Sorry, but this is the gold standard. Period. But I digress. It was perfection. Exquisite. The greatest comedy ensemble in recent time. It rivaled Your Show of Shows. It was that great. But it wasn’t live and that’s a factor that weighs considerably in the calculus of entertainment history. SNL enjoys an historical significance that can’t and shan’t be discounted. To be sure.
Waxing desultory? And speaking of digressing, the SNL40 special seemed interminable at times. What with Chevy Chase’s frightening cognitive disconnect and barely audible rasp, Eddie Murphy’s strange “message” which bordered somewhere between indecipherable and de minimis and those incredible moments of two, count ‘em two Brian Williams references — and how could a show that skewered mercilessly the high and mighty, deliberately spare the Merlin of Mendacity — along with the rather morbid reprise of Chris Farley’s Matt Foley character, the evening was certainly interesting and a wonderful opportunity to engage in the behavior of live tweeting along with the world. And there were moments that seemed unrehearsed, but not in the good sense. Unrehearsed as in random and haphazard.
But herein, I explore a number of points to be made inter alia:
- How SNL identified leaders as stupid and dense versus uninformed or quirky, thus reinforcing the meme that the professional left typically employs: that conservatives are dolts and liberals are enlightened
- SNL in the pantheon of political commentary disguised as entertainment and variety
- The persistent nonsense of the left-right paradigm
- How new media platforms will destroy the notion of liberal versus conservative commentary
- How Jon Stewart presaged the future of information and opinion gathering
- The essential elements of success: entertaining and great broadcasting
- Hoary and hackneyed tropes such as talk radio is only conservative
- The ostensible difficulty of conservative messaging finding its funny bone
- How the mainstream media looks upon the confluence of alternative delivery platforms with amusement and not as a serious and direct threat to their perceived cornered market
- And how, despite the forgoing, so many still in charge fail to see the seismic change that’s happening as we speak