Photo courtesy of nbc.com
In the final sketch of Saturday Night Live’s 40th anniversary special, Garth and Wayne (Dana Carvey and Michael Myers) made fun of the inevitable “Saturday Night Dead” reviews that pop up every single year. Without fail, someone always heralds that this year is finally, actually the year SNL has lost its magic and will soon be gone. It’s happened countless times — beloved cast members leave, ratings go down, the end-times are coming. Then SNL bounces back and becomes popular again. It’s a predictable cycle, and those reviews are an integral part of it.
The truth is that SNL is too deeply ingrained in modern American culture to just go away in one or even a few bad seasons. It’s too well-established, too stable. If SNL were truly to dissipate, it would have to come over a considerable amount of bad seasons, at least three absolute disasters and a serious demonstration that the show is culturally irrelevant, which, we see time and again, it isn’t. The show has shown that it can be just as biting in its satire, just as timely in its parodies, as ever.
Let’s be honest, the 40th anniversary special itself was pretty boring. It was a three-and-a-half-hour self-congratulatory cast party that we were allowed to watch. Over the epic length, there were only three or four sketches, all of them softball recreations of popular older sketches, mixed in with montages, guest appearances and musical performances, including a spectacular Kanye West set. Audiences were given retreads of old sketches, most with not much added, with the hopes that just recognizing familiar premises and characters would be enough to entertain.
It’s a problem that sprung up all night. Wayne’s World, the Bass-o-matic, even the Californians all made appearances. Beyond the initial recognition, however, these sketches didn’t land. The genius of SNL is that it has such a quick turnaround that the sketches are always of-the-moment. The Wayne’s World characters aren’t funny today because that trope — the rock-loving, long-haired basement-dweller — doesn’t really exist anymore. Similarly, the Californians sketch wasn’t funny because that kind of vapid, California rich-kid character is so overdone and mostly out of the public consciousness. (Also, that sketch was about 10 minutes too long.)
But the retrospective also reinforced how great SNL can be. Those sketches and characters were hits at the time, and the show still consistently creates comedy that speaks to the moment it was written. The 40th anniversary special may have shown how dated a lot of those old sketches were, but they look that way to us now because they were hyper-specific to their time. We shouldn’t be annoyed that something isn’t “timeless.” Comedy is great when it is of a certain time and is aware of where in that timeline it sits. The montages showed just how many incredible moments SNL has had, because it was aware of its place in popular culture when the moments were created. After 40 years of consistent timeliness, I can forgive a bit of cheesy nostalgia as long as each Saturday night, the writers and performers continue to situate their comedy firmly in the present.
