This ain't no gold medal!

38.02 Joseph Gordon-Levitt/Mumford & Son

Lines that made me laugh out loud:
It isn’t insanity; it’s Little Armenia. – Private Eye/Caricaturist played by Bill Hader
Romney’s campaign is getting crazier than the last season of Lost. – Seth Meyers.
And this ain’t no gold medal! – Kenan Thompson
Champagne, Bentleys and quail hunting -- Kenan Thompson
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Cold Open - Live with Kelly and Michael Strahan (Nasim Pedrad and Jay Pharaoh)
Michael comments how this is the easiest job in the world. Bill Hader plays a brooding Robert Pattinson. Strahan’s constant comparing of this job to his old job getting smashed by 350 lb men is rather funny and shines the omnipresent light on how stupid much of live television is. On a side note, Live! with Regis and Kathy Lee (the worst Catholic and Jew pairing since Goebels and Edith Stein) was my favorite TV show when I was in grade three. And due to this my teacher and a number of other campy affectations, Ms. McKenna, my grade three teacher, loved me...everyone loves a gay ten year old.

Monologue - JGL came out and read a mediocre monologue written by someone else. Then he commented on his favorite movie of the summer, Magic Mike. He then stripped and danced with a bunch of less sexy SNL-actors. A less than awesome monologue was followed by a great commercial about undecided voters who asked “the important questions” like “What are the names of the two people running? And be specific?” “How long is a presidents term of office? One year? Two years? Three years? Or life?” “Can women vote? Because if not, as a woman, I’ve got a big problem with that. And by the way, if men can’t vote, in my opinion, that’s just as wrong.” “If you burp, fart and sneeze at the same time, will you die?” Great stuff, we are idiots.

A couple of Gordon-Levit driven acts in quick succession - the son of the most interesting man (JGL) in the world. Keep banging my friends. And tchin-tchin, he salutes a beer: “To boobies.” 40s Private Dick (Bill Hader) who is spying on JGL’s wife, who he suspects is cheating, produces not photographs of her in compromising positions, but hand-drawn caricatures of the people. “It’s not insanity, it’s little Armenia.” Tommy Bergamon, hypnotist, played by JGL, hypnotizes Curtis (Taran Killam) who insists he is not hypnotized, and then acts out the request of Bergamom.

Mumford and Shit.

The bulk of Saturday Night Live is now the Fake News, this week’s version clocked in at just over 17 minutes, without commercial interruption. This episode’s fake news Great snark on Mr & Mrs Romney: Romney’s an out-of-touch scumbag and is going to lose. ESPN commentator Stephen A Smith, played by Jay Pharaoh, whose talents are either very limited or are being very limited, came out to talk about Tebow’s awful playing in the Steelers/Jets game from September 16 with his over the top articulation and frequent references to his very close relationships with virtually every professional athlete currently playing.

Skit with Mumford and Suns being a Beatles cover band. Guys gather for a stag party at a Briton pub. Off color stories and comments are masked by a chorus singing, “Hey! You’ve got to hide your love away.” The skit ends with a mass singing of the song while cast marches/dances off set. Feigned boho self-expression: you are special, guys, just like everyone else.

Finer Things: down-low men talking about high fashion garb. Hosts Sway and Fort Knox display how Hip-hop culture is being absorbed by metrosexuality . . . thanks Frank Ocean. They prance around with pink Louis Vuitton purses, a gift from equally camp/thug gentleman played by JGL.

Guess who’s back? Mumford and shit sing more schlock. I like bands with gimmicks and shticks, but these guys do not want the audience to think they have a shtick. These gentlemen possess is either no self-awareness at all or a thinly veiled money grubbing attitude that only Gene Simmons can pull off with a modicum of grace. Mumford’s got no grace, nor family jewels.

Awful skit with Fred Armisen. This must be his last season, two episodes in and he has been in like three skits. A “daughter” (JGL) is being set up on a date with Dad’s co-worker. Its like the Ferrel-Gasteyer era Clups, a bizzaro duet of shitty music.  A very New York skit: Burt and Blair Powers Realty, a Staten Island couple/business whose advertisements are constantly marred with phalluses and sexually explicit commentary. Guess who the artist is? Their son, Carmine, played by JGL. This is you, arts world; you want to be considered bonafide, but your own art mocks the artist. C’mon, JGL & SNL, you are better than this.

