I say "seems" only because I couldn't force myself more than halfway through the 7+ minutes:
I also skimmed the NYT review, "‘S.N.L.’ Season Premiere Weighs in on Its Own Trump Sketch." Yeah, they did a Trump sketch.
In the first episode of its 48th season, “S.N.L.” went meta in the opening sketch, recruiting the host, Miles Teller, and cast member Andrew Dismukes to play the sibling sports commentators Peyton and Eli Manning as they offered their running criticism on a seemingly standard satire of former President Donald J. Trump....
They know it's stale to just imitate DJT again, so the idea was to have 2 guys commenting, insulting the sketch, while cast members were humiliated by having to play badly and then get criticized. I take it the Manning brothers are a current phenomenon, but it reminded me of the Smothers Brothers, where the running joke was that one brother was dumber than the other.
Teller and Dismukes mocked various (scripted) elements of the sketch, like an awkward entrance from new cast member Michael Longfellow and Heidi Gardner’s impersonation of Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota.
This material is so bad — and presumably every other thing we thought of was so bad — that we tried to improve it by calling it bad as we forced you to watch it. But "going meta" is also stale, terribly stale, and you didn't even do it well. George Burns did it well in the 1950s. Beavis and Butt-Head did it well in the 1990s. Even if you invented going meta, this would be a fail.
And — for the first episode of a new season — the host was Miles Teller. Who is Miles Teller?!
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57 comments:
Is there a nice sad song about poor poor Hillary... Again? Nothing says comedy like butt hurt sad songs when an election doesn't go the way NBC desires.
Actually, the Manning cast is not too bad. Peyton and Eli are likable, and intelligent, and get along well. They are actually entertaining to watch. Which is more than can be said for SNL.
Still can't bring themselves to write a sketch that mocks their beloved delicate dementia patient Biden? Old Joe gives endless material for NBC to work with... and all they can do is obsess over Trump.
SNL = Saturday Night Democrat.
Only Democrat loyalists think that shit funny. Trump hate propels them.
Very meta: older woman doesn’t know this kid hosting SNL. Right out of first season criticism of SNL.
I don’t know either, but I aged out of the prime advertising demographic this year.
10 Ways to Bead a Dead Horse
1. Buy a strong whip.
2. Change riders.
3. Appoint a committee to study the horse.
4. Appoint a team to revive the horse.
5. Send out a memo or email that the horse isn’t really dead.
6. Put someone in charge to find "the real problem."
7. Harness several other dead horses together for increased speed and efficiency.
8. Rewrite the standard definition of a live horse.
9. Declare the dead horse as the "way it’s always been done."
10. Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.
This horse has been dead for many years.
snl? That'd STILL on?? does ANYBODY watch? I'm just kidding, of Course no one watched
Yeah, well, the rest of us are sick of them too.
Went to bed after the opening confirmed the continuing existence of Michael Che.
I take it the Manning brothers are a current phenomenon, but it reminded me of the Smothers Brothers, where the running joke was that one brother was dumber than the other.
I have no idea about the Mannings; I don’t watch much pro football. But in the case of the Smothers brothers, one was quite a bit brighter than the other — it was Tommy, the guy who played an idiot. Did you ever notice how so many entertainers who made their money playing fools — Tom Smothers, Lucille Ball, Bob Hope, Goldie Hawn — are actually quite shrewd in real life?
Joe Biden just stood up and asked "Where's Jackie?"
Jackie Walorski died. Biden just gave the writers at NBC(D) a joke... and they will not touch it.
The democrat loyalists who work at NBC - now that's the real joke.
When I mentioned the SNL line-up to my daughter she couldn't have cared less (except for Kendrick Lamar, who we might catch later on YouTube). It's just a Leftie Boomer show now.
What would the left do without Trump?
I am one of the original viewers of the show- I watched the very first episode as a 9 year old. I was a faithful viewer until Mike Myers left the show in the 1990s, and I haven't watched an episode since. It seems like it is time for the show to die, at least for a while for a while, but then it has seemed like that for over a quarter century now. It is like a zombie.
Thanks for confirming that what I stopped watching last century is still "Over".
All it took was a negligent homicide to end Alec Baldwin's bad imitation.
Teller starred in one of the worst movies ever, about a guy who went to a school to learn how to drum instead of just drumming.
It was bad. A joke follows based on the speed with which the Ukrainians recently advanced in Kharkiv. https://twitter.com/i/status/1571182191517769732
This shows that it's possible to make jokes about matters which one takes very seriously which raises the question: why can't the hard left joke about itself? I guess because the hard left and all the culture it commands is not just important, it's perfect. Moreover, we are all exactly alike so how could differences be anything but evidence of residual fascism on the right - and how is that funny? Hey Jackie, amirite? Jackie? Jackie? C'mon, shout out for Jackie. C'mon up here, Jackie! Heeeere she comes. Oh. My. God.
