90% of it is dreadful. They should boil down the "good" sketches to a half hour show and air it during the week. Norm McDonald kicked @ss on WU. His delivery was always off-kilter and usually made just OK material funnier. I remember him discussing the Michael Jackson pedophilia case and he started with something like "LA police were at the Neverland Ranch this weekend looking into allegations of child sexual abuse against Michael Jackson. Of course that make sense because (real slow) MICHAEL...JACKSON...IS...A...CHILD... MOLESTER!" the crowd predictably groaned but it was just perfect.
I liked McDonald when he first started doing WU. My big peeve with him is that during his last season+ on SNL when he had his disagreements with the producers (he wouldn't be the first or the last, of course) and decided to take it out on the audience. He pretty much made his entire material from rehashed bits like OJ Simpson, "crack whore", "(turn to Camera 2) or so the Germans would have us believe " and "note to self" - they're all funny when they're rare and unexpected, except in McDonald's case, they were often and expected. I'm a big fan of dry humor, but not when it's milked so hard that it's bone dry.
Norm was the absolute best! A couple of my favorites: "Police are trying to determine whether or not Dr. Jack Kevorkian had anything to do with the death of a woman whose body was found in the back of his suicide van. Now... I'm no expert on police work, but, uh ....YES!" "Yasser Arafat is celebrating the news that he is going to be a father. Arafat said he doesn't care if the new baby is a boy or a girl... as long as it hates Jews."
I´m glad somebody agrees with me. I absoloutely hated Molly Shannon. I thought she was the worst cast member. Almost everyone of her charachters were the same thing that her stupid Mary Katherine Gallagher. She sucked. The characther about the lady that "was loving it", may be the worst charachter ever. I never got how people thought she was so great.
Here's the actual Norm line from that episode: Well, there may be trouble in paradise. Lisa Marie Presley confirmed this week, that she and Michael Jackson live in separate residences, 50 miles away from each other. Lisa Marie was quoted as saying, "I guess being married to a homosexual pedophile wasn't such a great idea after all." http://www.fakenews.net/update/1994_11_19.html
Re: Re: Have You Given Up On SNL? I cracked up reading those. I can imagine how he delivered each one... Here are a couple others that I remembered: "A doctor in Sweden has developed a new method of surgery that doesn't require anasthesia. The surgery is exactly the same as it is with anashtesia... only it hurts like a bastard!" "A new poll has determined that the most popular band among college-aged listeners is the group Better Than Ezra. Coming in second? Ezra."
Some great Norm quotes. "Roseanne was married on Valentines Day, and gee, you know as romantic as that sounds, I find myself far more interested in almost anything else that is going on in the face of the planet." " The world was stunned this week when Yasser Arafat was awarded the nobel peace prize. Actually, it's not that remarkable when you consider this years other nominees; Raule Sadress, Mickey Roarke, and the guy who stabbed Monica Seles. " "This week Saddam Hussein pulled his troops back from the Kuwaiti border after realizing that a second invasion might hurt his chances for a Nobel Peace Prize. " And one of my favorites which was a qoute by Christine Brinkly, she suggested that football players should wear a light in their helmets that is connected to sensor, that way when a player catches the ball, the helmet lights up and you know who has the ball, "read this and other quotes on her new book, I´m an idiot"
Funny someone started this thread recently. Saturday's (10/18/03: Halle Berry, Britney Spears) was literally the worst I'd ever seen. And I saw many shows during "The Charles Rocket Era." It was so painful we watched the whole thing in amazement. Okay, maybe not amazement, maybe just-got-home-from-Sharks-game-and-too-drunk-to-change-channel kind of stasis. Only things remotely funny were one fake ad and one Tina Fey joke on the news. Horation Sanz was especially terrible, most notably as a Cubs fan during the news, coming off like such a pathetic impression of those "Super Fans" (da Bearse!) that I actually said to my wife, "Where's George Wendt when they need him?" and lo and behold, out came George reprising his Super Fan...and he wasn't funny, either. Every skit other than those was one you'd expect to see as filler at 12:50 AM. In EVERY skit, the actors were blatantly reading their lines...what, did they scrap the show and rewrite it entirely on Saturday? And Britney Spears was worse than the skits. In her first number, she was blatantly lip-synching. Her second number was a "ballad," and it evoked images of Britney and Freddie Durst locked in coital bliss (in other words, it was one scary, sucky ballad). I think she also lip-synched the ballad, but I was too drunk by that point to remember to check.
