Against Saturday Night Live

Plenty of people have been saying SNL isn't funny for a long time, and indeed saying it isn't funny has itself become an irritatingly obvious observation. Criticism of it is seen as an example of an overabundance of zeal in closing off your mind against potentially imperfect cultural input (a strange tic of our uncertain age, in which habits of cultural consumption are among the most fiercely guarded foundations of moral certitude left to us).

Entertainment consumption as a paramount arena of character formation is such a deeply ingrained moral prejudice now that some commentators, worried about the massive layoffs looming as robotic automation marches through more and more industries, have proposed rewarding wise consumption habits with salaries.

In the post-employment future we all seem very excited to be sprinting towards, the one thing giving a life value will be its buying power, and people love nothing more than buying entertaining cultural experiences. So it does make a certain kind of sense, if dismayingly defeatist capitalistic sense, for people to get madly worked up about their entertainment experiences not measuring up to expectations. Building reputations as wise consumers of entertaining culture products could be the best way to start carving out a livable wage in the new economy.

Like peasants struggling with each other for a piece of bread in the street, you can already almost see the desperation and venom forming on message boards between people accusing a movie of sucking, or denying that one sucks. People will always be needed as receptacles into which culture products can be deposited in return for profit. That is one 'job' that probably won't be going away any time soon.

But to return to SNL, and the volleys of hate it has received for not being as funny as it could be (the worst crime conceivably possible). The discussion should not be outrage at being deprived of weekly experiences of optimal funniness. At a certain point, being funny has nothing to do with anything. The stranglehold that Lorne Michaels has had on the comedy industry is unprecedented, surpassing anything that could have survived the vicissitudes of funniness.

At the very least, SNL is less reliably funny than it was Back When It Was Good, whenever your particular time period on that sliding scale is. So Michaels's durability becomes more puzzling. Why have the NBC suits been so very loyal to him, after decades of everyone saying his show sucked? We get fresh evidence all the time of how short the leashes are at NBC. So why has SNL survived?

SNL cast members are notoriously poorly paid--Will Ferrell, possibly its best and most durably successful product ever, was appropriately its highest paid player ever, earning $375,000 in 2001. For an institution as enduring as SNL, which occupies the same rare air as something like Monday Night Football, $375,000 per year for its brightest star is not much. Even rookie NFL players make more than that.

The low pay is one thing, but the exploitation and ownership was made quite explicit in the draconian contracts instituted fifteen years ago. A main aim of the new contracts was to ensure that any star power generated by SNL was controlled by NBC, after having been burned by the runaway Hollywood success of Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers. (Yes kids, at certain points in the eighties and nineties, both of those people were the most bankable Hollywood comedy actors in the world).

A huge part of the appeal of SNL used to be the promise of achieving this kind of breakout fame. It's an open question, after the narrowing of our cultural and economic horizons caused by the infiltration of Internet 'openness' into all aspects of society, if stratospheric fame on Murphy's level even exists anymore. But in the event that it possibly might, NBC, in true arch-capitalist fashion, has made absolutely sure that any possible earning potential generated under its auspices will be under its viselike grip. It is telling that there has been a definite shift in the SNL development system away from making movie stars to making NBC talk show hosts. Movie stars go on to make money for distributors and production companies that have nothing to do with NBC. Crappy talk show hosts, like Jimmy Fallon and Seth Myers, keep making money hand over fist for NBC for decades.

When SNL started in the seventies, it wasn't very funny. This isn't really news--we all know that nothing ages worse than comedy. Go back and watch some 'classic' John Belushi or Dan Aykroyd sketches and see how many times you laugh. If you can even bear to watch a full sketch, you should be proud. The important thing was how different the format was--live comedy TV really late at night was new and cool. That was forty years ago.

Now it is this endless honeypot attracting bright young talent into its orbit, grinding them down with insanely hectic work schedules and filtering them through the tastes of one old oligarch.

SNL is a shining testament to the risk averse nature of corporate America. Lorne Michaels has been producing the show for such a long time, and been consistently pulling in profits and generating personalities that have done well in other ventures, that they just don't want it to end. So we keep getting game show spoofs, lesser Daily Show jokes from Weekend Update, absurd commercials for fake products, and celebrity coronations (OMG it's Justin Timberlake! He's so talented!).

It's worth contrasting these typical SNL outputs with something like a Kids in the Hall sketch. This sketch has, in addition to its comic mania, real substance and depth, and enough time for the story to stretch out a bit. It couldn't be more different from what you see on SNL nowadays.

What if the next generation of talented, energetic comedic performers and writers agreed to stop letting this corporate comedy monolith drain them and exploit them? If people banded together to start their own thing, to make the next SNL, and let this beast finally die an overdue death? But as long as it exists as a platform that can allow creatives to live in NYC and pay NYC rent, while also giving them unparalleled exposure, it will continue.

SNL needs young talent more than young talent needs it. It is powerful because young people have agreed that it is important and powerful. If young talent could pull together and keep away from its temptations, we would finally be rid of it. Aspirants will keep deluding themselves into believing that having liked a few sketches or recurring characters from 15 or 20 years ago is worth contributing to this greedy, hungry octopus at the center of our culture.

This sketch from the last episode of its 40th season is especially callous. It is little more than an extended mockery of the obscenely dehumanizing and exhausting struggle that countless young actors and comedians go through to get their start. If it was funny, that might be something of a defense, but it really isn't.

SNL is coasting on the goodwill generated by its innovative format (from forty years back), and the memories that everyone between 20-45 have of laughing their asses off when they were kids. Everything good it did happened so long ago, when it did some very real things, like shaking up formats and injecting some inspired unhinged characters into American culture. The sad part is, this can't happen anymore. Why are only things that happened in the past real? This is a necessary part of our era of perpetual stasis, the "end of history"--that all of the true acts have already happened. It's all over but the shouting. When history has ended, the superficial scraps left to us take on fanatical importance.