Saturday Night Unalive

SNL Has Always Been Hit or Miss with Comedy. It Was Never Irrelevant Before

How has “Saturday Night Live” been handling the whole Israel-Gaza thing? Its premiere (with Pete Davidson’s sober cold open addressing the issue, but then making the case that silly comedy is a valid response to — and a valid service for —trauma) was well—received. For weeks, as if to prove that very point, the whole conflict was barely alluded to.¹ Then last week, a sketch with host Timothee Chalamet tried going there.

TLDW: A suicidal musician, played by the teen idol host, threatens to jump until people share his terrible music. In order to appease him, the do-gooders on the ground oblige him. When asked what the name of his band is, he says “Haymas…H-A-M-A-S.” The response: “I’m not sharing a song by Hamas on Instagram.”

SNL tried to stick to the plan of “silly, not controversial.” But SNL also has a reputation for reflecting our times, no matter how turbulent or shocking. The pressure was clearly on to stay in the cultural conversation.  They had three possible choices: 1) try mentioning how tense conversations can be around the topic (the typical go-to for SNL; wouldn’t be surprised to see this tack for this week’s episode, especially since it is the last one before Thanksgiving, which I’m sure many are dreading this year at this time); 2) the pro-Palestinian side (hahaha); 3) the pro-Israeli side.

Considering the growing criticism in America not only of Israel, but of America’s support for it, it makes sense (on paper) that a cutesy, silly, Lonely Island-style sketch group would make a dumb throwaway joke about the conflict that is not racist, aggressive, or cutting, but instead makes fun of people supporting Hamas online – a clear jab at the new Gen Z left.

The sketch did not go over well. Many were offended by the sketch. To the extent that a boycott is being called for all ofTimothee Chalamet’s movies. Does not help that the new Please Don’t Destroy movie is getting terrible reviews. Offensive or not, I think the main issue here is that the pro-Palestine youth do not like that SNL criticized them, not America or Israel. To put things in perspective, imagine if during the Iraq War, Will Ferrell and Tina Fey did patriotic sketches that made fun of antiwar bloggers instead of, say, President Bush. As predicted, SNL is signaling the inevitable rightward shift that film and TV makes at the beginning of wars. New Hollywood was not hatched at the onset of the Vietnam War, for example. It took years for the longhairs to get the desk chairs. Between 9/11 and Iraq, SNL played both sides of the fence. Some sketches were patriotic.² Some talked about the Islamophobia faced by Arabs like the character Chris Kattan played in a sketch.³ But there was a general rightward shift in pop culture between 2001 and 2004 that SNL flirted with slightly. Since there was not an overwhelmingly left anti-war movement at the time, this did not hurt them.

By the time the Iraq War was gaining opposition, SNL was late to the party. “The Daily Show” got all the good jokes first and all SNL had in its corner was Will Ferrell’s devastating George W. Bush impression. Then Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin. “Saturday Night Live” may not have been number one, but it was not irrelevant. After Colbert Report ended in 2014 and Jon Stewart left The Daily Show in 2015, SNL outlived its biggest threats and came out with bona fide classics like “Black Jeopardy” and “Davis S. Pumpkins.” “Black Jeopardy” in particular showing how poor blacks and whites actually agree on a lot of things. It didn’t flatter the egos of its smug liberal audience, but it also wasn’t just right wing comedy. Its comedic premise was too good to be reduced to a talking points memo.

This could have been how they tackled the current crisis. Instead, they did their lame Hamas joke. Imagine if "Saturday Night Live" was around in 1965, when the US first got into Vietnam, and they had a sketch mocking hippies supporting communism.

Yep. After 48 years on the air, SNL is officially an old person’s show.

Is this the fate of the show? Depends on one issue: audience capture. For a show that is so slavishly predicated on how well it can keep its finger on America’s pulse, it needs to satisfy the (needless to say, young) audience’s thirst for relevant satire. Especially with all the popular comedy TikTokers that are satirizing the situation to thousands of fans. This is not the first time I have pointed out that legacy media right now is in a very similar situation to the one it faced in the ‘60s, when it was reluctant to join the youth on the streets. So now SNL has three possible choices: 1) get a new cast immediately and start fresh in order to keep up with the zeitgeist;  2) challenge its audience regardless of its political ideology with intelligent comedy that doesn’t treat its audience like 11-year-olds that need their beliefs reinforced; 3) die. 

UPDATE 11/19/2023 @ 7:42 pm: Last night’s SNL evaded Gaza entirely — a topic that is still popular with TikTok comedians — to talk about men’s obsession with Rome (an Internet meme that was played out in August).

Pull the plug Lorne!

1. There may have been a couple of Weekend Update jokes but they did not make enough of a dent for me to go into it any further.

2. If you can call Tina Fey hugging Rudy Giuliani a sketch.

3. Can’t find it online because it tanked, but if you must see it, check out the Gwenyth Paltrow episode of SNL from 2001 on Peacock