What the fuck is up with Joe Rogan bringing on people who can’t hack the hyper competitive environment of SNL? Now, let me be clear — I BARELY listen to Rogan’s podcast on Spotify, but from what I’ve seen of the clips on YouTube there is a recurring theme. And that theme is SNL is some sort of shitty place to work where everyone is out to get you.
This, of course, is bullshit.
What I think is going on is there two things. One, Rogan probably couldn’t get on to SNL and he resents that. Two, the idea that SNL is some sort of viper’s nest plays into Rogan’s New Right lite grievance politics.
What is really going on is this — SNL is competitive as hell. Either you sink or swim. If you can survive — and thrive — in such an environment, then you have what it takes to be a huge star.
But Rogan brings on people who hate that type of environment and they sit around talking about what a shitting place SNL is. Ugh.
Upon the news that Lorne Michaels will be feted as part of upcoming Kennedy Center Honors festivities, I saw someone complain on Twitter about how Lorne Michaels hasn’t promoted enough POC comics over the years.
That’s a fair point, and, yet, it also misses a crucial aspect of what’s going on: that’s not SNL’s function. SNL is not meant to be The Chappelle Show. It’s not meant to be edgy or challenging or go way out of its way to introduce mainstream audiences to unknown POC comics. Though the show has begun to promote non-white comics more of late which is good, SNL is meant to be the exact center of American comedy.
In this respect, SNL is similar to Taylor Swift. Tay-Tay serves a function. And that function is to be the exact center of American pop music. If you want songs about WAP, turn your ears elsewhere.
So, in a sense, woke complaints about Lorene Michaels and SNL are more attacks on the idea of any sort of “mainstream” at all. There’s nothing wrong with simply being mainstream. There are so many other off beat, edgy venues for people to enjoy non-mainstream content that it’s annoying when people attack something for being mainstream for simply being mainstream.
Ugh.
It’s this type of thinking that aggravates the culture wars and makes MAGA New Right cocksuckers want to burn the whole thing to the ground. Welcome to the New Right, as Jesse Kelly keeps say. (Double ugh.)
There are no easy answers to any of this. We’re careening towards a moment in time when either we have a MAGA autocracy and everything goes to shit, or we have a civil war and there’s some sort of culture “reset” where we all agree that having a “mainstream” this or that thing is fine. (Because once such a horrific civil war is over, people are going to cling to the traditional again — at least, that’s my thinking.)
If my Tik-Tok feed is any indication, SNL has effortlessly become popular with another generation of Americans. This leads to how and why this keeps happening. First, let’s note that the old quip about SNL is, “It’s a mediocre restaurant in an excellent location.”
But I would suggest that this seriously misses the point about the House that Michaels Built. What makes the show so timeless is it fills the Bob Hope niche in modern America. Bob Hope’s humor was sort of like the comic strip Garfield — it was funny, but it wasn’t laugh-out-loud funny. It was comic comfort food. As such, SNL is kind of the same way — it’s often funny, but it’s rare that it’s really laugh-out-loud funny.
And that’s why SNL is probably going to grow in cultural significance for decades to come — it gives us a weekly round up of what’s on the mind of New York City liberals but it isn’t needy or pushy. It’s an enjoyable way to spend an hour and a half on a Saturday night.
If the show was as edgy as some people would have it be, SNL would quickly burn out. It would be really popular for one or two seasons and then get canceled because it was a little bit too “of the moment.”
The question of who will replace Lorne Michaels is something that I find very interesting because he’s been such a powerful figure in American entertainment for so long that while a lot of people would want the job, only one or two would actually be a good fit.
I still think Tina Fey is the perfect replacement for Michaels for various reasons, but I don’t know enough about her career goals to know if she would be interested.
Let me begin by saying the only reason why I keep talking about this is, well, Lorne Michaels is 76 years old and he’s got to retire sometime. But maybe he’ll be like Queen Elizabeth II and vow to retire when he’s 100. And, let me stress, I don’t know anything and I get things wrong all the time.
Having said that, there seems to be three types of people who are in the running for Michaels’ successor — Tina Fey, Kenan Thompson and everyone else.
So, while Thompson should get it because he knows the show so well, Fey will get it because she’s got brass balls and won’t take shit from anyone. I could definitely see NBC splitting Michaels’ job into two. Thompson gets to be the comical “executive producer” that shows up every once in a while, while Fey gets to be the behind the scenes, tough as nail broad who knocks heads when need be.
