Whole-heartedly agreed, sir. I am constantly baffled by how mercilessly bad SNL is. I was watching last night's episode with a hearty tumbler of Maker's Mark in me and another in my hand and still couldn't find enough semi-consciousness to be amused. When they lead the show with a nowhere sketch about a woman that apparently has an orgasm when someone she knows has a surprise for someone else she knows, you know the well's run dry. Forget satire, Jumpy; SNL has forgotten simple irony.

You really need to mellow out. Tina Fey is funny and the skit with Palin was funny. It didn't do Palin and McCain any good, as SNL basically made fun of her while she stood there.

And, I like Armisen...he is funny as Obama.

Seriously, lighten up.

I boycotted the Sarah Palin skit, because I know politicians do this thing to show a softer side of themselves. But in truth - I probably would have missed this anyway - because SNL hasn't been funny for years, and I gave up on it ages ago. This cycle has provided its moments - comedic relief in a relentless political cycle, but as satire, SNL is a bit off. Keeping in mind that they threw their hat in with Hillary - did you expect them to come up with good stuff now that Obama is the candidate? I certainly didn't.

I had mixed feelings at first about the white guy playing Obama, but I'm over it. I'm more interested in us getting Obama into office than the ... well, I guess you called it - irrelevance of SNL.

QT

You summed that up quite well. SNL hasn't been really funny in a long, long time.

I always thought Wyatt Cenac (the new Daily Show kid -- total hottie) would make a great Obama. With some makeup, it'd be ten times better than Armisen.

I agree that the political humor on SNL has changed a lot since the old days. But I still see "irony" in Tina Fey's characterization of Sarah Palin, especially when she is able to quote verbatim from a Palin interview and insert it into a sketch and have it sound just as funny if not funnier than the SNL script.

>>You really need to mellow out. Tina Fey is funny and the skit with Palin was funny.

Tina Fey is funny, yes. But the Palin sketches the other night were awful. You didn't see any similarity between the Update 'Alaska rap' and the awfulness that was 'MC Rove'? May we never again see on television another divisive race-baiting Republican mocking rap and hip-hop.

Sooooo true Bob. They haven't been funny in years. They have found something here to bring up the ratings for a time and they're going to ride the nag for as long as it has breath in it's worn tired old body.

Lighten up man. The SNL third debate spoof was hilarious--as was most of the other stuff they've done. I too was surprised to see Alec Baldwin hobnobbing with Palin, but like one of your other posters said, it didn't do McPalin any good. In fact, it probably hurt them. They were being joked about to their faces. Everybody knows Palin is a joke. And I personally like the Obama impression that Armisen is doing. We don't need this paranoid-sounding "Chris Rock wasn't allowed to be funny on SNL because he's black" crap.

Mad TV has had more biting satire than SNL for years. I've stopped watching SNL and just catch clips on the net. Even the musical guests are generally lame and formulaic. Lorne would do better to cut the show back to a quality 60 min, or even 30 vs. piss away what's left of his brand doing what they're doing. Once the election is over they lose Poeler and Fey, which essentially ends the show anyway.

What I saw on SNL was Palin saying not much of anything, similar to her actions in the campaign. What I mean is, Palin was openly mocked in all 3 "segments" in which she appeared.

I was glad SNL had such high ratings. It means millions saw the SNL mocking, but yet they realize when the pundits RAVE about how funny Sarah is (????) and how Sarah showed her great dance moves (????? in a chair ????) that's just more pundit B.S.

It amuses me to hear how the McCain campaign spins the SNL ratings, just like they similarly spun the V.P. Debate ratings. McCain's campaign ASSUMES the ratings mean they're going to get all those viewers' votes.

During the primaries, SNL may have had a preference for Hillary, (and evidently Tina Fey appeared on weekend update with the saying, "Bitch is the new Black,") one of my favorite pieces was when Tracy Morgan appeared on weekend update in response to Fey, ending with "Bitch may be the new Black, but Black is the new President, Bitch!" Lorne Michaels could have stopped that, but didn't.

Overall, SNL is mocking and dissing McCain and Palin like crazy, with very few similar Obama-Biden moments. That works for me.

And one final thought. If Michaels would not have let Palin on the show, there would have been a huge brouhaha over THAT. Instead, he put her on and did not give her any shining moments, specifically no jokes where she was taking aim at either Obama or Biden. That worked for me, too.

I would agree that SNL has lost its edge over the years. Fey’s Palin has given me some laughs, but she is almost endearing—an amiable cornball with an amusing accent—whereas I don’t find the real article endearing at all: she seems steely, ambitious, provincial, “faith-based” to a degree that stunts her capacity for rational thinking, and dangerously ignorant about everything a national-level politician needs to know. Right-wing politicians owe a great deal of their success to personality-based campaigns and, worse yet, to personality-based or character-based governance. In this scheme, competence counts for next to nothing, as GWB’s reign of heckuvajobbery proves: the point is to turn back the clock and keep leading the blessed few to the rivers of gold. SNL’s personality-driven skits are in sync with this bogus political emphasis on personality/character. That could be a good thing or a bad one, depending on what they do with it. (Satire and parody have often taken persons and personalities as their starting point.) But the best satire adds something synthetic and edgy to the analysis of political agents and actions; it isn’t satisfied with getting a voice or gesture right. I’d give the SNL political stuff a mixed review—being able to have a good-natured laugh at the expense of the powerful is something, but it isn’t setting the bar very high for political humor. Jon Stewart’s relentless mocking of the illogicality and breathtaking hypocrisy of Bush, Cheney, and others like them seems more likely to establish and reinforce a consensus against them—he does a better job of driving home the real-life consequences of Bushism without sacrificing entertainment value.