Tag Archives: Weekend Update

Keebler Girl Scout placement on SNL

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What was with the new face on SNL, cracking jokes on Weekend Update about Girl Scout Cookies? Was it a staff writer getting his on-camera big break? With unoriginal candle-holding to Gary Gulman’s cookie rap? I’ll bet the SNL regulars wouldn’t touch the shtick because it was pure product placement.

Number one: the humor was too self-deprecating. Wanna laugh at the Girl Scouts as an ineffectual distribution method? That’s like saying multilevel has no reach. Amway may look funny to traditional retailers, but the latter has to advertise like crazy, while the former only strengthens with publicity.

Number two: propagate pure falsehood. For example, complain that Girl Scout cookies are only available in season. In this age of consumer excess, it would seem impossible that the Girl Scout cookie varieties wouldn’t have at least generic imitators. The presumption of exclusivity is not even close. Keebler contracts the same baker elves as the Girl Scouts, so of course the Keebler Triple Fudge is identical to the Girl Scout Thin Mint. If you detect that one seems creamier, it’s because one is fresher. It’s the one with a shorter shelf life, because it goes straight from factory to jobber to supermarket, unlike its pricier, smaller packaged doppelganger which makes the rounds of garages, minivans and outdoor tables until a uniformed para-military future-realtor brings it to your door.

Bananagrams true lowercase scrabble

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Scrabble competitor letter tile gameSNL’s Weekend Update poked fun at a tragic development in the world of word games. SCRABBLE rescinded its famous prohibition on proper names and places, leaving SNL to suggest that JENGA should let us use glue. Was traditional Scrabble (let’s call it Scrabble Classic) becoming too difficult for today’s wordsmiths? Maybe conjuring anagrams from a modern vocabulary has became too hard a scrabble. The timing of this generous handicap would seem to take aim at viral rival BANANAGRAMS, a faster but no looser crossword game. I think the focus playgroup missed a larger no-child-left-behind incompatibility, math. To square off with Bananagrams, Scrabble needs to dumb down the arithmetic.

Maneuvering the ten-point letter unto the triple-letter square, that’s a challenge best left to our British Commonwealth cousins, our betters at math, science and now, I’m guessing, English as a Second First Language.

Although one could long, with Bananagrams, for a more complicated scoring system than simply who “peels” last. I’d like to see scores for most words formed, or long peel drives, or complexity of words formed. An interesting dilemma develops in Bananagrams between choosing entertaining words versus more interchangeable monosyllabic varieties. But Bananagrams keeps it simple and fast, which I think explains its contemporary appeal.

Which by no means means simple. Newcomers to Bananagrams, as they did for Scrabble, still find themselves well outmatched by players equipped with crossword puzzle vocabularies. Adz, Ait, Axon.. if you’re lacking for despicable examples.

Scrabble had to open the doors to proper nouns probably because today’s television vocabulary consists largely of brand names and trademarks.

Is there a sumo in your future?

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Mark FidrychThe Bird
I used to avert my imagination on the subject of Sumo Wrestling. Probably I still do, visualization wise. But the bigger than grotesque spectacle has suddenly fascinated me, as a historic predecessor of the wide world of sport of our future.

How odd that a tiny bonsai-grown island people fixate on professional athletes multiple times a normal human size.

It seems so inorganic, to cheer for man-hippos, instead of competitors made from our own image. After all, we cheer for home teams, not cross town rivals.

But sports fans are coming round once again to see their hero athletes for the super humans they need to be, to impress us with their superhuman feats.

Might I suggest that for a brief democratic period, baseball offered more than an illusion, that a neighborhood hero could emerge from the most unassuming physique. Today Americans recognize that professional athletes are no longer improved versions of us. Real winners are crafted by genetics and unimaginable dedication, for their superhuman destinies.

Our insistence that athletes cannot use steroids therefore seems to me awkwardly unreasonable. Doping levels the playing field, for aspirants up against genetics.

