by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
Saturday Night Live is not what the audience may think it is. It’s not a comedy show, it actually serves an important role in civil society. A lot of other elements of society use it as a shorthand for the mood of the nation about the zeitgeist. So, in real terms, it doesn’t even matter how funny it is. What matters is the general vibe of the show on any particular moment.
Reading Twitter comments about the show with that in mind can be rather grating. People get so worked up over how funny — or not funny — the show is. In fact, the case could be made that if the show was actually as funny as people want it to be, it wouldn’t have lasted as long as it has. SNL is the Bob Hope of institutional TV comedy. Its lack of comic Molotov cocktails ensures that it’s kind of background noise to the average person.
But, as I said, you can definitely get a bead on the mood of the country from the show, especially the cold open. I suspect a lot of the writers for the week night talk shows watch SNL and then use it to get a sense of what might play for the next week.
In passing, I would note that Great Britain, as best I can tell, doesn’t have an SNL equivalent. There’s plenty of great modern British comedy, but for some reason there’s no one late night show that critiques the days events in the country as best I can tell.
Anyway, SNL is at least one civil society institution in America that Trump hasn’t managed to destroy yet.
