Saturday Night Dead

Saturday Night Live celebrated its 50th season with an iconic ‘SNL 50’ logo, a movie about its past and a struggle to get 1 million viewers under 50 to tune in.

Saturday Night, a highly fictionalized movie about the show’s opening night back in 1975, couldn’t even crack $10 million at the box office against a reported budget of $30 million. For its 50th anniversary, the movie celebrating its origins lost $50 million.*

1 million viewers in the theater and 1 million viewers under 50 is all that SNL has anymore.

With less than a fifth of the weekly show’s audience being in the 18-49 range, 50 would be on the young side for a Saturday Night Live viewer. No matter how the show chases young trendy stars and musical guests, its usual viewer is closer to Joe Biden’s age than the kids onscreen.

Adding the big ‘50’ to the SNL logo just confirms that the show, which likes to pretend that it’s the work of the chaotic subversive young people featured in Saturday Night, is a tired institution.

50 years later, Saturday Night Live isn’t edgy, subversive or innovative: it’s just dead.

Like the rest of the media, SNL took a beating during the election, but like the rest of the media it can never go away no matter how few people actually watch it because it’s an ‘institution. SNL is NBC News and The Tonight Show. It’s where elderly liberals in major cities go to be reassured that the world as they know it has not changed and Trump can be dismissed.

But after the 2024 election, the canned laughter and sneering platitudes ring hollow.

Saturday Night Live has to look back at its past because it has no future. When the institutional memory that sustains its corporate self-importance disappears, so will the lame skit show. It won’t survive the end of network television and probably not even the end of late night TV.

Saturday Night Live only came into being because Johnny Carson didn’t want to work saturday nights. Today that’s not a problem because there are so few late night viewers that NBC cut The Tonight Show back to four nights (and even cut the band from Late Night with Seth Meyers) while putting out an ad of a mopey aged Fallon sitting in an old time setting under monochrome photos of Carson and other hosts harkening back to the show as an ‘institution’.

Saturday Night lies about that (like so much else) with a scene of Carson phoning producer Lorne Michaels on opening night and delivering a threatening foul-mouthed tirade. In reality, Carson quickly negotiated a guest-booking arrangement and used it to get out of work.

But the artificial attempt to make SNL seem like a beleaguered insurgency from the start, when it was an institutional tool all along, tells a larger story about Saturday Night Live.

SNL wasn’t a daring, original subversive show. It was a corporate ripoff of National Lampoon, which was actually daring if not especially subversive except of the mores and pieties of the older generation in the usual way of Ivy League college pranksters trying to shock their families.

The first half of the twentieth century had been defined by the humor that came out of the lower class vaudeville acts, kids from poor Irish, Jewish, and English immigrants, like George M. Cohan, the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin, who then took over the film industry. But as the counterculture rampaged across the second half of the twentieth century, what had once seemed heartfelt, witty and inventive came off as bombastic and ersatz. The giants of another era were reduced to hosting their own TV shows and then swept off the stage.

The new humor came from their privileged Harvard and Yale educated grandchildren. Their protagonists were not outsiders like the Little Tramp, but disaffected insiders feeling caged by convention, and wanting nothing more than to break loose, have a good time and shock their parents at the country club or the more serious faculty at their Ivy League school of choice.

Establishment comedy pretended to beat on an open door, playing rebels tilting at  establishment windmills when they were the establishment. And their obsession with ‘selling out’, conforming and settling down was an establishment neurosis. The only people they shocked were the powerless old folks, housewives and clergy who sent in outraged letters, only to be mocked and dismissed as irrelevant by the new emerging cultural establishment.

“What we do is oppressor comedy,” P.J. O’Rourke, who after his National Lampoon tenure became a conservative humorist, bragged in sharp contrast to the revisionist attempts to depict the humor magazine and Saturday Night Live as struggling insurgents. “We are ruling class. We are the insiders who have chosen to stand in the doorway and criticize the organization.”

The raw energy of National Lampoon’s Harvard graduates, their anarchic humor, was co-opted into a corporate product by Saturday Night Live. Lampoon’s John Hughes went on to invent the teenage drama and most of the self-aware precocious teenage dialogue with movies like Pretty in Pink. Like O’Rourke, he became a political conservative, and was posthumously #MeToo’d.

Chevy Chase, the patrician descendant of half of ‘Who’s Who in America’, became the perfect public bridge between National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live, parading his way through life  with the grin of a drunk stockbroker at an alumni party. The hatred directed at Chase over his disdain for the earnest millennial cringe comedy of Community, down to Saturday Night inserting a fake scene cutting him down to size, is a hatred of SNL’s own prep school roots.

(Chase telling Saturday Night director Jason Reitman “well, you should be embarrassed” was far more prescient of its box office than the fawning reactions of the majority of film critics.)

Saturday Night Live, like Chevy Chase, was never edgy, it wasn’t subversive, and after a short number of years it had shed the anarchic energy of its National Lampoon origins, and became the place where Americans went to see Gerald Ford falling down or Bill Clinton sleazing it up.

Comedy became uncut liberal agitprop and SNL shrunk along with it to an echo chamber of leftists laughing at their foes. Eventually the actual jokes became surplus to requirements. Jon Stewart broke off SNL’s Weekend Update and made it the centerpiece of an entire generation of clapter shows that took the politics much more seriously than the comedy. His alumnus, Stephen Colbert, took over what was left of CBS’ late night and comedy died.

So did late night.

By then the internet had made it all too easy for a few young Ivy Leaguers to get together to publish some comedy and all but impossible for them to make money doing it. At least until podcasts arrived. That’s where some of the latent National Lampoon energy still resides.

Pretending that the arrival of Saturday Night Live on the scene 50 years ago, just as Monty Python’s Flying Circus had gone off the air, was a breakthrough for comedy is one of the many industry illusions nurtured by PR flacks and entertainment writers with no sense of history.

SNL’s big claim to fame is that it’s still around. Less funny, less inventive and less insightful than virtually every competitor from SCTV to The Ben Stiller Show to Mad TV to Mr. Show, it endures because it’s a landmark corporate property where celebrities and politicians go to make fun of themselves. Its high school talent show level cast can’t even handle imitations, bringing in old pros like Jim Carrey or Alec Baldwin, or old cast members, to handle the actual work for them.

50 years later, SNL has lost whatever spirit or energy it ever had. The recruiting pool of young comics and aspiring actors acceding to the whims of Lorne Michaels in the hopes of landing a movie career or at least a successful TV series is shallower than it’s ever been. Unlike the Pythons, SCTV, MadTV or Mr. Show, it was never any good at deconstructing pop culture, had few clever ideas and its talent can’t even handle the imitations that used to be its calling card.

What’s left? Saturday Night’s $9.5 million box office smash is not just SNL’s past, but its future. That 1 million 18-49 audience that Saturday Night Live is struggling to hang onto is its ceiling. Not much of a return on an investment for spending millions on a live high school talent show.

SNL is betting that NBC would never cut an institution, but if it can cut The Tonight Show to 4 nights, whatever corporate behemoth it’s part of (currently Comcast, perhaps next SpinCo) will take the axe to SNL, NBC News and whatever else is left of its unprofitable agitprop sector.

The day is coming very soon when the last memories of John Belushi wielding a samurai sword will vanish and SNL will be one of those institutions which nobody remembers why it’s around.

And then the lights will dim and the curtain will fall as 30 Rock’s studios will be eliminated, marking the end of television broadcasting in Manhattan, and Saturday Night Live will be dead.

*(A movie has to earn double its budget to break even.)

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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