Yuks Aplenty

 Moments before the Emmy for Outstanding Variety Sketch Series, I marveled aloud to my wife that it was quite the thing that Saturday Night Live was still capable of winning Emmys. That's when they announced that Lorne Michaels et al would be taking home the trophy. Again. For the eighth time. Keeping in mind that after 1976, its inaugural season, there was a considerable dry spell. Seventeen years, to be exact. By 1993, the "Saturday Night Dead" jokes had been piling up for some time, with wags insisting that this once proud creative force was becoming a parody of itself. 

During all this time a parade of comic talent walked in and out of 30 Rock. A few, like John Belushi and Chris Farley were carted out on a gurney, but there was never a time when there wasn't a spark of something going on inside that studio. Sparks like Eddie Murphy and Kristen Wiig and Will Ferrell continued to perform and attempt to tickle our collective funny bones even when they were not stretching the comedy envelope. Al Franken left Saturday Night Live and grew up to be a US senator. For a while. Conan O'Brien grew up to be a late night host. In a few different places. For a while. Before he became a lawyer defending meth dealers, Bod Odenkirk wrote for Saturday Night Live. 

The show has spit out more good comedians than most shows see in a lifetime. Forty-seven years for a late night TV sketch show is more than a lifetime. It is, for better or worse, an institution. It's a little like Rolling Stone magazine: a defining voice for a generation that has grown up and moved on, but still feels the need to invigorate things in the way they used to. Even if the way they currently invigorate things is to keep doing the things that they have for half a century. 

For full transparency I will confess that it has been years since I watched anything on Saturday Night after my bedtime. I am pleased and happy when YouTube will bring me this cold opening or that commercial parody. The Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump sketches were something I kept track of on Sunday mornings. My need to show up to junior high with the entire show committed to memory has faded. 

Which is my perspective. I know that there is an audience out there who watch on Saturday Night. Live. I am reasonably certain that there are middle and high schoolers who are recording bits on their DVRs and committing them to memory for replay on Monday morning for the entertainment of their friends. Uber producer Lorne Michaels continues to churn out what appears to be anti-authority comedy even though at seventy-seven years and millions of dollars later, he is hardly the tough young Canadian whiz kid who burst on the scene forty-seven years ago. He's the old guy with a trophy case that needs room for one more statue. 

Isn't that funny?