, but Michelle Branch is all over MTV and the internet and every show on the WB — an SNL appearance is redundant, for her and for the audience.

Anyway. I acknowledge SNL‘s importance to and in the culture (movie spin-offs excepted, because…shudder). You can insert your own knowing remark here about the zeitgeist or the role of parody in a democratic society; I haven’t studied enough sociology to pull it off. But it’s like watching Andy Warhol’s Empire. I get what Warhol’s trying to say. I recognize that it’s an important statement. I just don’t want to actually watch it, because it’s eight hours of the Empire State Building, and it’s not an experience I need to have firsthand.

A lot of people really like the show, though, and get a lot out of it, and I respect that. It’s not like I think anyone else who likes it is misguided or an idiot or anything. “Funny” is such a subjective thing, after all, and reading the SNL book really got me thinking about that. John Belushi, for example. I’ve never gotten him, at least on SNL, but he’s revered as a comic genius. I can see why, objectively — I understand how his bits work, even though they don’t work on me — but I’ve never laughed at a Belushi skit. Weekend Update is another interesting example. Nobody agrees on any element of Weekend Update, ever. It’s usually the only tolerable part of the show for me, but the Couch Baron told me on the phone today that he’s always hated it, regardless of the anchor, and he and I have very similar senses of humor. The few times I endured the segment during The Nealon Years, I considered it an insult to Miller’s legacy and couldn’t understand why they left Nealon’s corpse behind the desk to rot for four years. The Biscuit, on the other hand, loved Miller’s stand-up but viewed Norm MacDonald as the apotheosis of Weekend Update anchors. Legions of viewers wanted Colin Quinn assassinated; I thought he did an adequate job with crappy material. Chevy Chase originated the “role,” but I don’t think he’s funny on Weekend Update. In fact, I don’t think most of the famous seventies stuff is all that good, probably because the buzzwords have gotten so played, but that’s my neurosis and it doesn’t seem to bother most people.

I don’t have much use for SNL, but I wish I did, if that makes any sense — I wish I liked it, because it’s a point in the culture where so much converges, and I miss a lot of references because I don’t watch it. I didn’t see the “buh-bye” skit until years after it aired. I didn’t see the recent and notorious scary-thin Brittany Murphy show. I didn’t know Cheri Oteri had left the show until, like, last week. It does important things and sets important standards for writers and comedians, and it’s got a wonderful talent pool, but a couple of chuckles in ninety minutes isn’t a good enough ratio for me, and that’s the bottom line. Again, I don’t think I could do a better job…but I don’t think I could do better than my lawyer at his job, either. Doesn’t mean I want to watch him drafting a will for an hour and a half. You know?

November 25, 2002

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