Don't talk to me until I've had my morning chicken.

06.05 David Carradine/Joe Papp’s Pirates of Penzance Cast featuring Linda Ronstadt

December 20, 1980

Lines that made me laugh out loud:

“This (Magnum 44) can stop a rhino in its tracks; imagine what it can do to a mutha’ in the Bronx.” Proprietor of “Gun City” played by Joe Piscopo.

“President elect Ronald Reagan says he will do what he can to make America a better place. His first act is to resign.” Weekend Update anchor Charles Rocket.

Premptive defense: Netflix has every episode of Saturday Night Live, but strangely it is missing many skits and all of the musical guests. I’ve attempted to find the missing skits and musical guest performances on youtube, but haven’t had much luck...or initiative.

This is one of the first episodes of the post-Belushi era “Not Ready for Primetime Players.” The cold open of the episode show’s Joe Piscopo trying out his Don Pardo voice in the mirror of a dressing room. Pardo’s voice over starts to question Piscopo’s intentions of his practice routine and later chastises him for this. The original SNL cast were basically nobodies who became somebodies. Following the departure of that entire cast and producer Lorne Michaels, it’s time to “Rip it up and start again,” but with the pair of shoes on the dressing room floor, that are impossible to fill perfectly. A sketch comedy show like SNL had not been very successful on American television before the 75 season of SNL. This cast was trying to play psychedelic blues guitar two days after Hendrix died: a daunting task.

Mr Piscopo seems to be the great funny hope of the season. He was in nearly every sketch in the highly edited 27 minute version of the episode. Piscopo plays an in your face owner/barker/spokesperson in a “Gun City” advertisement offering up Magnum 45s as a viable Christmas gift for dad. The ad seems to be based on the “Crazy Eddie” advertisements of 70s and 80s NY television, an electronics warehouse that had the prices so low the owner must be crazy. He later is a chicken junkie morning the death of Col. Harlan Sanders with some other denizens of KFC-land, Eddie Murphy and Denny Dillon, who refuse to partake in extra crispy insisting that its original recipe or nothing!

Charles Rocket hosted the eponymous “Rocket Report” where he waxes philosophical about the wonders of Santa Claus and the beauty of the Christmas season in New York over a documentary styled montage of a department store Santa sifting through trash, mooching a cigaret and propositioning a lady of the night.

“Santa Claus, truly a heckuva guy, with a heckuva job, who really comes through in a heckuva way each year after yar, sees the whole world in just one night a guy definately as special as that needs a special kind of love and affection that only we can seem to conjure up at Christmastime. At least, we are capable of it.”

Like his much later WU successor, Rocket really can milk the loveable dirtbag that Dennis Miller mastered, babe. Later in the episode he hosts the Saturday Night News, the Ebersol era Weekend Update which was full of snark and had a great Do’s and Do Not Do’s for the holiday season offered up by Ann Risley. Rocket pulls a few good ones on Rupert Murdock, nearly thirty years ago Murdock was still a dirtbag, but then without his Asian pittbull/wife.

A brief advertisement begins with Piscopo and his wife, Gail Matthius, arguing: he’s cheating she’s a souse, etc. Then Rocket pops up to fix the situation with a DALLAS dress up set: a cowboy hat and sportcoat for him; a bouffant wig and slinky dress for her. Wow! Family dysfunction becomes prime time drama!

One of the very few skits featuring Season Six boy-genius, Eddie Murphy, in which two yuppie couples go up to Harlem for a real drug experience. Cocaine is so passé, implies husband Rocket, heroin is the new black. So, they venture up to Harlem for a real heroin experience. Murphy, the dealer/hustler, is asked to provide the heroin. Matthais asks, “Is this one hundred percent heroin? I dont want to put anything unnatural in my body.” This skit is followed by a few skits featuring guest host, David Carradine: Dopenhaged smokeless marihuana. Then Bob Dylan, Pat Weathers, visiting Woody Guthrie, Carradine. The two guitarslingers have a conversation peppered--er--permeated with self-referential lyrics, mostly said by Gutherie: Hey Woody, I wrote you a song. Don’t think twice, it’s alright. Oh well, I’m just blowing in the wind these days. Hell, I feel like I’m knocking on heaven’s door. Boooooooooooooring.

