The seventies have been over for a long time. The Bees are gone. The Coneheads are gone. Point/Counterpoint is gone. Falling Chevy Chase is gone. The Wild & Crazy Guys are gone, and so's Mr. Bill. (Into the White House, and who the new punching bags were is anyone's guess.)
What is left is a little bit of sharp political satire and not much else. And we've all got to wonder about even that when Mike Huckabee and Hillary Clinton provide some of the funniest moments for the new Not Ready for Primetime Players.
The creative genius that put Saturday Night Live on the cutting edge is long gone. Remember the Bees? And Todd and Lisa? These were funny. They were creative and original. They required a spark of imagination that people would call a gift because they came out of nowhere. And the people who came up with these ideas would never talk about thinking outside the box because no one who uses that phrase is really outside. They weren't making fun of any one person or thing in particular. Oh, perhaps the awkwardness of youth with Todd and Lisa, and even Wayne's World. But these are more universal themes which are shared, and which all people of a society can relate to. Belushi and Akroyd didn't need to craft jokes out of watching a political debate. They didn't need to rely almost exclusively on a specfic media event that they could watch and figure out who, what, and how to mock. A lot of their best humor did not make fun of any one specific someone or something.
And that, in a nutshell, says a lot not just about this one program, but about what has happened to our entire culture. The show seems to be reflecting a cynicism and meanness that has caught hold of the national psyche, and which has drained the real life genius and fun out of not just SNL scripts, but the population as a whole.
When Saturday Night Live was first airing, and still funny, the Cold War was still being fought and a whole host of social issues thrown up by the Sexual Revolution had yet to be codified into the society's social framework.
Several decades later, there is no Evil Empire to attack, so many Americans seem to have resorted to demonizing each other. No doubt this always went on, but you'd have to really wonder if it is not now at an all-time high. And the bits and pieces of embraced traditional values that were in place before the sixties are now antiquities. You can catch glimpses of them in decades-old films and television shows at midnight screenings that modern audiences probably text message their way through over beer and pizza. I do not know if this generation will be like mine; my generation, and the one before it, laughed at the past. And they laughed hard.
Saturday Night Live isn't funny anymore. And neither is a lot of what is happening around us. It is one thing to laugh at the past. But when the laughter fuels the destruction of what was nurturing in society-- and what made the average person feel safe and secure, and maybe even happy-- the laughter stops.
So goes Saturday Night Live and its nation.
