SNL is no longer equipped for the meme age it helped build

Wired

"For the better part of the past decade, SNL has sucked empirically, emphatically, royally. It’s sucked balls, and it’s sucked balls by design," says Zak Jason. "I’m not talking about a severe decline in talent, nor do I mean it sucks entirely. (Bowen Yang as Fran Lebowitz nostalgic for when 'everyone in New York had a machete' and as the petulant iceberg that sank the Titanic will be year-end highlights in comedy.) But for years, eight or nine of the roughly 10 sketches each week have been expected, uninventive, rote duds. There are several causes, including that YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, and other streamers have opened many more avenues to circumvent SNL, which was long the path to comedy writing and acting stardom. But mostly the continued suckiness comes down to the fact that Saturday Night Live is no longer equipped for the meme age it helped build." Jason adds: "The problem here isn’t that the memes themselves aren’t funny. As far as digs at your uncle go, 'HELLO DARLING. YOU MAY WACK ME IN THE PENIS WITH A GOLF CLUB' isn’t bad. The problem is that the memes aren’t funny in the medium. It’s also one thing for SNL to repeat the latest circus act in Washington, DC, nearly verbatim, just louder, during the cold open. It’s another to try to re-create the experience of the internet. Memes are made funny and incisive not just by their content but by their context. A meme about the Big Boat stuck in the Suez or horny bachelor Bill Gates makes you laugh in large part because it appears in the middle of a stream of overly serious tweets about a spat among journalists, during the workday. In a sketch comedy show, where the viewer is there to laugh, watching memes shared on a screen within your screen is like going to a basketball game where no one steps onto the court and instead you watch highlights from an old game on the Jumbotron. Sketches about memes in general are less fatiguing and prevalent than SNL trying to stretch specific viral moments into sketches." ALSO: Bowen Yang tells Jimmy Fallon he was stunned his Titanic iceberg character even made it on TV.