In Living Color? Actually, it was Saturday Night Live, it just played like a spoof of In Living Color as the sad and bad White writers played Beat Down On Whitey. At least when that was the focal point of the non-homophobic In Living Color skits, there was the fact that Jim Carrey was immensely talented. So there was an edge to the skits that wouldn't be there if, for example, Whitey were played by Jonathan Silverman instead.
Or Jason Sudeikis. To be clear, Jason has some talent. He doesn't have any talent to display in political sketches. His Mitt Romney was no different than his Joe Biden. He comes off highly limited as a performer when he tries for political sketches. That's not all his fault. Last night's cold open would have been a hard stunt for even Carrey to have pulled off.
It shouldn't have been that hard to write a funny spoof of the debate last week between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Unless of course you're a writer for Saturday Night Live.
When the first debate took place, Barack tanked. So Saturday Night Live came to his rescue with a bad skit about him being distracted during the debate. We got an entire interior monologue from 'cool cat' Barack instead of seeing him as the stammering fool he came off as.
Last night was yet another serving of bad Shaft-lite revenge fantasies from the limp dicked writers writers of Saturday Night Live, the limp dicked White writers of Saturday Night Live.
In the second debate, last week's debate, both were eventually seen as too aggressive (general consensus). Somehow that translated into a skit about Mitt wanting to fight Barack. Jay Pharoah now plays Barack. He can do visual imitations, he's yet to inhabit a character. Fred Armisen previously played Barack. Regardless of who delivers the lines, the character is always written poorly.
On the show, Barack can never make a mistake, his family will never be a joke and he will always have the upper hand. It's the sort of thing, understand, that killed All My Children. Susan Lucci played Erica. Erica was a little bitch from day one. Around the time (1979) that Days of Our Lives made Lucci a serious offer (and she seriously considered it), Erica was headed for the grave yard. It was then that ABC gave into every one of the actress' whims in an effort to keep her. She made more money than someone of her (fading) popularity should and the actress ran off many a talented performer. But worst of all, Erica Kane became a big bore. Take Melrose Place. Sydney Andrews (Laura Leighton) was always more interesting than Amanda (Heather Locklear) because you always knew Syd really could lose everything. Amanda, like Erica, had ceased to be an interesting character.
And SNL's Barack has always been a lousy character. To say he's one-dimensional is to give the writers credit for writing deeper than they have. We were pointing this out in 2008. They have had four years to find humor and they have repeatedly ignored it.
They are the limpest of limp dicks, the tiniest of small penises. They are an embarrassment as comedy writers. There has never been a skit where Barack did not triumph and overcome. A SNL skit about Barack is as predictable as one of Joan Crawford's shop-girl movies.
It's a shame Herman Cain didn't get the GOP nomination for president. That would've forced everyone to address the fact that Saturday Night Live is a highly racist show. In the brief time when Cain was in the running, Kenan Thompson played him in the typical racist manner that SNL usually presents Black characters.
So it's not even that SNL woke up to their own racism following the emergence of Barack on the national stage. They're still as racist as they always were. But when it's time for Barack, they get to scream "Racist!" at others and pretend like the Whitest thing in the writers room is the walls and not themselves. And that's been behind every Barack skit they've written from day one.
So last night we got Barack making "Magic Mormon underwear" references. They never worry about that, their intolerance towards religion. And the audience certainly didn't worry about it. They acted as though manna had dropped from heaven. Remember what Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II made clear in South Pacific, you've got to be taught to hate. Certainly, Saturday Night Live has ridiculed Mormons and made fun of them non-stop.
If there was any reason to spoof the debate, it was to spoof it's biggest moment when Candy Crowley (as moderator) interjected herself into the debate to 'correct' Mitt Romney. As The Washington Post and CBS News (text report by Brian Montopoli, video report by Jan Crawford) have pointed out, Mitt Romney wasn't wrong. Candy Crowley has taken to defending herself by pointing out that she allowed Mitt was also correct. What Ruth caught in real time, Saturday Night Live couldn't find days later.
They redid the whole debate to make fun of Mormons, the Romneys and more. Instead of ridiculing the press, they made Candy a hero (kind of like a lot of idiotic bloggers last week) and had her call out a defeated Mitt allowing a triumphant Barack to drop his microphone to the stage and brush off his shoulders.
It wasn't funny, it wasn't a spoof of the debates but if you want to think about the idiotic, the pre-juvenile mind -- yes, pre-juvenile mind that wrote it, that might be funny. A bunch of White writers who don't want to bring in any non-Whites (they seem to think they've been inclusive and expansive when they hire non-Irish and non-Jewish) really get off writing these skits where everyone is racist to Barack Obama and Barack triumphs over evil Mitt Romney.
With In Living Color, the racism was mitigated by a number of factors including that the variety show employed large numbers of Black performers and writers. So, acknowledging the fact that the history of entertainment is a history of racism (and sexism and homophobia), it was more than understandable that another point of view would emerge. Not a better point of view, we never seem to get that on TV. But the same racist view only aimed at non-Blacks, that's what In Living Color offered.
SNL can't even claim to offer that, not with the Whiteness of its writing staff.
Which is why the Barack skits are so limp dicked.
These writers worship and dream about Barack, dream of wrapping their lips around his cock and sucking him off. Unable to do that (or even be honest about the desire), they write impotent little skits, their idea of what a Black revenge fantasy would be. Nothing about the skits are funny or authentic.
And certainly not fair. They've felt they could make fun of Romney's children. They've never made fun of Michelle Obama or the two daughters. Not once. Until Michelle, there's never been a First Lady they haven't mocked.
It's limp dick writing and it's by a bunch of dicks who chose to self-castrate. (There are 23 credited writers this season, all but three are men.)
