Saturday Night Live

When SNL is firing on all cylinders, there’s a sense of respect for its audience. “Sure,” it seems to say, “we know we’ve put out some real stinkers over the years, but you keep coming back for more, sometimes against your better judgement. So for your support and patience, here is an episode that simply doesn’t suck.” In the current state of a Saturday Night Live that is approaching 50, “doesn’t suck” is some on the highest praise you can get.

With the news that CBS has canned The Millers for this season, Saturday Night Live decided to poke fun at the current climate of network sitcoms and create their own version with The Dudleys. The sketch, which aired this Saturday with host Woody Harrelson, creates a sitcom that includes two parents and two children and chronicles …

The nature of sketch comedy means that anything can happen. It’s an inherent feature of the form, one that can lead to some truly transcendent weirdness and some pretty bland filler. Take Key & Peele, for example: By being a sketch show, they are able to do things like have a silent short commenting on the Trayvon Martin case and racial profiling, and have goofy things like the East/West Bowl sketches (“Everybody’s talking about Fudge”). But because anything can happen, this invites unevenness into a sketch show more easily than in other programs. The main goal of any good sketch show, other than being funny, should be consistency. With SNL, that consistency can come from a variety of places

It’s a shame when the best segment of any given episode of SNL is the musical guest. This tends to occur in an episode with mediocre sketches and a lack of cohesion and identity, all of which makes it really hard to soldier on until commercials, when you can justify looking at tumblr or updating your watchlist on Letterboxd. Last night’s episode was full of this kind of half-backed material, but luckily we were guaranteed one highlight, which did not disappoint.

Shortly after the PR fallout of the Internet hating on U2’s Songs of Innocence album release, frontman Bono is in the news yet again with a story that’s arguably more WTF than the release of a smart watch. In an interview with The Independent regarding the release of his new film A Walk Among the …

Saturday Night Live hasn’t chosen the best of hosts this season. There has been at least three terrible episodes, and the SNL team hasn’t been able to produce a solid, much less, stand-out, sketch… until now. With only a few days left before Oscar voting closes, Supporting Actor nominee Christoph Waltz (Django Unchained), was given …

Seven Psychopaths Directed by Martin McDonagh Written by Martin McDonagh USA and United Kingdom, 2012 Christopher Walken has become a gag in modern popular culture, a punchline to a joke no one’s actually told. His repeated hosting gigs on Saturday Night Live over the past two decades along with a series of bizarre appearances in …

Roller Town Directed by Andrew Bush Written by Andrew Bush, Mark Little, Scott Vrooman Canada, 2012 If comedy is tragedy plus time, a satire of the cultural immolation that is the 1970’s is long overdue. From tacky flare trousers and ridiculously wide neckties, to disco music and roller rinks, the 70’s was, for the most …

This Is Sodom Directed by Adam Sanderson and Muli Segev Written by Muli Segev, David Lifshitz and Asaf Shalmon Israel, 2010 At an arranged marriage, a Rabbi tries to break the ice by telling a joke. “Why was the first man the happiest?” he asks. No one answers. “Because he didn’t have a mother-in-law!” No …

Steve Buscemi proved to be a great host on last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live. Buscemi, who first hosted the NBC sketch-comedy show in 1998, took on such topics as “The Miley Cyrus Show,” which portrayed the teen star as a stoner, “Coach Bert,” which centered on a college basketball coach who is being …

Wayne’s World is without a doubt one of the most popular recurring sketches from the NBC television series Saturday Night Live. The sketch spawned two films, and several catchphrases which have since entered the pop-culture lexicon. Dana Carvey hosted Saturday Night Live this weekend, which included a surprise appearance by Mike Myers, allowing the two …

NBC has announced that the British stand-up comic and actor Russell Brand will host Saturday Night Live for his first time on February 12th. The actor is best known as a fast-talking, hedonistic comic anarchist who appeared in such films as Forgetting Sarah Marshall and it’s spin-off movie, Get Him To The Greek. Russell who …

Jesse Eisenberg, the star of The Social Network never met the Mark Zuckerberg (the creator of Facebook) in  real life until this past the weekend on Saturday Night Live. For those of you who missed it, you can now watch it online. Enjoy!

Here is the Jim Carey parody of Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan on Saturday Night Live, for anyone who may have missed it. Bill Hader takes Vincent Cassel’s role as director Thomas, Nasim Pedrad plays Nina (Natalie Portman’s role), and the Mila Kunis character Lily is played by Jim Carrey himself. Enjoy!

– On January 8th, Jim Carrey will host Saturday Night Live with musical guests The Black Keys. This marks the return to his sketch comedy roots which made him famous when he got his break on the series In Living Color. Carrey had actually auditioned to be a cast member for the 1980–1981 season of …