SNL 40 year anniversary

Its hard to not be impressed by any show in the history of Television lasting 40 years. No regular TV episodic series has ever lasted this long and the TV show "Gunsmoke" is the only only one that is somewhat close at 25 years.

The over 3 hour 40 year SNL anniversary show was very entertaining last week and I enjoyed seeing some of the stars of that show and some of the great guest hosts they have had, the top four being Tom Hanks, John Goodman, Steve Martin and Alex Baldwin. One of my favorite all time repeating skits was the Jeopardy skit with Will Farrell playing Alex Trebec and Darrel Hammond playing Sean Connery. You have to tip your hat to some of the great ideas and great talents that have come out of SNL over the last 40 years.

Unfortunately, the problem with SNL after the first cast left the show back in the early 80's is that the show has been extremely bad with very bad skits too often of the time. Of course we all know that there is nothing more difficult that writing and performing live comedy, but my ritual with SNL ever since I got my first VCR and now DVR is to fast forward through a high percentage of the show - which for the most part is very unfunny. I have never understood why better writers have not been hired for this show and given the amount of time they all have over the summer that funnier ideas and skits have not been created. SNL has a ritual of a very late Tuesday night where everybody writes until 5 AM and then they have meetings to determine which one of the many skits that are written gets to make it on the show that Saturday night. Perhaps this ritual is the problem, perhaps a better way of creating better comedy should be invented and rather than expecting people to write until 5 AM is not the best way to come up with skits that are actually funny.

I also think that for the most part the fake News part of the show is also very unfunny. Tina Fey and Amy Pohler were the last two cast members to do a great job with this part of the show and the current cast members who are reading the fake News are also not funny in my opinion. Its time to make a major effort to making a funnier SNL, because for a very long time for the most part, SNL is just plain not funny enough.