Every so often, I come across a story about a former celebrity whose star has fallen so far they might be asking you whether you want to super size your combo meal as you ask that all important question, “You’re still alive?” This past week, I had a similar feeling about a long-running TV show, “Saturday Night Live.”
See, comedian Shane Gillis delivered a monologue that…how can I put this…pissed off a lot of Leftists because he made some disparaging comments about how some women dress in gyms. As a result, SNL got mentioned in the news after being a news, talent, and entertainment void for decades.
Consider me jumping on this bandwagon, but with a lot more humor than the subject.
Saturday Night Live
What the Left thinks it means – an exceptionally funny and well-written show that pokes fun at the powerful
What it really means – an occasionally funny show that should have been cancelled years ago
I wasn’t that old when Saturday Night Live started, but I caught up quickly as I got older. They weren’t the cutting edge of comedy at the time; they were leagues beyond it. Early hosts like George Carlin and Richard Pryor brought a lot of eyes to the fledgling show from controversial appearances, but it was the steady hands of the Not Ready For Prime Time Players that kept people watching. The men and women who made up the regular cast all had comedy chops and weren’t afraid to push the envelope more than a postal worker working straight commission.
After the original cast left, there were some lean years, but the core of what SNL was remained the same. They weren’t afraid to take on raw topics in the cultural zeitgeist or poke fun at politicians regardless of party. Even if you winced at how the cast skewered your side, there was still some solid writing that you could appreciate.
And don’t get me started on “Weekend Update” that gave us absolute geniuses behind the desk from Jane Curtain and Gilda Radner to Dennis Miller and Norm Macdonald. I would wade through sketch after sketch just to watch SNL’s take on the news of the week because, well, I was a nerd and had the time on Saturday nights because I had no social life.
And that’s why I was in therapy for so long.
Anyway, when it was firing on all cylinders, nobody could touch SNL. Oh, there are some who tried, like ABC trying to upstage SNL with their show “Fridays,” but it didn’t last long. Even coming on a day earlier didn’t help. Saturday Night Live was an entertainment juggernaut.
Then, things changed. Oh, the format was the same, but the material started losing its bite. Gone were the days when Democrats and Republicans would get smacked around with something resembling equal time. Some topics (including the President in Briefs, Bill Clinton) weren’t being covered as savagely as before. The comedy was hit-or-miss (or Ms. if you prefer). What made SNL so entertaining got muted by ideology and status.
When SNL started, it was the comedy counter-culture. By the mid 90s, it was the culture. And with their reputation preceding them, the competition just ran syndicated shows in the hopes “Baywatch Nights” or “VIP” could peel off even a couple of viewers. That made the powers that be comfortable, which made them complacent.
The cracks really began to show during Norm Macdonald’s turn behind the Weekend Update desk because of his frequent jokes at the expense of O. J. Simpson. And really, all he did was kill his wife and a waiter in a fit of rage. Who could hold that against him?
Norm did. And he did it very well.
Which brings us to the figure I think is the touchstone for the fall of SNL. His name was Don Ohlmeyer, who at the time was NBC West Coast president at the time. Oh, and he just happened to be close personal friend of…O.J. Simps0n. Apparently, “the Juice” couldn’t take Macdonald’s jokes on Weekend Update and called Ohlmeyer to complain. Naturally, Macdonald was told to stop, and just as naturally, Macdonald refused. As a result, Macdonald was fired from the show, only to return to host the show a year and a half later and deliver quite possibly the best monologue in the show’s history.
Sure, it’s no Alex Lifeson’s acceptance speech at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but it’s up there.
Comedy works best when there are no sacred cows. By picking and choosing who gets mocked, you limit your potential joke sphere, which in turn defangs its bite. Comedy is supposed to be the great equalizer because we all do funny shit.
And Ohlmeyer forgot that rule, if he ever knew it at all. After all, that pindick fired Macdonald for not being funny. Humor may be subjective, but there was no doubt Macdonald was a comedic genius.
Once the heads of the network got to determine who could be the butts of jokes, SNL truly lost its way and, with a tiny handful of exceptions, no longer became a must-see for people on Saturday nights. The sketches got predictable and safe, Weekend Update was the show’s version of Mitch McConnell, and not even the musical guests could salvage what was left of SNL’s bloated, unfunny corpse.
