Tue, May 20, 2003

Saturday Night Live is not a good TV show. I've said this before. It will not again be a good TV show, in my estimation, as long as Lorne Michaels is involved. It simply lacks vision, edge, or really even humor. However, even a tired platitude is right twice a day. Anomalies in the show's badness inevitably occur, and there are laughs to be found.

First off, I should say that the Robert Smigel cartoons are always hilarious and appropriately edgy. I applaud Michaels's willingness to drop them into the show without censoring, but I'm stupefied that he can't learn from their comic approach. He produced The Kids In The Hall too; doesn't this guy take notes?

One key problem with Saturday Night Live is the cast structure. If cast members write sketches, they can cast them, which incentivizes writing a sketch for yourself. Which further incentivizes writing a sketch in which you build a "character," like Mary Katherine Gallagher, that can return in future sketches. Sure, this has always been the case: Coneheads; Wild and Crazy Guys. Characters aren't bad. Bad characters are bad. And the senior cast members seem to have license to create or inhabit whatever awful character they like and it becomes a regular feature of the show. Tracy Morgan was the most consistently funny cast member on SNL this season, but his character Brian Fellow is horrible. Occasionally his sketches hit on something so absurd that it was funny, but as with most of the show's material, it was much funnier in concept than in execution.

Morgan has left the show as of the season finale last weekend. (His decision to retire is like Amy Irving leaving Steven Spielberg. Why ruin a good thing? You're making decent money and they barely ever make you do anything. Sweet ride!) Morgan's obvious successor as the funniest person on the show is Will Forte, who's a dead ringer for Cameron Diaz when she dressed as a man in Charlie's Angels. Unfortunately, he's still mired at the "featured" level of the cast for two more years, so we won't see as much of him as we will of Chris Parnell or the unfunny Amy Poehler, late of the unfunny Upright Citizens Brigade. Forte is so comically awkward that he steals any scene he's in and (whether it's his own writing or he just brings out the best in the writing staff) his sketches always have the same absurd flavor that characterizes the show's best work. He's already got a character that I actually like, The Falconer. The Falconer is a guy who quit his ad-agency job to live in the woods with a falcon named Donald and is always getting into trouble. It's bizarre and it's absurd and it's usually quick because it has too much going on to get stuck on a single joke the way most SNL sketches do. (This is another thing Michaels should have learned from The Kids In The Hall – good sketch comedy is quick! Get in, do the jokes, get out. How many wacky eyeglass designs do we need to watch Adrien Brody prance around in before the joke is tired? [Answer: One.]) Whereas also-retiring cast member Chris Kattan's "old vegas comedian" character basically has one joke (and it's not even his, it belongs to Fred Armisen), The Falconer has much more going on. These are the kinds of sketches they should be doing, but they won't. The Michaels approach – the all-cue-card, all-lame-joke approach – requires one-joke sketches because there's less chance of confusion.

This season's finale aired last weekend with guest host Dan Aykroyd. He hadn't been back to host the show since he left the cast in 1979, and it's clear that the choice to come back was motivated more by the money than by the fact that he believes the current show to be well-produced or creative. (This is the man who played Britney Spears's dad in Crossroads, not that it wasn't the best film of last year.) It was among this season's better episodes, because we got The Falconer with guest star John Goodman and (the other funny character vehicle) Tracy Morgan's Astronaut Jones, a delicious spoof of 60s-era space adventure serials and Morgan's own on-air persona as a booty-loving slackass.

But the Aykroyd episode was also good because of Aykroyd. He was on the show back when, cue cards or not, everybody on the show was funny and talented so it was just more fun to put all you had into each sketch. So that's how Aykroyd delivers. He's trapped in a tired Top O' The Mornin sketch, but he really shines in the Kattan old-vegas-comedian sketch and in the episode's best offering, La Cucina Canina. Cucina Canina was a restaurant for dogs, but it was just dog noses and maybe some funny ears or makeup around the eyes. They were dressed in human evening attire. They ordered bitch's piss martinis or dead fish entrees or asked their waiter "What's in the cat vomit?" The sketch wasn't riotously funny, but it reminded me of the original Aykroyd days. Silly situational humor based on absurd twists of reality and simple observations. It reminded me of the John Belushi in the bee outfit.

So, Saturday Night Live continues not to deliver on its potential. And I continue to watch it, because of Forte or because of how much Horatio Sanz likes to mess up. I understand from accounts that Lorne Michaels doesn't like the flubs or any ad-libbing, but they're the best thing the show has going for it. Last week when Sanz and Jimmy Fallon were cracking each other up at the update desk while Sanz played Elton John very badly, it was among the show's funniest moments this year. #1 still goes to Forte's "Tax Code Song" that he and Armisen sang on Weekend Update in April. Forte is god.

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