SNL50 - In Search of More Cowbell
/Everything Old is Old Again
Saturday Night Live, the comedic cultural cornerstone, celebrated its 50th anniversary this past Sunday night with a three-and-half-hour celebratory episode.
The SNL50 show was a messy mishmash of music and sketches from different eras that accurately portrayed the overarching uneven narrative of the franchise as it paid tribute to itself.
I’ve been watching SNL from the just about the beginning and have seen the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Sunday’s SNL50 was neither of those, which makes it exactly what it should be for an anniversary show…passable.
Most of the prominent SNL players from the show’s long history were there with some notable exceptions. Of course, there have been some all-time greats who have gone on to their eternal reward much too soon, people like John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Chris Farley, Phil Hartman, and Jan Hooks. But notable absences on stage beyond the dearly departed were iconic SNL stars like Chevy Chase, Dan Akroyd, Billy Crystal, Dana Carvey and Bill Hader.
There were some very big comedy stars there though.
Eddie Murphy was like a tiger re-released into the jungle…he devoured every scene he inhabited with a level of funny ferocity and fury that only he can muster.
Murphy is the most talented man to have ever been on the show and seeing him unleashed back in his element with the added incentive of competition against his peers, made for comedy gold in two vibrant sketches.
Will Ferrell, who is maybe number two on the all-time SNL list behind Murphy for out and out comedic chops, did not fare so well. He was his usual gregarious and goofy self, but his rhythm and timing seemed off and he was out of sync all night.
While Murphy and Ferrell are the top two performers in SNL history, my personal favorite, Bill Murray, crushed his lone appearance when he ranked the top Weekend Update anchors of all time. Murray is the master of timing and he toyed with the audience and with Weekend Update host Colin Jost in glorious fashion. (As an aside…my favorites in the show’s history are in no particular order - John Belushi, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Martin Short, Chris Farley, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader)
The rest of the night was bumpy.
Steve Martin’s opening monologue was subdued and somewhat staccato, as Martin never fully grasped the material and was not able to read the cue cards with any vigor.
Tom Hanks stepped into a Black Jeopardy sketch midway through to replace Eddie Murphy…never a wise move…especially when Murphy had already stolen the sketch in the first 30 seconds. Hanks was uncomfortably bad but he was put in an unwinnable situation.
Other sketches, like the Lawrence Welk sketch, the wedding party sketch, the Broadway musical sketch and the alien abduction sketch, were pretty weak.
The Welk sketch was just chaotic and never fully coalesced as Will Ferrell was just a bit off and the bits fell flat. That sketch is usually very funny but it was much too awkwardly written and performed here to be decent.
The Wedding Party sketch just isn’t that funny to begin with and cramming it into a big show like this felt foolish. It also ran on forever and never hit its stride.
I’ve never been much of a fan of Kate McKinnon and find her “alien abduction” character to be decidedly one and done material, so reprising that flaccid character for the 50th anniversary seemed a stretch too, even with the addition of Meryl Streep.
I must admit that for the most part I really don’t get the John Mulaney thing…and that continued Sunday night as Mulaney’s big musical comedy number seemed like a muddled mess of Broadway inside jokes that misfired.
There was one interesting John Mulaney moment in the show and that was when he interjected into Steve Martin’s monologue with a joke about how difficult guest hosts are and that of the nearly 1,000 that the show has had, it is shocking that only two have committed murder. The joke was funny…and was obviously intended to be directed at O.J. Simpson and Robert Blake…but Alec Baldwin was in the studio and conspicuously absent from sketches until he made a late appearance introducing a video clip later on in the show…and I couldn’t help but wonder how uncomfortable that joke made him.
One final thing comedy wise…I know people love Adam Sandler, but I find him so egregiously unfunny and comedically pedestrian as to be criminal. I think Sandler, who only has two gears – idiotically infantile and atomic levels of shmaltz, has set the art of comedy back centuries in his career, so when he showed up to play one of his god-awful songs…this time a saccharine one, I rolled my eyes and cringed. Others feel different and think the song was very moving…but the only thing it moved on me was my bowels.
SNL has been a showcase for musical acts during the entirety of its run, and it had four musical performances Sunday night to celebrate that fact.