But instead of picking up on the fact their show sucked ass, they kept on doing what they were doing. People still showed up for the live audience, the critics almost universally praised the show’s comedic chops, and nobody was the wiser.
Except, you know, for the people who understand comedy is supposed to be funny.
I still catch SNL clips every so often, but it’s not something I go out of my way to find. It’s more like a notice of an impending IRS audit; I know it’s there, but I try to put it out of my mind before I get anally raped.
Even by the most liberal (figuratively and literally) standards, SNL’s brand of comedy makes Hannah Gadsby look like Dave Chappelle. And if you don’t know who Gadsby is, consider yourself lucky, but I can give you an idea of how she approaches comedy.
She sneaks up on it, is about to pounce on it, and then gets distracted by a shiny object, thus allowing comedy to hop away unharmed.
SNL doesn’t even try to approach comedy so much as it shops for it at Whole Foods, but only if it’s free range cage-free cruelty-free organic comedy because they have an image to maintain. Even their edgier jokes these days have all the edge of a Nerf ball.
And it shows in the ratings. They’ve had some high points since 2022, but most of the time they’ve struggled to consistently get 5 million viewers. Even longtime fans, such as your humble correspondent, are turning off SNL in droves.
That’s why I think they asked Shane Gillis to host. If he entertained people, it would be successful and SNL would get positive press for putting on a good show. If he offended people, SNL could (and did) disavow his performance and would get positive press for not standing for offensive humor. It’s a win-win situation.
And who cares if the show sucked otherwise!
The thing is SNL doesn’t seem to care anymore. It is a legacy show, so it will have a spot in the lineup for as long as NBC wants to keep it on the air. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good show. After a while, even the best shows get trite and as predictable as a mystery novel written by the Socialist Socialite. (Spoiler Alert: the oligarcy did it.) “The Simpsons,” “Family Guy,” and “Friends” all got boring for me after a time because the jokes and plots got predictable.
And Saturday Night Live has been that way for the better part of two decades with no signs of changing anytime soon. In the meantime, if you want to reminisce about its heyday, see if you can find old episodes on steaming services or YouTube, or check out old episodes of MadTV, which had more of the old SNL vibe than anything since the start of this century. At some point, they’ll have to get the hint that they aren’t the cultural phenomenon they once were. Instead of thumbing its nose at The Man, it became The Man.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to prepare for Halloween. The trick or treaters are bound to make me laugh more than Saturday Night Live has.
Month: October 2026
Leftist Lexicon Word of the Week
With the midterm elections taking up so much media attention (as the non-stop shitstorm of political ads shows), there are some stories that slide under our respective radar. One such story is that of Christa Pike, a woman on Tennessee’s death row who just happened to survive two execution attempts via lethal injection. Aside from questions about how she would do in Atlantic City casinos, it opened up another discussion about a controversial topic, that being the death penalty.
The public is still divided on whether violent criminals should meet their maker via the world’s most lethal Tinder date, with a majority still favoring it. Of course, that means the Left opposes it, including groups like Amnesty International, because, well, the Left is fucking contrarian these days. And in the past. Well, ever, if you really think about it, and I do because there’s nothing good on TV anymore.
Needless to say (which is why I’m typing it), the death penalty is worth a gander for a Leftist Lexicon entry.
the death penalty
What the Left thinks it means – a barbaric process that should be outlawed for various reasons
What it really means – a punishment that should be the on the table for the most extreme cases
There are a lot of divergent opinions on the Right when it comes to the death penalty. Some of the faithful variety support it while others reject it, both on religious grounds. And both sides have valid perspectives on whether God would allow His followers to end a life in the name of justice. Even more secular members of the Right have concerns about whether the state should be in the business of killing prisoners. These positions show a great deal of thought and introspection.
The Left, on the other hand? They just fucking love criminals.
Take the impending executive by firing squad of Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood shooter. Sure, he killed 13 people, but the Left want us to overlook that inconvenient truth (hey, that would be a great name for a book, unless that fuckwit Al Gore got his mitts on it) because Hassan was injured as a result of his killing spree. Now, he’s a paraplegic and the Left are turning him into a martyr for their cause.
Which is, you know, loving criminals.
Although Hassan’s circumstances are different than Pike’s, the Left’s position is the same: we can’t kill them because…well, they’re still trying to figure that part out. But I’m sure that, given sufficient time and consideration, the Left will come up with something by the end of the decade.
