SNL and one-joke sketches

One-joke sketches on Saturday Night Live aren’t inherently awful. “It’s Pat” wasn’t exactly complicated. Tom Hanks did well as “Mr. Short-Term Memory.” Even The Coneheads and the wild-and-crazy Festrunks didn’t exactly match the complexity of a classic Seinfeld or Arrested Development. Nothing wrong with that.

But when a debate sketch, so often SNL’s bread and butter, resorts to one joke, that’s a missed opportunity.

That’s why SNL’s otherwise excellent return to the air last weekend had a slow start.

OK. We get it. The media have been fawning over Obama recently. Just as they fawn over every front-runner. Say, Hillary Clinton, three or four months ago.

That’s really not enough for a debate sketch. Amy Poehler, Kristen Wiig, Will Forte and Jason Sudeikis are left with little to do but caricatures. (I especially feel for Wiig, who gets stuck with a lot of these characters for some reason — the new woman in the cast, Casey Wilson, is already getting better parts. In the evening’s best sketch, a parody of birth-control pill ads, Wiig is seen making out with a dog.)

The classic SNL debates have layers of jokes on all the candidates. Dana Carvey’s memorable Bush vs. Jon Lovitz’s pained Dukakis. Carvey’s Bush vs. Carvey’s Perot vs. Phil Hartman’s Clinton … a trifecta of brilliant characterizations. Then the best of them all — Darrell Hammond’s overbearing Gore vs. Will Ferrell’s borderline illiterate Bush, which was heavy on Gore but still introduced “strategery” into our vernacular.

The whole racial question over Fred Armisen playing Obama is overblown — both men have family trees that look like Benetton ads. Maya Rudolph had no problem playing characters of any ethnicity. Neither should Armisen.

The blame here is on the folks who were on strike all this time — the writers. Come on, folks. These people are funnier than that.

 

The next senator of Minnesota should be me, Al Franken

Al Franken’s long on-again, off-again association with Saturday Night Live was always hit or miss for me. I never really got the Franken and Davis skits. He tended to lapse into tedious self-loathing, which sunk his promising sitcom Lateline. His books suck.

On the flip side, Stuart Smalley was a brilliant character, and he got a lot of mileage out of the “one-man mobile uplink unit.”

So could I accept him as a senator from Minnesota? Seems less silly than electing Jesse Ventura governor, anyway.

Also made me wonder if I could take any other SNL stars seriously in politics. Dana Carvey made a few political comments in his stand-up, but I didn’t buy it. Chris Rock says plenty of provocative things as a comedian he could never, ever say in a campaign.

I might go with Tina Fey, just on intellect and demeanor.

 

Skipping "denial" — moving straight to "anger"

If you live near Washington and aren’t one of those total *^&#@s who despise all things relating to the Redskins, you’re grieving today for Sean Taylor, whose utterly senseless death has shocked the region.

But another death in the news caught my attention as well. Quiet Riot’s Kevin DuBrow, not an old man by any reckoning, suddenly passed away.

It’s easy to think of DuBrow and company as a little cartoonish. That was their image for a while, and it worked for them. But these are very real people. If you want a reminder, check the official site of drummer Frankie Banali, who shares his pain with an eloquence you might not expect from a guy whose band bashed out Metal Health back in the day.

I’ve been home with MMM Jr. today, and as entertaining and lovable as he is, I’ve been feeling kind of angry. The way I figure it, death and decay are always going to be in greater supply than any of us want. The great idiocy of mankind is that we invite more of them into our lives.

We don’t know the details of why Taylor was shot. We don’t know anything about DuBrow’s death. But at some point, the message has to sink in. We as a species are absolute failures in the most basic need of living creatures — taking care of each other.

I don’t hear any politicians talking about such things — they’re all reciting the same banter we’ve been hearing for decades, and the “citizen journalists” that are supposedly replacing those of us who are being bought out and laid off (speaking in generalities here — last I checked, I still had a job) aren’t doing any better at broadening the conversation beyond the same rhetorical tricks carefully coached by the Vogon warlords who serve as their strategists.

Can we do better? I sure as hell hope so.

(Back to more uplifting fare tomorrow.)

 

This land must change or land must burn

The Australian election results are fascinating on so many levels — a vote in favor of the Kyoto Protocol, a rare defeat (unofficial) of a prime minister in his home district and another electoral repudiation of a Bush/Iraq War ally. Yes, they’re taking their 550 troops and getting out, if the new guy lives up to his campaign promises.

This being a mostly music/media blog, our primary interest is the current Shadow Minister for Climate Change, Environment, Heritage and the Arts. He has indeed been re-elected.

You guessed it … he’s Peter Garrett, former lead singer of Midnight Oil, currently awaiting likely nomination to the equivalent of a U.S. Cabinet post.

Let’s see someone from Rage Against the Machine do that.

(Title source: Warakurna)

 

An unscientific survey

Far be it for me to question the methodology of polls, particularly as a proud employee of a company that relies so heavily on them.

But the current polls have me confused and wondering if I’m completely out of touch with real Americans.

And so I’d like to take an unscientific survey of my own, just for my edification.

First and only question: Do you know anyone who actually plans to vote for Hillary Clinton?

Disclaimer: I’m not intending to reveal anything about my own political views. I’m just wondering if and how the people I know and read about, with the exception of a few Hollywood types with big checkbooks for political donations, intersect so little with the apparent political majority at this point in time.