‘Saturday Night Live’ and I have something in common. We are both, somehow, now 50 years old. On Sunday night, the Not Ready For Prime Time Players are throwing a birthday party (for the show, sadly not for me), live from New York.
With five decades of circling the sun comes the desire to reflect upon the past, what worked and what didn’t. For SNL, and late night comedy TV writ large, what absolutely has not worked is their relatively recent, hackneyed obsequience to wokeness.
The problem began around the turn of the century when the flexible social strictures of political correctness were metastasizing into the cold hard rules of wokeness. Put another way, the age of ‘That’s not funny,’ was ushered in.
What this meant for SNL, as well as ‘The Tonight Show’ and others was a kind of self-censorship that is completely anathema to comedy as well as the bizarre notion that the primary goal of a joke is not to provoke laughter, but to make society better, or something.
In the case of SNL, not only has the show censored itself in the 21st Century, it has censored its own past. The best example of this is that NBC Universal has banned video of a classic skit from 1977 featuring original black cast member Garret Morris and the lighter-skinned black activist and guest host Julian Bond.
In the bit, Bond plays himself on a talk show talking about how IQ tests are racially biased. Asked for an example of a biased question, Bond says, ‘Question one: You have been invited over for cocktails by the officer of your trust fund. Cocktails begin at 4:30, but you must make an appearance at a 6 o’clock formal dinner at the Yacht Club. What do you do about dress?’
The whole thing is hilarious, but the reason it has been scrubbed from existence is the final punchline, in which Morris asks where the idea of black intellectual inferiority comes from, and Bond, deadpan, says it is because light-skinned blacks are smarter than dark-skinned blacks.
Decades later, Bond would say the sketch made him feel uneasy, adding, ‘I believed it treaded dangerously on the fine line between comedy and poor taste,’ but honestly, so what? The obvious point of the punchline is that it is ludicrous to judge a person’s intelligence based on skin color.
This is a perfect example of the woke attitude that has choked most of the laughs out of late night TV comedy. Instead of searing and sometimes abrasive comedic insight, they just rehash progressive shibboleths about Orange Man bad and vaccines good.
When we look at the funniest and most successful comedians of the past 25 years, they tend to be the very people willing to transgress on supposed good taste. Guys like Dave Chappelle, Norm MacDonald, Ricky Gervais, and more recently, Shane Gillis, have all been in hot water over so-called offensive material.
In ‘Saturday Night Live’s’ case, there have been some signs that things are changing, notwithstanding producer Lorne Michaels’ boneheaded decision to go back on his word and give Kamala Harris an appearance just days before the election, a Hail Mary that didn’t even make it across the line of scrimmage.
A recent sketch in which President Donald Trump is depicted mocking Hamilton superstar Lin Manuel Miranda is a good example of a playful touch that would have been all but impossible four years ago, maybe even four months ago.
Sadly, the same cannot be said of the Jimmy Kimmels and Seth Meyers of the world whose nocturnal obsession with abusing Trump has become all they do. As Johnny Carson once said while roasting Don Rickles, ‘Don is a great comedian. I love his joke.’