Only half way? You stopped before the Corn Kid reference!
The most telling part of the sketch? When the Peyton Manning character mentions that Biden has lost his marbles and the audience response is crickets. They could (and should) consider replacing the audience with trained sea lions. Now that would be meta.
Tyler Cowan discusses humor with Dave Barry
COWEN: But maybe by the mid-’80s, it became harder for it to be daring because you have other comedians in mainstream media, well before the Internet, but being more daring. Eddie Murphy would be an example. So Mad didn’t seem so outrageous anymore. Do you think that’s it?
BARRY: It could be. And then we had a crossover into television. Saturday Night Live brought the sensibility of my generation to TV, a complete willingness to mock everything, mock commercials, the way Mad used to. Nobody on television mocked television, and suddenly there was this show that was mocking everything about television. And then the Larry Sanders Show, where it became kind of a staple of television to mock television. And Letterman, who has gone on to make a whole career out of that. So maybe we didn’t need a magazine anymore to say, “Hey, look how silly TV is.” TV was doing that for us.
Was in the man cave watching college football when the wife, watching SNL upstairs, cried out, "Oh my God this is such sh!t".
One thing stood out to me.
When the Peyton character brings up political balance and asks where the jokes are about Biden 'losing his marbles' there is a pause for laughter that never comes.
The audience is stone quiet: they cannot even fathom that there could be humor about such a thing. Because humor about Biden means you're MAGA and MAGA are deplorable terrorists.
For SNL to be a refreshed show they need a refreshed audience. You know: an audience that doesn't bark like trained seals as they reliably get their fish.
Chicken sandwich and the Egg McMuffin.
I am Laslo.
Could this be an invitation to the eternal debate -- whether it's not funny anymore or whether it was never funny? Or will the football be snatched away again?
The show was funnier forty years ago, but a lot of the appeal was the novelty and uniqueness. Audiences laughed at things that weren't very funny because nobody else was doing them. Satirical formats get familiar and stale over time: Mad Magazine, The National Lampoon, Firesign Theater, Kentucky Fried Movie, Lake Woebegone, The Simpsons, Monty Python, Private Eye, Charlie Hebdo, SNL.
Satirists either stay in the old format and get too comfortable with their routines and targets, or they branch out and do new things that have some of the daring of the original product, and eventually replace it. Nothing lasts forever (except maybe the Today Show, which convinced NBC that it possessed the secret of immortality). "SNL 48 Years" is a badge of disgrace, not honor.
Also, these kids and the writers behind the scenes don't appear to have much talent, and they look like they were all cloned in test tube and brought up in incubators without contact with real life.
It's done. Stick a fork in it.
It's long past time for the show to do a George Sanders and kill itself out of self boredom.
The standard against which all this sort of sketch must be measured is the "Statler and Waldorf" bits from Jim Henson's original "The Muppet Show". The critical duo must not confine mockery to the skit, but to each other.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6I_dKUYyI4
Althouse deserves some sort of canonization for subjecting herself to Late-Night Entertainment Hell (get aboard Charon's ferry and drift downstream a bit) for the sake of my benighted no TV soul... No, Achilles, Shouting Thomas, et al., that's the one-N canon I refer to, so just stop it. Relax.
As probably will be true for most all your commenters, I can't even bear to watch the embedded clip. If they weren't brave enough to come up with a parody of Bruce Willis and the little kid "I see dead people" or Kamala calling North Korea our great and long standing ally, they don't deserve any level of viewership.
"Althouse deserves some sort of canonization for subjecting herself to Late-Night Entertainment Hell (get aboard Charon's ferry and drift downstream a bit) for the sake of my benighted no TV soul...."
I only watched the embedded YouTube at the NYT. I don't think I've turned the television on in a week. I did buy the new season of "Survivor" on Amazon Prime — a good deal at $25 compared with paying for a TV service. Actually, I couldn't watch SNL live without subscribing to a new service. I don't have regular TV, only HBO, Netflix, Criterion, and Amazon Prime.
Mocking the left is actually funny.
BTW, recent interviews with the Smothers Brothers make it quite clear that Tommy was the real brains behind the act. It takes someone pretty smart to act that consistently stupid.
Michaele - exactly.
Both Joe and Kamala provide endless sources of comedy mocking gold. NBC ignores all of it.
They ignore the comedy gold given to them by Hunter Biden as well.
NBC-SNL is
Saturday Night Democrat.
I have antenna TV - local only. It does include the alphabet stations - so I can watch as much Saturday Night Democrat as I want. I don't watch any. EVER. I can't even stomach an accidental pass-by.
PBS news is Trump-hate obsessed pro-democrat party. All of the alphabet "news" is pro-democrat only. Local and national. I don't have cable.