The highlight of these 80s episodes are these strange little short films, this one’s was Mitchell Kriegman’s Bill Irwin Dancing Man a nouvelle-vague inspired peice where actor Irwin does mundane activities that are interrupted with the funk classic, Peaches & Herb’s “Shake Your Groove Thing,” to which Irwin begins dancing like a maniac which causes his OJ to spill all over or for him to rhythmically fall down a flight of stairs. Great stuff.

Nobody was laughing out loud that day in Granada

38.01 Seth MacFarlane/Frank Ocean

September 16, 2012

Lines that made me laugh out loud:
Nobody was laughing outloud that day in Granada. (Puppet)
When we come back: can Hot Sauce prevent impotence. (Steve Harvey)

Considering the political climate and the concurrent election, the cold opening welcomed back a season that will likely be rife with political satire. Not that this is anything new, however, Jay Pharoah showed a bit of versatility outside of Jay-Z and Denzel Washington and may prove himself to be more than the one-trick phony I’ve taken him as since he joined two seasons back.

I’m not a huge fan of Seth MacFarlane’s sense of humor, but his panache for the old Hollywood and Vaudevillian multi-talent actor I regard very highly. His voices, his singing, his love of musical theatre and his everyman face worked very well this episode. Particularly in the “Lids” sketch where he played a SoCal baseball-hat-monger who cheers up his friend, Keenan Thompson, who was recently passed over for a promotion by hitting a big red button that opens a trap door through which dry ice smoke, dance music and a 70s bar mitzvah tuxedoed rapper comes out and dances. MacFarlane explains this is K-pop rapper, Psy, who recently got two million hits on youtube, because white people can relish in their racism when they are alone. Psy was played by Bobby Moynihan, and then joined by female dancers, horse puppets and hype-men. The actual Psy, this was not made up to my surprise?, comes out dances.

MacFarlane puts his man-child hat on for the next skit playing a puppetry instructor to three would be Shari Lewises, Thompson, Vanessa Bayer and Bill Hader, whose marrionettes are a park ranger, valley girl and an American veteran of the Sandanista Rebellion. Get it? The puppets were great looking, particularly the veteran: a very funny sketch, twisted and dark which harkens back to the mid-80s Jack Handey or Sen. Al Franken.

Frank Ocean comes out to rap/sing a song, “Thinkin’ About You.” Really good stuff. I’m not terrible hip on neo-soul, but I hope this kid makes it. It’s guitar driven atmospheric music, grab the hip-hop crowd and the guitar-rock crowd. Nicely, nicely done, Mr. Ocean.

Weekend Update had three fake guests. First was Honey Boo Boo, the TLC reality star played by Bayer and her mother, Moynihan. They mock these reality-tv bumpkins and their supportive network, where the L apparently standsfor Louisiana-backwater. Ryan Lochte is an Olympic swimmer who is apparently dumb, no stretch in humor for actor MacFarlane. Lastly, newcomer Cecily Strong, who played a Dominicana political enthusiast who knew virtually nothing about either canidates, and she had to constantly swat away the busy fingers of her silent-but-libidinous boyfriend, Pharoah. Nice schtick by Strong not supporting the Dream Act because some of her uncles are creeps and her family has a lot in common with Mormons because her dad wants more than one wife.

Steve Harvey Show mockup was funny because dressing people like Steve Harvey is silly. The sharpest skit was “Blind Date” with Nasim Pedrad and Seth MacFarlane. It really nailed the 18-30 youth culture, a group of people so permeated with TV and movie driven popular culture that an original thought is celebrated because it’s so darned uncomon! Two blithering idiots constantly trying to impress everyone with a terrible metacongnative affectectations modeled on popular culture schlock. Kenan Thompson, probably along with Fred Armisen and recently departed Kristen Wiig, the most versitile impressionist on SNL since 2005, follows Pedrad and MacFarlane’s preface to each impression: “and I’m all like ‘Stop this now.’” Now that I’m over thirty, I don’t get the cultural references and jokes that my students (pre-teens) and my younger, thinner, hipper contemporaries get, “Stop this now” is quite apt.

Speaking of impressions, John Mayer did a great Stevie Ray Vaughn impression during Frank Ocean’s last song of the show, “Pyramids.” Ocean: this little faygeleh has got some promise!