Pretty good Saturday Night Live sketch. Rather typically, it starts out very strong, then falls into familiar bad habits, putting a hat on a hat (a phrase possibly coined by Mike Nichols) and falling back on cultural references passing for jokes.
It’s a little ironic that SNL started by satirizing this very style of humor with Chevy Chase’s Gerald Ford impersonation, which consisted of no attempt to capture voice or mannerisms, just falling down repeatedly. The show was making fun of those tired old variety show bits where someone would say something like, “Hey, it’s Ed Sullivan,” and the actor would walk out with his shoulders hunched, repeating the line “really big shoe.”
These days, that same tired old bit is usually the payoff for a sketch.
Of course, it should be noted that the weird, deconstructionist phase of SNL was very brief, arguably not even lasting as long as the original cast. For the remaining 45 or so years, the show has been mainly interesting as a cultural phenomenon, managing some clever bits and really funny moments but of more interest as a showcase for new talent and for what it told us about the zeitgeist of a particular season.
For that reason, it’s heartening to see the satire aimed at deserving targets.
I don’t know if any of the writers on SNL today are British
comedy fans, but the sketch bears a strong resemblance to this classic
from That Mitchell and Webb Look.
Homeopathic A&E
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