I do amazon prime, Acorn, netflix and PBS passport for masterpiece theater stuff. Youtube is great for my Ryan VanDuzer type road trip adventure, cycling, and home-made nature watching.... even though I detest google-youtube(D-censorship).
TV is barely worth watching. It's mostly Putin-esque democrat party propaganda at every turn.
I sat thru the opening and am wishing I hadn’t.
Not good.
Teller has his Peyton impression down pat.
You can tell who watched the skit and who didn't.
The football connection immediately turned off Althouse and overwhelmed her reaction.
It went on too long and the cast isn't particularly talented as usual but the concept was good.
You can get an over the air antenna through your Amazon portal.
For comparison look up "Sincere Guy Stu" SNL's guy who always says exactly what he's thinking sketch from some years back. It came to mind because I thought Peyton Manning played the guy, but it was actually Joe Montana. I thought it was funny when I saw it years ago.
Who is Miles Teller?!
He's in the new Top Gun movie, and he's pretty good in it. Plus he was in "Whiplash" and the woebegotten "Fantastic 4" movie from a few years back. (Not that it matters.)
I can't believe I watched the whole thing. The clip, not the show, which you couldn't pay me to watch.
Witless drivel, written and performed by partisan ignoramuses for other partisan ignoramuses.
Mocking Democraticals is literally domesticterrorism.
Gadfly and Howard are happy to explain why.
"Who is Miles Teller?"
I guess you haven't watched "The Offer" miniseries yet. He played Al Ruddy, the producer behind The Godfather.
He did a good job, but Matthew Goode as Robert Evans was amazing. Especially if you go back and find videos of Robert Evans.
The most telling part of the sketch? When the Peyton Manning character mentions that Biden has lost his marbles and the audience response is crickets. They could (and should) consider replacing the audience with trained sea lions.
Can you imagine how quickly a NYC resident would be cancelled if he/she laughed at Democrats?
It just is not done.
Maybe they should move the show to a purple urban area. Indianapolis? Cincinnati? Waukesha County?
Can you imagine the media response?
this is still a thing, well not really.
Sexual Harassment and You - Saturday Night Live
We're in the age of that's not funny, they're not serious, and ethical (i.e. relativistic) conundrums.
How many conservatives does it take to change a light bulb?
Teller starred in one of the worst movies ever, about a guy who went to a school to learn how to drum instead of just drumming.
The Farmers Insurance Guy, J.D. Wazzisname, is a National Treasure.
Did you ever notice how so many entertainers who made their money playing fools — Tom Smothers, Lucille Ball, Bob Hope, Goldie Hawn — are actually quite shrewd in real life?
Sonny Bono, Louie Prima, Jerry Lewis, Gracie Allen
I thought the open was okay, premised upon them making fun of themselves. But not funny enough for the opening of a new season with a new cast. And, of course, old hitting Trump.
Their mistake was hitting Trump instead of Biden. However, it may be that their political bias would not let them do so right before the election.
So, if only The Fonz had jumped the shark in a meta way, Happy Days would still be rolling along, with an ironic, so-bad-its-good kind of deal? Dubious.
This cold open is a desperate cry for help -- Saturday Night Live grabbing a Saturday Night Special to put itself out of its misery.
I thought the Miles Teller guy did a decent job satirizing Peyton Manning.
All I know is, they have a real-life Pat.
Are they going to do sketches of Biden being led around by the nose by his wife?
How about not being able to find a way to walk off a small stage.
Or Biden conducting a seance to talk to recently-deceased politicians.
Hilarity would ensue...
Biden conducting a seance to talk to recently-deceased politicians.?
They did, not a seance but as an update joke. It's a pervasive habit around here to criticize things not read, not watched and not listened to. Why bother?
The Farmers Insurance Guy, J.D. Wazzisname, is a National Treasure.
J.K. Simmons is great in this, Counterpart.
'They did, not a seance but as an update joke. It's a pervasive habit around here to criticize things not read, not watched and not listened to. Why bother?'
Because I don't watch shitty liberal drivel...
Thank you Heywood Rice, for the Counterpart recommendation. After one episode, it looks like a show I will enjoy. There is no SNL in Guatemala, but I have Amazon Prime, Netflix, and a shitload of soccer.
SNL
So Not Laughing.
Howard: "I thought the Miles Teller guy did a decent job satirizing Peyton Manning."
satirize
săt′ə-rīz″
transitive verb
"To ridicule or attack by means of satire."
Miles Teller as Peyton Manning did not satirize Peyton Manning in the slightest. In fact, as is always the case with Howard, the opposite occurred. Teller's Manning was a pretty accurate capture of how Peyton critiques others during his Manning-casts and in no way satirized Peyton.
We'll just add "satirize" to the long and ever expanding list of terms/phrases which Howard does not understand.
If this keeps up, we're gonna need to purchase more pixels.....
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