I liked the one where he was talking about an auction of Beatles memorabilia, and said that "among the items earning the most money was a picture of George Harrison NOT looking haggard".
"I agree" posts suck, but you just wrote exactly what I was going to write about that episode. It was hoo-hah-riffic.
It's not a good sign for the season when the best host so far out of Jack Black, Justin Timberlake and Halle Berry was Justin Timberlake.
I have the clip of presidential debate between Bush and Gore in 2000, where Gore talks about his plan for the budget, involving a 'lock-box'. That was a damn funny skit. Orlando Jackson (that's his name, right?) can be kind of funny. Will Ferrel isn't bad. Norm McDonald was definitely the funniest SNL cast member I've seen. His delivery was always great.
Here's the thing about SNL: people have been saying its on a decline for 15 years. Every year, people think it has hit an all-time low. I don't understand why. It's not like expectations are very high. So why are people surprised when the show isn't funny? I'm as bad an offender as anyone. I always want it to be as funny as I remember it, but it never is.
Some host once said in an interview that they don't like you to memorize your lines, since the writers are constantly tweaking them all week after rehearsal. I forget who this was though, some woman singer I think, and not an actress, so maybe they were feeding a crock. Maybe they thought she was too stupid to memorize them anyway, and she shouldn't worry her pretty little head about it. But yea, I'd never known who Justin Timberlake was, other than the name, but he sure has a lot of energy. He was in just about every skit and did three or four songs as well. He must have sweated off ten pounds.
The lip-synching in the first song was so blatant that it certainly has to be a low-point in the show's history. I'm sure she was really singing the second time around, and guess what? She makes Paula Abdul sound like Mahalya Jackson. Hell, she makes Victoria Jackson sound like Mahalya Jackson.
I thought the show was worse than SNL although I haven´t seen them in a while. Still all sketch show are inferior to the greatest sketch show and greatest show in the history of TV, Mr Show with Bob and David.
I realize you don't care, but anyways... I'll admit I'm a huge Chris Farley fan, but did you even watch more than 3 or 4 episodes with him in it? By now, I've probably seen almost every episode with Chris Farley in it and I don't see him "always getting lost and trying to READ his lines". I'm not saying he never did that, but I think you might have just seen one skit and based your whole opinion off of that one skit.
I know I'm probably committing apostacy, but I caught the really old reruns (John Belushi etc) awhile back on the E channel, and even cut down to half an hour, they're pretty rough. Obviously theres some moments of brilliance in them, but there are a lot of rough edges, both in the writing and in the acting. Just something to think about.
I think you're right. When we think back to the "classic" SNL, we tend to think ONLY of the great moments -- Belushi as Samurai Whatever, fake ads with Aykroyd, Bill Murray's lounge singer, Garrett Morris yelling "OUR TOP STORY TONIGHT ...," etc. We don't remember the awful drug humor, the weird "confrontational" style of the Franken-and-Davis sketches, etc. Those who confuse cynicism with intelligence will always say SNL was better "in the old days." When I was in college, there were people who said it hadn't been good since Belushi. They missed the Hartman-Carvey years. Then people said it hadn't been good since Carvey left, and they missed Will Ferrell. It has struggled a bit since Ferrell left, but it's still absolutely worth watching. I've come to realize that anything Tina Fey does is brilliant. Hammond's "Hardball" sketches are unreal. And yes, they actually got a great performance from Justin Timberlake, of all people. The sketch in which he fought the fake Kermit (hearing The Frog call him a douchebag over and over was priceless) and the bizarre Barry Gibb show at the end both had me laughing the next morning. They also have the best female cast they've ever had in Fey, Dratch, Rudolph and Poehler. Fey's brilliant, Dratch and Poehler have terrific brash attitudes, and Rudolph is supremely talented.