Tina Fey Overreaches

Published March 19, 2008 in Humor and TV.

I liked Mean Girls. I think 30 Rock is one of the funniest shows currently on TV, but Tina Fey seems to want to compare SNL and The Daily Show. The problem is, Daily is consistently funny. 4 nights a week with multiple laugh-out-loud segments per episode. With SNL you’ve had a good week when you get one or two truly funny skits. The guest host can make a big difference (for instance last week Jonah Hill - who is normally funny - was atrocious in the way he had to constantly read the cue cards, just look here), but overall the quality of the show really stinks. I haven’t found the recent Clinton-Obama skits funny at all, and that’s not because I’m an Obama fan. I love Al Gore, but I loved the way they’ve made fun of him in the past. It’s just not funny now. The skits, as usual, go on way past the time they should - they don’t know how to end it. And some of the worst years were under Fey. She does great work in other venues, but not SNL.

5 Responses to “Tina Fey Overreaches”

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1 merlallen
Mar 20th, 2008 at 5:19 am

That show stopped being funny 20 years ago.
2 riffle
Mar 20th, 2008 at 6:15 am

Wow thanks for pointing that out, Oliver. Probably wouldn’t have seen it otherwise.

With SNL rising in public consciousness recently, I’ve thought a bit about the differences between SNL and TDS. (And merlallen, above, is right — SNL is rarely funny anymore and I’m not sure anyone really watches it out of anything other than habit.)

SNL, after a few lunatic first few seasons when it seemed they would try nearly anything, has retreated to standard lame sketches. Many are parodies of television shows, and many try to create a character and dessicate it into a catch phrase so that people are meant to assume it’s funny through sheer repetition.

In the Weekend Update segment on SNL, one gets the feeling that if they could make fat jokes, dick jokes, and jokes about the most superficial aspects of political figures, they would be fine with that.

TDS doesn’t deal so much with political figures as with a lampooning of the media. The absurdity usually springs from the disconnect between the issues being covered and the way our braindead media brings them to us. Also, a lot of TDS comedy relies on a fairly sophisticated understanding of what is going on with actual issues, whether in Congress, on the campaign trail, etc.

So, while SNL will have people impersonating actual media personalities (politicians like HRC and BHO, newspeople like Russert and Brian Williams), and generally doesn’t do delve much deeper than “See, he sounds like Russert! Funny, right?” TDL puts the media stereotypes (Generic Expert on Everything; reporter-who-is-parachuted-in, etc) to satirize the broader media culture. We swim in an entirely different media culture from the one that spawned SNL (3 broadcast channels PBS), but SNL seems to have the same take on comedy that settled in decades ago.

I’m sure TDL will wear thin someday, and sooner if they don’t adapt their take to new situations. But SNL already has worn thin and they’ve taken their comedy right back to the sad SNL years of the early eighties but refuse to die.

The main SNL political comedy writer, Jim Downey, is 55 years old. He’s been writing similar stuff for SNL, on-and-off, for 25-30 years. I doubt if he’s capable of developing a new approach to his material.

Also, Downey is conservative and a republican, but if he were funny that could be forgiven I guess.
3 Duros62
Mar 20th, 2008 at 11:05 am

I only watch it anymore for the Smeigel cartoons and the Digital Shorts.

doesn’t… delve much deeper than “See, he sounds like Russert! Funny, right?”

Nailed it.
4 Mold
Mar 20th, 2008 at 1:41 pm

Tina Fey is funny? Sorry, I always felt that she thought she was funny and nobody had the heart to tell her. What about Margaret Cho? Kathy Griffin?

SNL needs to go to the well and find talent.