If there's anything worse, its bitches who sell out women.
By all mean, gals, sell yourself out. If you've got no ethics and can live with that, more power to you. But make sure you're just selling out yourself and not all of womankind.
There's a trend story this season but you won't hear about on NPR, now will you?
Do you ever?
The trend is: Women lose their jobs.
Now, let's get a few things straight. When you watch a sitcom, you're not watching for much more than to laugh. If it can do more, great. But a sitcom shouldn't bring you down.
This fall, Jess (Zooey Deschanel) has lost her job as a teacher on New Girl, Reagan (Christina Applegate) has lost her job as a TV producer on Up All Night and Frankie (Patricia Heaton) has lost her job as a car salesperson on The Middle.
All three shows were created by women so you might think we could expect some point to be made. But only with Frankie does the post-firing make any sense. It's a bad economy, cars really aren't selling. Frankie's going to get some training for a better job. That's the plan currently as she tries to decide what she wants to do, a career, not a job. She's got to get something before unemployment runs out and they are having to economize. This is realistic. If you're going to do a story about someone losing their job, then be realistic.
While the storyline works for Frankie that's because it's a storyline. No one knows what it is with New Girl. October 2, 2011 we shared our thoughts on the 'hit' show for Fox. Forget about outrage in e-mails, a Fox suit huffed to us that New Girl would never dip below 9 million viewers. That was the Monday after our piece ran. We responded it would be pulling in 5 million by the end of season.
A day after that conversation, a new episode of New Girl aired. Guess what? It fell below nine million. And none of last seasons' last eight episodes made it above 5.6 million. Season two's 'big' debut brought in 5.35 million viewers which was a big disappointment to Fox but after the last two episodes have both resulted in less than five million viewers, they're probably looking fondly at the 5.6 in retrospect.
Jess was a teacher. How do you get fired from your teaching job at the start of a school year? No one wanted to ponder that but there's never been a great deal of thought behind the show. So you've had Jess as a shot girl and as a fast food employee and, this week, a model.
This crap never plays. It didn't really play with That Girl. In fact, the changing jobs probably harmed the show in the long run. No one wants to watch that crap. "Oh, who will Jess be this week?" They want to feel they know the character. And, in a bad economy, they don't think it's funny that someone's lost their jobs or that, not only is Jess doing menial jobs. but she's doing them badly.
It's humiliating and goes to hatred of women. It's probably the most offensive thing that's taken place since 1985 when 'creative geniuses' Ken Levine and David Isaacs were explaining that on Mary they were going to destroy all that had made Mary Tyler Moore beloved as Mary Richards (The Mary Tyler Moore Show). Like most pigs, when they wanted to brag about how they were going to trash Mary, they ran to Rolling Stone.
So it's no surprise that Zooey Deshcanel ran to Rolling Stone to gab about the "big emotional impact" this change will have on Jess. At least Zooey thinks it has a "big emotional impact" on her character. Reagan losing her job on Up All Night sort of really didn't happen.
If you saw season one of the show, you know that Reagan was the producer of a daytime talk show hosted by Ava (Maya Rudolph). Chris (Will Arnett) and Reagan were the new parents of Amy. Chris gave up his law career to stay home with Amy. Well over the summer Ava got the axe because everyone just 'knew' that the problem with the sitcom was that Chris didn't work outside the home.
Now some networks would say, "Okay, Amy goes to daycare and Chris goes back to work." But this is NBC. You don't get in the toilet of last place without being a huge dumb ass. See, even Fox is higher ranked than NBC. Fox which really can't claim to produce a full schedule, even now all these years later. But Fox beats NBC.
And it does so because of decisions like making Reagan a stay-at-home Mommy. Not only does that sideline the funniest character (Ava) but we've all seen this show before. It was called Yes, Dear and only shut-ins watched it.
Taking a funny show and turning it into something else? We've seen that before as well. CBS had a very funny show called Gary Unmarried. It was hilarious. Jay Mohr played the title character Gary who had two kids who lived with their mother, his ex-wife, played by Paula Marshall. She's got a new fiancee (played by Ed Begley Jr.). He's a house painter and getting used to the dating scene again.
Season one ended on a funny note. And then the show came back in the fall of 2009 or something called Gary Unmarried did. He wasn't a painter. He was now on the radio, doing sports talk radio. And he was in all these office hijinx with a female boss. Please pay attention, suits, you can change a show by emphasizing a different character (Fonzie on Happy Days, Urkel on Family Matters, to give two examples) but you can't alter the basics of a show and retain an audience.
You also can't insult the audience.
If you're unemployed (as many are currently) or afraid you're going to lose your job due to the economy (ibid), you really don't find it funny that someone loses their job -- or that a lot of someones did when the talk show Ava got the axe. Not only do you not find that funny, you don't find it funny that Chris and Reagan can continue to live in their dream house and never worry about bills. They can pay various baby sitters and try to paint the town red, money's never a problem.
"Well," you say, "Chris is a successful attorney."
No, he's not. Chris gave up his job in the first episode. He's not in the home remodel business with Reagan's brother. They're a two man crew with office space and not a lot of business going on. Yet no one's concerned about money in that family.
It doesn't play well.
And neither does Up All Night or New Girl. It's not that funny doesn't happen anymore. New shows like ABC's The Neighbors (Jami Gertz, Lenny Venito, Toks Olagundoye and Simon Templeman) and CBS' Partners (David Krumholtz, Michael Urie, Sophia Bush and Brandon Routh) are hilarious. NBC shouldn't be scared of new shows. Comedy's all about the new -- new takes, new lines, new relationships. When you stop surprising people, you stop doing comedy. What are you doing instead? Season 38 of Saturday Night Live.