Random Snippets: Saturday Night Live really isn't all that funny, and never has been.

Saturday Night Live is celebrating its 40th Anniversary right now, and it recently had a special in which all of its surviving old hands came in and reprized some of their famous skits.  And everyone has some that  they like.  I, for example, like the memory of The Samurai Delicatessen, even if when I see it rerun it doesn't seem to be that funny. And some of the mock ads, or the some skits, I find genuinely funny.  And nobody can deny, I think, that the mock political debates are hugely funny, as are occasionally the satires of individual Presidents (the ones of Clinton were hilarious).

Having said all of that, by and large, the show just isn't all that good.

Now, humor is very subjective, but for a lot of Saturday Night Live to be funny, you have to have both a sophomoric sense of humor that even most sophomores in college or in high school don't have, and I think it helps if you fit into a downtown, middle class, east coast urban demographic.  That demographic seems to fill the population of television writers in general, and indeed years ago on NPR I had heard how a surprising number of comedy writers all come out of the same Ivy League school which is why they all have the same sense of humor from their college days, which never really changes.  Humor is, I"m pretty sure, both genetic and cultural, and there's a lot of funny stuff out there which just isn't going to make it on to something like Saturday Night Live, let alone television in general. In contrast, there are entire acts that one demographic finds funny and another does not. Chevy Chase, for example, isn't funny.  In anything.  But somebody must think so.

But Saturday Night Live, in spite of not really being all that funny, by and large, is long running, and television likes to celebrate itself, and so it has been. And that's part of the appeal, I think, of Saturday Night Live.  The culture believes its funny as to maintain otherwise would be to suggest that we've all been playing along. 

Of course, it could all be subjective.  My wife thinks Wayne's World is hilarious.  I think its stupid.  My son and I find the Grand Budapest Hotel to be very funny, my wife does not.  Everyone here loves Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, but one of my in laws can't stand it.