50 years of ‘SNL’ is just not funny (by Alan Dershowitz)

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After suffering through more than three hours of “Saturday Night Live” unfunnyness on Sunday night, I’ve come to the sad realization that “SNL” was never that funny. There were moments — Belushi, Radner and a few others — but mostly the sketches were heavy on physical comedy and light on thoughtful humor. The 50 year anniversary had almost no funny moments.

My criticism goes deeper. The 50 years of “SNL” mediocrity helped to destroy really funny, laugh-out-loud comedy as practiced by such masters as Groucho Marx, Jackie Gleason, George Burns, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Woody Allen, Elaine May, Bob Newhart, Don Rickles, Alan King, Jackie Mason, Rodney Dangerfield, Joan Rivers, Red Skelton, Danny Kaye and George Carlin.

Maybe it’s just a matter of taste or generational preference. But I really don’t think so. By anything close to objective standards, comedy has gone downhill since “SNL” became its dominant platform.

I have always loved good comedy. I grew up in a funny Brooklyn neighborhood, two houses away from Jackie Mason, a few blocks from Buddy Hackett and a couple of miles from Woody Allen. Humor — satire and quips — was our language of choice. We were judged in large part by how funny we were. A good joke circulated with the speed of conversation.

One of our favorite radio shows was called “Can You Top This?” It featured four comedians who tried to outdo each other by getting laughs. The MC would throw out a topic and the competitors would quickly tell a relevant joke. The winner was selected based on a laugh meter that measured the reaction of the live studio audience to each joke. I am willing to bet that if the live reaction to “SNL” were accurately measured, it would be far lower than the reactions to the comedians that it replaced.

The mostly physical and heavy-handed “comedy” of “SNL” resulted in audiences laughing at the prat fallers, rather than at the clever repartee of their predecessors. Old comedy was about words and ideas. “SNL” was largely about goofy actions and distorted faces.

Woody Allen was as funny on the written page as he was on the live stage. Other comedians made recordings that were hysterically funny. The broad physical comedy of “SNL” had to be seen live because the words themselves were not clever or ironic — or funny. “SNL” humor, unlike the comedy of wordsmiths like Groucho Marx, is rarely retold. For “SNL,” you had to be there.

For the past half-century, the criteria for success as a comedian depended on how many times Lorne Michaels selected you to fall down, make a face or scream. This had a discernible impact — for the worse — on how aspiring comedians honed their craft. It also had a negative impact on the expectations of audience members who experienced comedy largely through the narrow prism of “SNL.”

Maybe I’m just nostalgic for the comedy of my generation, but I still love today’s great stand-up comics. Unfortunately, there are too few of them and they don’t get the public airings if they haven’t “made it” to “SNL.”

The end result has been a dialing down of the laugh meter. Since the advent of “SNL,” many unfunny “comedians” go for the political applause rather than the belly laughs. They seek rehearsed approval for their political and ideological views rather than spontaneous bursts of genuine laughter. Signs in the audience tell them how to react, and the responses are anything but spontaneous. And we are the poorer for it. All thanks to “SNL” and Michaels.

The current TV manifestation of “SNL” comedy is late night TV. Rarely funny, but almost always political. And always progressive. More applause and fewer laughs. No more Johnny Carson. Instead we have the tendentious and rarely funny Stephen Colbert. And many young late night audiences say they get their “news” from these Solons.

Then there are the dime a dozen podcasts and radio talk shows, few of which are humorous or clever. But people listen by default because TV is so bad. Thank God for YouTube, where a determined connoisseur of classic comedy can go back to those glorious days of yesteryear and watch black and white standup from the 1960s or listen to crackly radio comedy from the 1950s.

Call me old fashioned and nostalgic. Tell me that I can’t adapt to change. But I love to laugh and I just don’t laugh at contemporary “SNL”-type comedy. If it weren’t sad, it would be funny.

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