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“Saturday Night Live” and I have something in common. We are both, somehow, now 50 years old. On Sunday night, the Not Ready For Prime Time Players are throwing a birthday party (for the show, sadly not for me), live from New York.
With five decades of circling the sun comes the desire to reflect upon the past, what worked and what didn’t. For SNL, and late night comedy TV writ large, what absolutely has not worked is their relatively recent, hackneyed obsequience to wokeness.
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The problem began around the turn of the century when the flexible social strictures of political correctness were metastasizing into the cold hard rules of wokeness. Put another way, the age of “That’s not funny,” was ushered in.
What this meant for SNL, as well as “The Tonight Show” and others was a kind of self-censorship that is completely anathema to comedy as well as the bizarre notion that the primary goal of a joke is not to provoke laughter, but to make society better, or something.
Bill Murray hosted “Saturday Night Live” when actor Seth Green was just a child, who on set to perform in a holiday-based sketch. (Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis/VCG )
In the case of SNL, not only has the show censored itself in the 21st Century, it has censored its own past. The best example of this is that NBC Universal has banned video of a classic skit from 1977 featuring original black cast member Garret Morris and the lighter-skinned black activist and guest host Julian Bond.
In the bit, Bond plays himself on a talk show talking about how IQ tests are racially biased. Asked for an example of a biased question, Bond says, “Question one: You have been invited over for cocktails by the officer of your trust fund. Cocktails begin at 4:30, but you must make an appearance at a 6 o’clock formal dinner at the Yacht Club. What do you do about dress?”
Garrett Morris (Photo by NBCU Photo…