Saturday Night Live

My review of television shows past and present will focus on hour-long shows, rather than sitcoms, cartoons, or others. But first I should give a shout-out to the show that sparked my interest in television, acting, and comedy forever -- Saturday Night Live. I started watching when I was about 10, and watched every Saturday night for probably 6 years or more. What first got me was the political impressions. I've been interested in politics my whole life, and interested in making fun of politics for nearly as long. I walked around spouting off Dana Carvey's catchphrases for George HW Bush and Ross Perot to all my family members back in 1992. That was the time when Farley, Sandler, Spade, Hartman, and (ugh) Schneider dominated the show. Then they moved on, and the show tanked for awhile.

I still watched. It was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. A show like that can make fun of anything, tell any story it wants. Sometimes it was cutting edge, and sometimes it was terrible. But when there's a good sketch, a really good, sharp sketch, that will stay with you for years. And then get made into a terrible, terrible movie. Or, it could spawn the Blues Brothers, still one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. Or the Blues Brothers 2000. Let's not go there.

Anyway, about 1996, the show hit another high period, with the additions of Will Ferrell, Darrell Hammond, and Molly Shannon (although, personally I found all of her popular recurring characters painfully annoying). Suddenly the show was cool again, and there were so many sketches I enjoyed. I had a friend named Adam who felt the same way, and each day at school we'd be doing our favorite impressions, spouting off lines about Bill Brasky, and inadvertently slipping into Harry Caray voices and shaking our heads in attacks of Parkinson's disease.

Then one day I had a English project where one option was to make a video related thematically to a book we read. A couple other friends who were in that class also enjoyed SNL, and we came up with an idea to do a video like an SNL sketch with Harry Caray. I got to play Harry. Now, looking back, my impression was terrible in that sketch. But the whole class loved it. That video got shown to other classes, and I had people all over telling me how funny it was. This was huge for me, since I was generally pretty quiet in school, and now people I rarely spoke to and barely knew were telling me how funny they thought the sketch was.

Around this time Adam and I decided we wanted to make some other sketches. The more we talked about it, the more and more we wanted to do. Our other friends were interested, and pretty soon we had a full show's worth of sketches, plus Weekend Update, fake musical guests, the whole nine yards. Eventually we got it organized and started taping. It was AWESOME. We didn't get much accomplished at first because we kept making ourselves laugh, and we could never complete the sketches. Still, it was one of the most exhilarating things I've ever done.

Suddenly I wasn't just some teenage kid from rural Wisconsin; I WAS Bill Clinton. I WAS Sean Connery. I WAS a Brasky guy, a Roxbury guy, and the host of Weekend Update. I WAS Vanilla Ice, and Ross Perot, and Matt Foley, motivational speaker. I got to be a Blues Brother - - I got to dance and lip synch to "Sweet Home Chicago." Beyond that, I was a writer, and a producer, and an actor. And soon I was known throughout the school for more than just the guy that was going to be president someday.

Of course, reality set in eventually, and we didn't have so much free time anymore. People got jobs, people got busy. It took us all four years of high school to put together a final tape. And then we hit it big. First, we had made a debate between Bush and Gore, where I got to play Gore, and take on a ludicrous Tennessee accent. That got played for our World Affairs and Senior Social Studies classes, until our teacher started figuring out some of the sexual innuendoes. (eg Cheney made a cameo to inform everyone that there's no better combination than "Dick" and "Bush.") Shortly afterward, the full tape got out. By then we were in our last semester, and classes didn't matter much. So any class that had a cast member in it with some down time decided to pop in the tape.

By then, the actual show had gown downhill again, and I didn't really watch anymore, but it didn't matter. It created a monster. In my second year of undergrad, a bunch of us got together again over vacation, and decided to pop the tape in for old time's sake. Someone suggested afterward that we make more shows. That's all it took for me. I was banging out script after script for the next couple of months. And there was that feeling again - - I WAS Sean Connery and Harry Caray and Chris Matthews and Donald Rumsfeld and Christopher Walken (!!) all over again.

On top of the new show, I wrote a script for a Matrix parody. I got to be friggin' Neo. We staged fight scenes. We had fake stunts. We had Uzi's. We had futuristic techno. We had trench coats and Agents and a sweet-ass "your mom" joke. The thing turned out to be 14 minutes long, and we used it as a fake movie preview. Hella tight.

I had to push that show through by sheer will, because by that time we were even more scattered, and even more involved with other projects (ie "real life"). But eventually we finished, and it was, in my opinion, even better than the first. And once again, we had an incredibly good time making it.

Hence my love for Law Revue. It gives me a chance to express some creativity, live vicariously through characters, talk about "alleged vaginas," and, as in MZRM, say some incredibly sexist, racist, and straight-up bad-assist things in front of a large crowd of, well, douchebags. And I get to be Cliff Thompson. How sweet is that?

So here's to you, SNL. The show that carried me through my formative years, and made me love television so much I wanted to make my own. That was the big thing for me - - with the actual show, I watched it, I appreciated the humor, and I laughed, and I enjoyed myself immensely. But making one myself -- I got to give back. I got to make others laugh, and make others enjoy themselves. That's one of the most rewarding feelings I've ever encountered. And now, on to Law Revue '07...

Next in the series: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel