The major problem with SNL currently is that they don’t seem to have a sense of comic timing, so sketches consistently overstay their welcome and bang the joke - assuming one was present to begin with - into the ground.
SNL has had that problem for over a decade. One-joke sketches (and Will Ferrell) were what drove me to give up on SNL.
Far more than a decade. It’s why Belushi broke character in the Bee sketch.
That’s the ticket!
Wasn’t that Kids In The Hall?
That was Cabbage Head (who once got shot in the head).
I liked this interview with Bruce McCulloch where he discussed some of the differences between working on KITH and SNL (there’s a bit at the end about that too).
All that site does for me is play a Blackberry ad over and over and over.
That’s too bad. I just checked it again and it plays for me. I hope it isn’t a case of the content being restricted for non-Canadians.
I get the interview, and I’m in the US.
In all fairness, most recurring bits do work occasionally.
For instance, I will say that I thought the “very bad sex advice stand-in” sketch worked very well this last week (Paul Rudd). I always thought the bit had potential, but instead of jokes they just made Armisen pretend he couldn’t hear the whole time. I feel like they finally wrote some other jokes for it, and it worked pretty well.
One of the worst offenders was Debbie Downer. It was funny the first time because no one in the sketch could stop laughing. Apparently the writers confused breaking character with quality writing and went back to that well at least a couple of times later.
This thread has a suspicious lack of cowbell.