Saturday Night Live is an odd creature.
I don’t want to go into a whole spiel about how SNL is now terrible and will never match the “good ol’ days” because that argument is, put bluntly, retarded. The quality of SNL in any season even in its “classic” years goes up and down like crazy. Like most things, we simply remember the great stuff and forget the rest.
That said, I think this season might just be the worst I’ve seen in the longest time.
It’s amazingly impressive how bad some of these shows have been. The jokes are beyond stale. While SNL has always traded on one-note sketches and repetition, this season has found me in awe of just how far they’ll try and stretch sketches around a flimsy premise.
On tonight’s episode with Joseph Gordon Levitt, for instance, a whole sketch was based around someone being bad at Password. That was the joke. They didn’t even expand upon it. It was just Kristen Wiig putting on a wacky voice and saying the same word over and over. Just awful. And even before that? They did a movie trailer edit. The kind that’s a dime-a-dozen on the internet. And it wasn’t even as good as a lot of the stuff you’ll find there. It was a lazy joke putting Palin into 2012. Snore.
And yet, I’m tuning into SNL more this season than I have in a long time. I actually look forward to it every week just to see how bad it’s going to be this time. Now, I’m not one to shy away from ironically appreciating a bad movie or show, but never with comedy. Bad comedy is just the worst possible thing in the world. Nobody with a brain watches Meet the Spartans to laugh at how they’re not laughing. It just doesn’t make sense.
But SNL, I just don’t know. It’s drawing me in. Maybe I’m just kinda hoping that it’s gonna implode in on itself and finally disappear from the air. It could happen. Don Pardo did stumble tonight with the introduction of the band. That’s the first sign…