Left-Wing Vice Magazine: Say, Saturday Night Live Really Is Unfunny and Hackneyed, Isn't It?

Via Jazz Shaw, maybe even some leftwingers are getting tired of SNL's call-and-response religious sermons pretending to be "comedy."

He's talking about SNL's cold opens (a cold open is any part of show that appears before the credits have "warmed it up," so to speak), but that's where most of the stupid political bullshit is. And I can't imagine the rest of the show is any better.

SNL' Cold Opens Are Unfunny, Elitist Pieces of Liberal Propaganda

The star-studded sketches aren't just dull, they're limousine liberalism at its worst.

Harry Cheadle

May 8 2018, 12:55pm

...

All of this is preamble to say to SNL, I come as a friend: Your cold opens are terrible, cringeworthy pieces of self-satisfied liberal propaganda that are sometimes so bad they seem like parodies of themselves.

Even if you avoid SNL you probably hear about these cold opens, which are consistently politically themed--though "themed" may be too strong a word because they are mostly just recaps of the political news of the week performed by A-list celebrities....

But beyond that novelty, the jokes are tired references to current events that never build on one another. Instead, they are limply tossed out as obvious applause lines to an anti-Trump crowd....

....Baldwin's Trump impression also stands out as awful. He keeps his mouth open for reasons I don't understand, squints, and talks in a deep voice. That's it. The real Trump and Rob Schneider are correct: It doesn't work.

Schneider, believe it or not, had another trenchant critique of these sketches, which is that they skew too heavy-handedly to the left. "The fun of 'Saturday Night Live' was always you never knew which way they leaned politically," he told the New York Daily News last month. "You kind of assumed they would lean more left and liberal, but now the cat's out of the bag they are completely against Trump, which I think makes it less interesting because you know the direction the piece is going."

...

At best, the cold opens just echo the same beats and jokes as all those other programs (every good liberal recycles material). At worst, these sketches just coddle the audience by reflecting all of their assumptions and prejudices back at them: Yes, Trump is dumb, his administration is full of venal lackeys, Jeff Sessions is creepy, Cohen is a crook, all of your obvious, knee-jerk impulses and prejudices are correct. It's not just playing to the crowd, it's spoon-feeding the audience their own spit-up. It's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip come to life. It's exactly the kind of smug, smarmy bullshit that makes conservatives angry enough at the Hollywood elite to vote Trump just to stick it to them.

Jazz Shaw's link (the first link above) ends with a cold open from the Mother's Day show in which the cast had on their mothers, many of whom complained that the constant Trump jokes weren't funny.

But... that bit also wasn't funny. Even when they're knocking themselves for not being funny, they still can't manage to make it funny.

By the way, the Vice article links a bunch of non-political sketches, and one political sketch that takes a shot at #WokeFeministMen who just play the feminism card to get women into bed. He says these are examples of the show really hitting its stride and being genuinely funny.

He's wrong. None of these sketches are funny, including the one about #WokeFeministMen which should, in theory, appeal to me, if only on a clapter level.

It's actually a very obvious and unfunny sketch of a dude sitting down next to a woman at a bar, laying down a smooth #WokeFeministRap on her, then asking making sexual propositions with decreasing levels of subtlety and calling her a "Bitch" when she says she won't.

This goes on for, I think, five minor variations of the same dumb set-up/punchline.

Even with a short-for-SNL runtime of 3:10, the sketch is still a padded-out grind.

If this is SNL firing on all cylinders, it's time to take the car out behind the bar and shoot it in the head.

posted by Ace of Spades at 02:59 PM

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