Remember when Saturday Night Live was cool?
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Artist:frank zappa, david bowie, elvis costello
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Track:TVC15, Purple Lagoon, Radio Radio
Nope, me neither.
Well, sort of; I did watch it at an early age - I watched it with my grandparents when I was very young (although it's difficult for me to grok exactly why they watched it - maybe it was purely because, somehow and inexplicably, their very young grandson found it hysterically funny.) I would also watch Monty Python's Flying Circus (at that age, it was Terry Gilliam's animations that most appealed to me) and another English show called The Goodies on PBS. No one really seems to remember the latter these days and my memory of it is too distant to want to really hunt it down...
In any case, I do remember watching the Belushi/Ackroyd/Chase/Radner/et al. cast as a kid, laughing even at stuff that I didn't really get...
25 years of poorly written sketches aimed at semi-literate red state frat boy types and stripped of any possible intimation of 'edginess' (i.e. a non-castrated political viewpoints, non-retarded sexuality, drug use, etc.) has pretty much rendered the show a non-entity for me. Even my fond, if fuzzy, memories of the early days have largely been erased by the likes of Chris Farley and Rob Schneider... A fat guy jiggling his copious man-boobies in a flimsy shard of a sketch constructed solely to showcase that - I dunno, maybe I'm just a humorless asshole but, sorry, that's not funny to me.
Now, someone pretending to be Jimmy Carter (in a sketch playing off of his prodigious command of facts) talking a caller to a radio show through a bad acid trip - that's funny.
Of course, at the time, the show's audience got that sort of thing. Woodstock, The Summer of Love, copious experimentation with sex and drugs, the danger and edginess of rock music, racial tension, civil rights and Vietname - that stuff wasn't so distant in the minds of the show's audience at the time; they were aging, becoming productive members of society, assimilating in their own ways, but that was all still fresh.
Seems like white-bread suburban ennui was the prevailing zeitgeist through the late 80s until present. Politics - especially of race - scares the advertisers. Sex and drugs are out - sex can kill ya now and, before we had an open-ended war on terror we had an open-ended war on drugs - and those'll kill ya, too. War is now a constant. Corruption is now seen as endemic to government and politics. Religion is taboo. What will play on the coasts won't play in Peoria, etc. etc.
I guess that's just the way things go when you have the marketing and advertising sales departments writing and directing your comedy...
Likewise, as my own musical tastes have veered from the mainstream and the show itself as veered ever more mainstream, the musical performances, too, have suffered. Back in the day, however, there was some pretty cool shit on the show. This clip of Zappa conducting Purple Lagoon (with John Belushi guesting as the samurai) is pure brilliance:
...while David Bowie performing TVC15 (couldn't find a clip of Boys Keep Swinging, unfortunately) in a dress, backed by Klaus Nomi and Joey Arias is also sort of wonderful to see on TV. Dig the video monitor in the pink poodle's mouth...
And, of course, who could forget Elvis performing the song (Radio, Radio) he was forbidden to perform (after a false start)...
I suppose I might still watch SNL (and TV in general, really) if I felt like there was some chance I might see something spontaneous, weird and wonderful that wasn't especially bowdlerized so as not to upset the infantile and puritanical...
Well, sort of; I did watch it at an early age - I watched it with my grandparents when I was very young (although it's difficult for me to grok exactly why they watched it - maybe it was purely because, somehow and inexplicably, their very young grandson found it hysterically funny.) I would also watch Monty Python's Flying Circus (at that age, it was Terry Gilliam's animations that most appealed to me) and another English show called The Goodies on PBS. No one really seems to remember the latter these days and my memory of it is too distant to want to really hunt it down...
In any case, I do remember watching the Belushi/Ackroyd/Chase/Radner/et al. cast as a kid, laughing even at stuff that I didn't really get...
25 years of poorly written sketches aimed at semi-literate red state frat boy types and stripped of any possible intimation of 'edginess' (i.e. a non-castrated political viewpoints, non-retarded sexuality, drug use, etc.) has pretty much rendered the show a non-entity for me. Even my fond, if fuzzy, memories of the early days have largely been erased by the likes of Chris Farley and Rob Schneider... A fat guy jiggling his copious man-boobies in a flimsy shard of a sketch constructed solely to showcase that - I dunno, maybe I'm just a humorless asshole but, sorry, that's not funny to me.
Now, someone pretending to be Jimmy Carter (in a sketch playing off of his prodigious command of facts) talking a caller to a radio show through a bad acid trip - that's funny.
Of course, at the time, the show's audience got that sort of thing. Woodstock, The Summer of Love, copious experimentation with sex and drugs, the danger and edginess of rock music, racial tension, civil rights and Vietname - that stuff wasn't so distant in the minds of the show's audience at the time; they were aging, becoming productive members of society, assimilating in their own ways, but that was all still fresh.
Seems like white-bread suburban ennui was the prevailing zeitgeist through the late 80s until present. Politics - especially of race - scares the advertisers. Sex and drugs are out - sex can kill ya now and, before we had an open-ended war on terror we had an open-ended war on drugs - and those'll kill ya, too. War is now a constant. Corruption is now seen as endemic to government and politics. Religion is taboo. What will play on the coasts won't play in Peoria, etc. etc.
I guess that's just the way things go when you have the marketing and advertising sales departments writing and directing your comedy...
Likewise, as my own musical tastes have veered from the mainstream and the show itself as veered ever more mainstream, the musical performances, too, have suffered. Back in the day, however, there was some pretty cool shit on the show. This clip of Zappa conducting Purple Lagoon (with John Belushi guesting as the samurai) is pure brilliance:
...while David Bowie performing TVC15 (couldn't find a clip of Boys Keep Swinging, unfortunately) in a dress, backed by Klaus Nomi and Joey Arias is also sort of wonderful to see on TV. Dig the video monitor in the pink poodle's mouth...
And, of course, who could forget Elvis performing the song (Radio, Radio) he was forbidden to perform (after a false start)...
I suppose I might still watch SNL (and TV in general, really) if I felt like there was some chance I might see something spontaneous, weird and wonderful that wasn't especially bowdlerized so as not to upset the infantile and puritanical...
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