That viewers recognize the well demarcated expectations of the differing athlete body types, became no more clear to me than in this year’s Super Bowl, when a Steelers linebacker carried the ball from end zone to end zone, dodging not only his pursuers, but the book maker’s handicap as well.

Even Saturday Night Live parodied the feat, although their urban comedy cannot be said to snub the NFL certainly. Weekend Update portrayed the beleaguered James Harrison as still out of breath, a full week after SB XLIII. It seems even SNL knows that non-sports watchers would recognize that Harrison’s 100 yard triumph was over and above what a non-running football position could be called upon to do.

It could almost have been an ordinary Japanese man facing a Sumo. That would be populist fantasy, but not sport.

SNL pays their respect to Sarah Palin

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Sarah Palin on Saturday Night LiveSARAH PALIN GETS A PASS ON SNL. But much more than that. From cultural figures whom we suppose to be rabid critics of the ice-rink-leibfrau, we get deference, flirty ass-kissing, an abrupt skedaddle, and an ovation. What were we expecting — Palin to embarrass herself? She’s flubbed her interviews, the debate, and by my measure for certain, every utterance. But Saturday Night Live amped the celebrity appearance and let Palin make of it her least funny yet, and to a chorus of applause.

No really. Make what you will of the take-a-pass gag (lifeline?), Palin worked out not having to face the headlights. Some viewers may think her refusal to do the Weekend Update rap skit was real in live-time. But she didn’t make a fool of herself, and she got to look like a good sport. She got deference from Lorne Michaels, star-struck flirtation from Alec Baldwin, a prompt skedaddle from Tina Fey, and an ovation from the SNL audience when she finally reached the microphone. This, when most of us want to level accusations to her face or instinctively step on her feet. Instead we watch our only few political/cultural heroes fawn over the Machiavelli in lipstick doofus.

It’s a pattern established by George Dubya.

A. Whitney Brown and The Big Picture

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Saturday Night Live Weekend UpdateEvery year or so I search online to see what cartoonist Bill Watterson might have decided to do since putting Calvin and Hobbes to bed in 1995. I showed less diligence with another favorite social satirist whom I’m thrilled to discover has returned to the spotlight. He appeared reclusive, it turns out he’s been mouthing off to great effect on Daily Kos! I can’t describe my giddy thrill to see A. Whitney Brown and his insightful Big Picture again.

In the 1980s, A. Whitney Brown was the brilliant SNL Weekend Update contributor, the archetype for David Spade, waspish and unapproachably sharp. But Brown’s deadpan sarcasm and contrarian wit elevated the public discourse above the comedy, akin to Lenny Bruce or George Carlin, and spoke to the TV audience as if the truth mattered behind the current event.

Brown published a book based on his SNL segment, THE BIG PICTURE, which remains one of my favorite recommendations. As a used-bookstore owner, I know it sold well because there are a lot of copies still floating around. But like Jack Handy’s Deep Thoughts, or Allen Smith’s Life in a Putty Knife Factory, or Fran Lebowitz’s Metropolitan Life for that matter, the popularity of comedy books does not usually survive into succeeding decades. Whenever I see that a copy might have reached our 50¢ table, I snag it to take home. Today I’m going to revisit that stash and make sure to redistribute it with the good news.

You can catch Brown on YouTube, explaining why he still supports the troops. He’s been involved with Air America Radio, the Daily Show -of course, and his own projects at myeverything.com and more.

THE BIG PICTURE still has to my mind the most lucid explanation of the economic crime that is the National Deficit. Unless Brown can get his title back in print, I hope he releases it to the Gutenberg Project, to reach everyone again. Here’s a start:

We live in a nation of 25 million illiterates. I read that in USA Today. That’s a scary thought, one out of ten adult Americans can’t even read USA Today. What are they all going to do in life? They can’t all write for it. Maybe they can dictate the editorials.

—-A. Whitney Brown, The Big Picture