Just as an outsider, it seems as though Michaels job is a unique blend of mentor and aloof manager who has his finger on the sensibilities of liberal America to the extent that he can pluck comics from obscurity. So the “everyone else” group of potential successors could be a wide range of people.
It would be very interesting if NBC didn’t pick someone with extensive SNL experience to run the show. But who knows. It’s just something interesting to think about.
A re-occurring theme in this novel I’m working on is how much I want people to really love a place. I want particular place in the setting of the novel to be almost a character unto itself. I’m fascinated by how people love the office politics and history of Saturday Night Live and struggle to figure out how to use that dynamic in the novel.
It’s really interesting that people enjoy hearing old behind the scenes stories from SNL that sometimes that’s Jimmy Fallon’s entire show. I’m still only on my first draft, so there’s a lot of nuance that I’ve yet to figure out how to impart into the novel’s text.
But in general, I want several main characters to have an emotional attachment to a place so when something happens to it, the audience knows it’s a big deal. Being able to actually show that on the page is a lot — a lot — of work. I’ve discovered the hard way that my imagination and my ability to lay what I can think up on the page are two different things. It’s been a two year struggle to get to this point.
Anyway, I’m going to have to give this a lot of thought to evoke the emotional attachment I need.
Today’s big concept is something very obvious and simple: “plot” is a verb. This has been a major problem of mine since I starting developing, then writing, the developing again, this novel. In the past, I’ve thought up scenes that were static. They presented information, but had zero action or connection to other scenes.
Now, as I have repeatedly said in the past, I have no friends and no one likes me. I didn’t have a wife or a girlfriend to point out some massive problems with the universe I’d thought up and so I’ve repeatedly wasted months of my time by not seeing the obvious, only to abruptly have to re-calibrate the entire novel. I am functioning in a complete vacuum, with only seeing the occasional movie being any outside source to help me with this obsession.
But things are slowly beginning to bounce back. I have vowed to myself not to start writing again until I have some semblance of a complete scene summary that I can use as a guide to write the next draft of the novel. There’s a lot — a whole lot — going on with this novel right now. While it has a lot of layers (if you know me well enough and know how I think) it also has ZERO literary aspirations.
I’m graze-reading an essential book — at least for me — on scene and structure that I need to snort if this novel is to be any semblance of a success. Knowing how to develop both a scene and the plot that it would be a part of is crucial.
Having said all that, two things are really beginning to influence this novel, which I jokingly within my mind call a “political guilty pleasure for woke Park Slope moms.” This is not at all a real description, for no other reason than my background, personality and political views are maybe not Ken Bone bad, but they at least don’t easily fit the narrative that Blue Check Liberals are so fond of on Twitter. In fact, on an emotional level, this novel is essentially me running around naked to see if anyone notices what’s going on.
Two things are really at the forefront of my mind as I struggle to finish a second draft scene summary as quickly as possible so I can get back to writing — SNL and Pitchfork. SNL is important because it’s an organization that has a storied history and legacy that people love, love, love to hear about. I’ve only encountered one place in my life that was as intense about something creative that a team did together — in a sense — and so I’m leaning into that as the heart of this novel. It’s the thing that connects the whole universe together, at least from my point of view as the “prime mover.” It has to do with music, so maybe that might catch someone’s eye at some point when such attention is needed.
Meanwhile, I’m also interested in using the music Website Pitchfork as a cheat sheet for the musical aspect of this novel’s plot. I haven’t done it yet, but given what’s going on in the novel and when it’s set, it would make sense if I started to study Pitchfork to get some sense of what people who read it would think is “good” modern music. If I don’t do that, I really risk being bit too conspicuous about what I’m REALLY doing with this novel and that might be off putting. If I can hide behind updating the musical reference, that might help a lot.
Again, I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m operating in a complete vacuum. This novel’s problems are MY problems. It’s just I’ve gotten better as a storyteller and so I’m growing a little bit more confident that at a minimum I won’t embarrass myself. The great irony is I do have a few very, very, very tenious connections to showbiz…but none of these people take my seriously and think of me as just a dreamer loser. So if I have any type of success with this novel, these people might have a few eyepopping surprises down the road.
I’m being really delusional on that one as of right now, though.
It could be that at the end of this process I still suck and I have to self publish. At least I will have gone through the entire process and can say I’ve written a “real” novel on my own terms.