They’re still trying to figure out which decade, mind you…
For me, I’m of two minds on the subject. As a Christian, I know it’s God’s job to judge, and I’m smart enough not to get in His way. As a skeptic of government getting things right, I can’t completely go along with the same bunch of asshats who can’t figure out how not to spend us into insurmountable debt until the sun burns out having their fingers on the switch.
But as a human being who pays attention to the world around me, I know there are some deeply evil motherfuckers out there. And keeping these dregs of humanity alive while their victims didn’t get the same consideration has always struck me as supremely unfair. I’ve often said any murderer who doesn’t get the death penalty has effectively beaten the charge, and I still feel that way.
Even though we have clowns to the Left of me and jokers to the Right, I’m still not willing to take the death penalty off the table, but only for those extreme cases where there is no other punishment severe enough to adequately address the crime committed.
Of course, the Left loves to paint the death penalty as racist because of the races of the people on death row. My counter to that is the racial makeup of the people committing the crimes that land them on death row. Seems the FBI has some pretty detailed statistics on the matter. But, the Left believes math is racist, so there’s that bullshit to deal with.
Even if I grant the Left’s position that the criminal justice system is biased against non-whites, there’s a way to avoid it completely: don’t commit violent crimes! This is a fixable issue, kids! And, yes, I understand the racism can reach down to the local police departments, some of which make the white people in court in To Kill A Mockingbird look like a Benetton ad. The point still remains the best way to avoid a racist judicial system is to not get in a position to run afoul of it.
The problem we face with the death penalty is some of us aren’t willing to even consider using it for the worst of the worst. The fact California couldn’t bring themselves to execute Charlie Fucking Manson should disqualify them from any morality discussions. Well, that and the fact they covered for Harvey Weinstein like he had blackmail material on Hollywood.
Regardless, even when we have someone who turned in his membership to the human race decades ago, we can’t seem to bring ourselves to accept his/her resignation and wish them the best of luck in their soon-to-be-truncated future endeavors. This can be boiled down to a belief executing a criminal somehow diminishes our humanity. If we can learn to forgive those who commit the most egregious of crimes, even if it results in the loss of life, we’re lead to believe it shows we are better for not giving into our baser instincts.
And this is what the Left counts on in their anti-death penalty rhetoric.
In the Bizarro World logic the Left uses, the criminals are almost always the victim (except if they’re involved with J6 or conservative causes, then they’re all guilty) and they deserve to be kept alive in case we execute an innocent man/woman. I sympathize with those wronged by the judicial system, but I also recognize the relative infrequency in which an innocent person is erroneously punished. By playing to the fears of excessive punishment of the innocent, we have rendered justice toothless and irrelevant to the guilty.
And you can be damn sure the guilty know that.
That’s how Lindsay Clancy got a mistrial in a case where only the truly delusional believe she shouldn’t be held truly accountable for killing her three kids. And it will happen again and again until we get our heads around the guilt trip we’ve been on for decades about the death penalty.
Even so, we have to be careful not to default to the death penalty for every crime. You shouldn’t be getting it for not rewinding a movie from Blockbuster Video in 1994, but if you shot one up and don’t feel any remorse for it I’m going to have to insist we schedule a meeting with Ol’ Sparky for you. I hear he’s electrifying.
Leftist Lexicon Word of the Week
Language is a funny thing. Something that is crystal clear for one generation can get muddled by the next and vice versa. But there are some things that we thought would be universal.
Like masculinity.
Well, we can cross that off the “No Shit Sherlock” list because the Left has been trying to reshape the idea over the past few years. The latest salvo in this war of words came from New York Magazine and its men’s style issue. And who just happened to be at the forefront of the issue? Elliot “The Artist Formerly Known as Ellen” Page.
Yeah, the irony of having a trans man as the epitome of masculinity isn’t lost on me, but it opens the door to discussing it further. Or at least it gives me something to write about until the Left does something else mock-worthy!
masculinity
What the Left thinks it means – a fluid concept that encompasses the best and worst of male traits
What it really means – a specific concept that defines male traits
Having been a man all my life, except for a brief stint in college when I was drunk and needed the money, I have an insight on masculinity the Left doesn’t. That’s not exactly a major accomplishment, mind you. My dog has insights the Left doesn’t and she eats her own shit.