The music Sunday night was…well…it just was.
The show opened with the corpse of Paul Simon singing his hauntingly melancholy hit “Homeward Bound” with the luminous Sabrina Carpenter. Simon looks and sounds like he’s been soaking in a formaldehyde bath for the last fifteen years, while Sabrina Carpenter is so inconceivably, sublimely gorgeous, she seems like she was created in an anime lab somewhere.
Carpenter got the first laugh of the night when in reply to Paul Simon saying he first played “Homeward Bound” on SNL in 1976, she blurted out, “I wasn’t alive then…and neither were my parents”.
As for the song itself, Paul Simon simply can’t even pretend to sing anymore, which is sad, but thankfully Sabrina Carpenter, who is a pop princess - but there is no doubting that she has an exquisite voice and a charming stage presence, is a versatile and thoughtful duet partner and she carried the song without grandstanding…no small feat.
The second musical act was Miley Cyrus, who is the antithesis of Sabrina Carpenter. Why the hell is she famous again? The classless Cyrus is such a toxic combination of odd traits that don’t ever seem to gel at all…at least in my eyes. But apparently people love her.
Miley’s rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” (made famous by Sinead O’Connor’s stunning cover) with Brittany Howard was devoid of everything that made Sinead’s version so great…namely artistic depth and soul.
Sinead was a walking wound, an Irish female Christ crying out to her father from the cross “why have you forsaken me?” with every song she inhabited. Miley Cyrus is a pop princess nepo baby who sings with the unsubtle zeal of a trailer park meth head prostitute barking at the moon while searching for a lost pack of menthol cigarettes.
For the third musical break Li’l Wayne performed with The Roots but I skipped that shitshow entirely because, to be frank, I think hip hop/rap is a grotesque, artless and thoughtless excuse for music, it is nothing more than a marketed minstrel show and noise machine that is so beyond awful and so asinine as to be lower in artistic value than month-old crocodile piss.
Speaking of old crocodile piss…the final musical number of the evening went to Paul McCartney, who closed the show by performing “Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End”. Notice I didn’t say he sang those songs because what McCartney was doing doesn’t rise to the level of singing.
Like his elder by a year Paul Simon, McCartney looks and sounds like he’s two thousand years old and unfortunately, he has completely lost his singing voice.
It was odd watching McCartney, who resembles a cool grandmother at her grandson’s wedding trying to keep up with the young people. It was cute at first but as it went on it became more and more uncomfortable as the possibility of the second to last Beatle dropping dead of natural causes on SNL became more and more possible, if not probable.
Ultimately, the fact that SNL has survived 50 years is incredibly impressive. In a corporatized entertainment industry, any entity, nevermind a comedic one, surviving more than a few years is reason to celebrate.
That SNL has, through some very, very lean years, been able to stay, if not funny, at least alive, is one of the more miraculous things to ever happen in television.
The show has, through sheer force of will (mostly Lorne Michaels’ will), been able to stay in the conversation for half a century even when it lacked talent, skill, insight and comedic chops.
The current cast is as dull and devoid of star power, charisma, comedy talent and vitality, as any cast in the show’s long history, but somehow SNL persists…and will for at least the foreseeable future.
The bottom-line regarding SNL50 is that the show was sometimes funny, sometimes cringy, sometimes exciting and sometimes boring…just like almost every other episode of SNL over the last half century.
As for the bigger picture regarding SNL...the fact that Kenan Thompson, who is deathly allergic to being even remotely funny and brings absolutely nothing to the comedy table, is the longest running cast member in SNL history…and is still in the cast…speaks to the Sahara level talent drought the show is currently enduring.
The reality is that, to paraphrase former Boston Celtics head coach, and current St John’s head basketball coach, Rick Pitino, “John Belushi, Dan Akroyd, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Phil Hartman, Norm Macdonald, Will Ferrell, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Maya Rudolph, Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader, ain’t walking through that door. “
No, they ain’t…so SNL is gonna have to work really, really hard to survive long enough to see its 60th anniversary. As much as the show consistently disappoints me…I have to admit I’m rooting for it to make it to its next milestone, if for no other reason than to see a reinvigorated Eddie Murphy unleashed once again.
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