Maybe I’ll write a screenplay next if that happens.
I am — by nature — a generalist. I know a little bit about a wide spectrum of things. So, I am often fascinated by people who know a lot about one thing. I also find the passion that things like Saturday Night Live can generate very intriguing. There’s only been one time in my life when I felt that much passion for a group of people and that was in Seoul. With that in mind, I’m at least trying to lean into that experience as the cornerstone of the novel I’m developing.
It’s a prime example of “write what you know” in action. But there’s a fine balance between writing about a fictionalized version of a place that you love and writing a lot of verbiage that many people in your potential readership will find tedious, at best. But I think if I really go into what makes the place special and how it has come to change the lives of the people connected to it and the community around it, then I think potential readers will enjoy it once they get into it.
One thing I have to really think about it establishing that such a place actually believable exists in the first place where I am determined to put in in my universe. My hope is that if I write about the place with a lot of obvious love that that will come across on the page and people will get into it. Or, put another way, I don’t care. This novel is for me and fuck you you don’t like it. Wink.
The universe I’ve created is very detailed and well thought out. Extremely so. Like, we’re talking Star Wars levels of backstory on the interaction between characters. But that comes more from how personal the story is than anything else. In a way, the plot of this novel is me running around emotionally naked. That is, of course, if you understand the inspiration for the people and places I’m writing about.
One fun part of all of this is having a vast amount of information that I have to explain to the reader in a simple, cogent fashion that makes the premise of the novel believable, even though, in a sense, it follows some of the conventions of science fiction. You might call the novel a “political science fiction novel.” I have referred to it as a “political fairy tale guilty pleasure for woke Park Slope moms” in the past. But I’m not a woman and don’t pretend to know anything more about women than any other man. I’m not an “ally,” but I am good-natured and empathetic. I try not to get too wrapped up in how you might suggest I have a vested interest in the patriarchy given that I am a member of it. Meh. I generally believe the more agency and happiness women have on a personal level the better off society is. If that makes me some sort of feminist “ally,” so be it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t like T&A and won’t try to chat a woman up with sex on my mind if she’s hot.
I have numerous political views that don’t fit the narrative advocated by Blue Check Liberals on Twitter. Fuck that and fuck them. I’m my own person and I know what I believe. But I am generally compassionate and empathetic — or at least try to be.
The thing about Phoebe Waller-Bridge is how down to earth and honest she is. One thing I’ve noticed about her, however, is she doesn’t have the UCB chops that a lot of American TV stars have. She’s more of a writer and traditional actor.
Hey babe.
You notice it the most when she’s on a show like Late Night and Seth Meyers obviously really wants to do a form of improv with her and she can seem a bit slow on the take. She’s naturally funny, of course, but it comes out more naturally for her in the context of sitting in front of a laptop and thinking about it.
Having said all that, I have a hunch that she’s going to get sucked into the Hollywood community in a pretty big way. She’s recently divorced and there are plenty of single — and powerful — Hollywood leading men who love to have her by their side as they walked down the red carpet. The one guy who might find her a catch would be Bill Murray. He’s a bit old for her, but they would be an instant Hollywood power couple. (I’m too lazy to look at Wikipedia to see if he’s single.) I mean, the one guy I could see falling hard for Ms. Waller-Bridge is Jon Hamm. Hamm is a very funny guy and it seems like he would enjoy having Ms. Waller-Bridge a comic foil in both public and private endeavors.
I could see Hollywood producers have a bit of a struggle figuring out what to do with her because she’s not a traditional Hollywood beauty, but I can think of plenty of roles she would be perfect for. She’s got a unique comic voice that will serve her — and the audience — well for potentially decades to come.
One other thing is now that she’s hosted SNL, she’s a part of the SNL hivemind and there’s a good chance she might linger in its orbit as events warrant. She’s probably met a lot of the big wigs of SNL during the course of preparing for the show and those contacts will be beneficial to everyone involved going forward.
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.
The key thing about Shane Gillis losing the SNL gig is he did not take the initial outrage seriously. If he had validated peoples anger over what he said, then maybe he would still be on the show.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize the first step to getting people to accept your apology is to validate their anger. But he did not do that. His “apology” was rather flip. He acted like, lulz, you guys can’t handle my style of humor.
This is NOT a good course of action when it comes to being on SNL.
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