The truth about SNL

Sorry, I like it.

Sarah Sherman and Colin Jost celebrate appearing in the one funny sketch per episode.

As any freelance writer will tell you, sit on an idea long enough and you’ll either see it tackled by someone else, or events will either render it obsolete, or force your hand. I’ve long been dancing around this week’s subject. It’s not that I am ashamed or embarrassed, or concerned people will think less of me – I have no interest in being an arbiter of cool. But circumstances now compel me, I must prevaricate no longer, out with it:

I like SNL.

I never miss an episode. I’m actively annoyed when it’s not on.

I know what you’re thinking, because I often think the same, while watching. Saturday Night Live, US weekend institution for the last forty-nine years, is frequently unfunny to a near indefensible degree. Its sketches are at least one and a half minutes too long and usually end badly. It is unafraid to wring a joke by the neck until it is dead, and delights in ignoring better ones. The famous cold opens – a usually topical, satirical sketch preceding the titles – are painful, overlong, and favour newsworthiness over humour. The cast is too large. There’s an over-reliance on impressions. Some sketches are niche to the point of being incomprehensible. Some arrive to internet bandwagons and memes weeks too late, like your auntie screaming out “SEND IT TO ME RACHEL” on Boxing Day 2027. The accent work is agony. Every third show, the musical guest is a white man in a lumberjack shirt with face tattoos. Even in 2024, there’s an uncomfortable reliance on punching down for a lazy joke. Colin Jost’s teeth appear to feature alien technology. The repeat sketches tend to be the least amusing.

But I watch it all the same. It’s not a hate-watch, I don’t believe in those. Why waste your one wild and precious life spending an hour a week – we watch on delay and scroll through the ads – wishing your TV would explode and take you with it? I realised, some time ago, that the main draw for me is the cast. Most are very talented performers, and watching them every week means you get to know their energy, and their individual tics and strengths, which means, even if the sketch they’re in is terrible, you will root for them, or at the very least enjoy watching the material mangle them like a lion with a gazelle in its mouth.

Behind the scenes, the show takes itself very seriously: showrunner Lorne Michaels, set to retire after the show’s current season, is notorious for getting very angry when the show’s stars corpse, and the various production scandals are reported breathlessly in the American press much as the British tabs salivate over the Royal Family’s ongoing psychodrama. Somehow this makes it more entertaining, you become invested in the lore. Cast changes hit like breakups. And it’s well worth getting to know them before they depart – such is the show’s huge influence, they’ll end up leading the movies and TV shows you’ll be streaming in a few years’ time. The show nurtures new talent, and bins it off just as easily, but some of Hollywood’s biggest comedic names rose to power there. The performers are the glue. I may cringe to the level of ‘three share bags of Skittles Sours served in vinegar and a bottle of freshly squeezed lemonade’ but even if the cast is having a nightmare, you feel in on the joke.

The show is hosted each week by a special guest and this can make or break an episode. It’s got A-list appeal – it’s starrier than Graham Norton’s celebrity sofa in summer blockbuster season – but global success tends to elude some US comedians for a reason, so if the host is some guy you’ve never heard of, prepare to scroll through fast. The guest host’s influence on the writing team is clear from the off; you can tell who’s been difficult to work with, or has zero personality, if the sketches are all terrible or sideline the celeb. Ariana Grande, for example, helmed a decent show because she’s obviously game and a brilliant performer. As for why the show isn’t particularly funny – or if it is, it’s usually accidental – I have no idea, but at a guess I’d put it down to the hordes of people who work on the show. Too many cooks killing decent gags and letting terrible ones fly, agents getting involved, stars getting their asses kissed, who knows. It’s interesting that 30 Rock, Tina Fey’s sitcom based on her time as head writer on the show, acknowledged SNL’s reputation for being light on laughs by ensuring all the sketches on the fictional version of the show, TGS, were about as hilarious as being chainsawed in half, lengthways, slowly.

As a regular viewer, you soon get accustomed to groaning in agony as a sketch withers and dies in front of you. Main causes of death include:

– overstretched runtime
– the same joke told ten different ways, all badly
– an inability to work out a decent ending
– the show’s enervating habit of featuring a character serving as proxy for the viewer, reacting incredulously to most of the good jokes ‘Okaaaay, well, I’ve no idea why you just did that’ rather than just let the joke breathe
–  a guest host flubbing their lines and/or having the charisma of a spatula.

I watch with such low expectations that it’s near impossible to be disappointed – unless a favoured cast member gets zero screen time.

As a British viewer, I’m fascinated by the insight into American culture. SNL has taught me much more than the gazillions of US sitcoms I’ve watched over the years. Although watched globally, SNL makes no allowances or apologies for anyone living outside America, and in a way I hugely respect that. Dateline, Sábado Gigante, Arby’s, Spirit Airlines, Totini’s, Olive Garden – like the roll call of brand names throughout Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, SNL allows a peek into a world whose familiarity is exactly what makes it strange. The recent sketch lampooning the Gallagher brothers from Oasis, who are pretty much beyond parody anyway, was widely derided for not being funny, which was fair, it stank. But the critiques about the brothers’ accents – somewhere between Michael Caine in The Italian Job and the cook from Mary Poppins – were baseless. You have to understand, SNL doesn’t give two f•cks about authenticity, or Britain, for that matter. The sketch simply needs to be done, so they can move on to the next one. (Sarah Sherman, on the right in the Gallagher sketch, is usually very brilliant in all her other sketches and one of my favourites.)

Watching SNL is a stark reminder to me that comedy is hard, maybe I’m not doing as badly as I think, and that humour is hugely subjective. (I find it hilarious that New York magazine’s Vulture website does episode recaps – I am a paying subscriber! – and the episodes I like always achieve a low rating, while the stone-cold duds bask in the glow of five golden stars.) Risks don’t always pay off, but if you have the platform you might as well take them, and there is always an audience out there, no matter how small, who will appreciate you, no matter how weird you are. And as I groan and roll my eyes to the heavens, I always ask myself, ‘Could you do any better?’ and the answer, truthfully, is no, I definitely couldn’t.

When slating SNL we should ask ourselves two questions: a) what would a weekly hour or so of live, scripted topical comedy in the UK look like? and b) isn’t it a shame that we don’t try?

DISCLAIMER: I know there have been several attempts over the years to replicate SNL, with a UK version mooted as recently as 2021. Hopefully one day we’ll have a version that works. It feels like sketch comedy is given so little space to breathe on mainstream UK TV and the little nurturing of comedy writers we do see focuses on sitcoms or vehicles for established acts (and even then there’s nowhere near enough of it on the main channels).

EXTRA DISCLAIMER: I write this love letter to SNL from my third sick day on the sofa, mainly spent watching old Bill Hader SNL sketches because my head hurts too much to read. So perhaps I am delirious.