Then again, maybe the Left does, too…
Anyway, the point is masculinity used to have a set stereotype. Think Ron Swanson. A man who likes his whiskey, a steak, and to build shit. Often at the same time because, dammit, that’s what men do. Can you tell me Elliot Page could replace Ron Swanson without ingesting copious amounts of illicit drugs?
No, but that’s not going to stop Leftists from trying.
In fact, this isn’t the first time the Left has tried to redefine masculinity. During the 70s, the Left tried to get us to see Alan Alda to be the epitome of manhood, mainly because he exhibited traits that were decidedly not masculine. Being in touch with your feelings and unafraid to show them are nice traits, but they’re not exactly masculine. But it worked well enough that men, including your humble correspondent, felt they had to be “good guys” to get female attention.
Works great in romcoms. Works like shit in real life.
This is because heterosexual women like masculinity, even if they don’t want to admit it. You’re going to find most women (and a good number of men) lusting after Jason Momoa than after Jack Black because the former exudes masculinity and the latter is, well, Jack Black. It’s biological hardwiring, kids. At our most primitive levels, women like men who look like they will protect them from a T-Rex or a drunken asshole, and men want women to like them. That way they can make babies and the bloodline will continue.
And when you consider the Left considers sex to be more for pleasure than procreation, it explains a lot about why they don’t get what masculinity is. That and their 406,193,248 genders bullshit.
Now, this is going to come as a shock to some of you, but the Left loves to try to make things more difficult than they actually are. Their constant attempts to redefine masculinity is part of that, but it’s also a part of their attempts to make trans women “real women.” After all, if they can get enough people to think of Dylan Mulvaney as a real woman instead of a man with a weird Audrey Hepburn/Ariana Grande fetish, they can get people to see Elliot Page as a real man.
They do this by preying on our humanity, and by having a social media mob that would make the villagers going after Frankenstein’s monster look positively pacifistic. It’s the classic iron fist wrapped in a velvet glove approach. If you don’t respond to their softer attempts, you’ll get a 10 ton five knuckle shuffle across your jawline.
But now they’re running into some unexpected resistance in the form of people just saying “fuck it” and not playing along. The Left’s kryptonite with any of their current attempts to reshape manhood (oh myyyyyyyyy!) is getting people outside the Leftist hivemind to agree with them on the freakier shit they support. The slippery slope is a thing, but it’s hard to overcome the lack of traction on that slope when someone throws out sand, salt, and common sense.
And guess what the “fuck it” is.
What the Left and their cohorts fail to see is how tired most people are of the near-constant assaults on reality. We don’t want trans people to feel like second class citizens, but we need them to meet us halfway on the respect front. If you want to dress like Judy Garland trapped in the body of an NFL linebacker, go for it! Just show us the same respect for the way we live our lives. And as it stands right now, the majority of the Left so little respect for alternate opinions that Nick Fuentes is suing them for intellectual property theft.
Joke’s on him! There’s nothing intellectual about Fuentes.
And there’s even less intellectualism about the Left’s attempts to turn Elliot Page into the new face of masculinity. Remember, these are the same assholes who tried to get us to believe Tim Walz was the modern “real man” because he coached football and can change parts on a truck. This is “Naomi Wolf teaching Al Gore about manhood” levels of dumbfuckery. And it didn’t work either time.
The real kicker here is how the Left has to put qualifiers on masculinity. If you lean more towards the Ron Swanson side of masculinity, it’s “toxic.” If you lean more towards the Tim Walz side of masculinity, it’s “healthy.” In other words, if you want to be popular in Leftist circles for your masculinity, you have to be an utter buffoon.
And even then, you can be replaced by a trans man.
If I could offer TIMMAH Walz some advice, it would be this. Stay down. Don’t even try to get up again. Just stay down.
As far as the Left is concerned, my advice is to stop trying to redefine masculinity into something that is the Bizarro World version of it. Men are men, and not even clever wordplay can change that. Elective surgery, yes, but not clever wordplay.
And to Elliot Page, I say live your life, but don’t let yourself become the face of a concept you didn’t come to naturally. You can be your version of masculinity, but it’s not the masculinity most people recognize and that’s always going to make you an outsider, and not of the Pony Boy variety. Juno what I mean?
See what I did there?