“Saturday Night Live”

Weenie of the Week: “White Lotus” Star Aimee Lou Wood

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Oh, suck it up and laugh, you spoiled celebrity snowflake.

Aimee Lou Wood, one of the stars of HBO’s “The White Lotus,” is whining about how “Saturday Night Live” cast member Sarah Sherman impersonated her in a sketch wearing silly fake teeth as a spoof on the actress’s trademark gap-toothed smile. Wood called it “mean and unfunny.”

Awww. Were her wittle feelings hurt? Saturday Night Live made fun of Katherine Hepburn’s shaky voice, Dana Carvey played Paul McCartney as a smarmy ass, the show cast obese actor John Goodman as Linda Tripp, portrayed President Gerald Ford as a bumbling boob virtually every week for a full yea, and styled George W. Bush as a moron, and you’re upset because they kidded your teeth?

Your front teeth look like Bugs Bunny’s, kid. Own it.

“I have big gap teeth not bad teeth,” she wrote. Yeah, it’s called “satire.” SNL did a CNN sketch spoofing then anchor Bobbie Batista, who had a slightly askew eye, with the actress crossing her eyes for the whole sketch. Batista didn’t complain.

“I am not thin skinned,” Wood wrote in one of a series of posts on her Instagram account, proving that she is thin-skinned and doesn’t comprehend the celebrity phenomenon or that satire thingy.

This is why comedy is dying in the Age of the Great Stupid. Incredibly and foolishly, the show apparently has apologized for mocking her, which, if I were planning on ever watching the show again after all these years, would have caused me to junk the idea.

Ethics Quote of the Week: Christian Toto

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“‘SNL’ became hyper-partisan and abandoned bipartisan satire. ‘SNL,’ like the legacy media, mostly ignored President Joe Biden’s obvious mental decline, the most stark example of its liberal bias. Show founder Lorne Michaels pretends the show remains nonpartisan. Reality says otherwise. Screams it, to be precise.”

—“Hollywood in Toto” blogger Christian Toto as tonight’s much hyped “SNL50: The Anniversary Special” looms.

My sock drawer organization is in true crisis, so I had programmed my schedule to handle that task tonight long before I knew of the special. Otherwise, I would have certainly wa…oh, who am I kidding? No I wouldn’t have watched the show if my Roku was malfunctioning and the only alternatives were re-runs of “Rosanne” and “Hart to Hart.” As Toto correctly explains, the show betrayed its mission, its origins, its original fans (like me), the culture, and the tradition of political humor, satire and comedy itself.

Toto points out that “Saturday Night Live” had the power, influence and ability to be at the forefront of a counter-culture revolution. In doing so, it would have been a national unifying force, holding the excesses—and it has been almost all excesses—of the extreme progressive capture of the Democratic Party to the public ridicule and derisive finger-pointing it deserved and needed. James Carville recently ranted that “It’s like, there’s a plant somewhere in quote–progressive—unquote America, that just to seize how many jackass, stupid things that they can embrace. It’s stunningly stupid.”

But apparently not stupid enough to be funny.

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Unethical Quote Of The Day: Blogger Ann Althouse

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

“Who is Miles Teller?”

—Ann Althouse, at the end of her blog post commenting on the premiere of “Saturday Night Live” and the New York Times’ review of it

The SNL premiere was guest-hosted by Miles Teller.

I’ve got some income-producing work to do for a client early this morning and I shouldn’t be working on an Ethics Alarms post, and I know I’ve been picking on Ann a lot lately, but I really can’t let this pass.

It’s really simple: if Althouse is going to engage in popular culture commentary as if her opinion should be taken seriously (as in “is worth reading on her blog”), then she has a base obligation to be at least minimally informed regarding American popular culture. She isn’t. She has never been, and I have read her blog for more than two decades, back when she was a law professor. There are arbitrary pockets of pop culture that she is obsessed with (like Bob Dylan songs), but it has always been obvious that Althouse is not very conversant in classic films or network TV; she’s even blogged about this hole in her experience. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, except that if one is going to critique popular culture, especially a show that at least purports to satirize current personalities and themes within pop culture, it is irresponsible, incompetent and arrogant (dare I say, “stupid”?) do do so when you literally don’t know what you are talking about.

Sixty-something Ann Althouse asking “Who is Miles Teller?” is the exact mirror image of those lazy jokes on TV and in movies about clueless Millennials who ask, “Who is John Wayne?” or “Who were The Beatles”‘ after a Boomer makes a reference to them or their equivalents. Saturday Night Live has always featured as guest hosts actors and singers (and sometimes, less successfully, politicians) who are currently popular, in the news and hot commodities, so Ann had to know that if Miles Teller was hosting the first show of the season, he must qualify. If she wasn’t familiar with him, then obviously she should have Googled his name: it would take all of three seconds. Her question, at the end of a post suggesting that “Saturday Night Live” is tired, unfunny and irrelevant (not that it isn’t), conveys stunning elitism as well as the qualities I already attached to it.

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Saturday Night Live Lies And The Biased Mainstream Media Cheers: Propaganda Mission Accomplished

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

That cold open from last week’s Saturday Night Live was a perfect illustration of the maxim, best articulated by the late, great, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” Satire must be granted considerable license, but basing nasty mockery on a deliberate misrepresentation is unethical even if it is funny. The SNL skit above isn’t funny, unless one finds deliberate misrepresentation and outrageous laziness funny. I don’t.

The opening narration essentially takes the skit out of the realm of humor into the murky world of propaganda and public disinformation. Alito’s draft only states that “no woman has a right to an abortion” in the context of Roe v. Wade’s legally flawed and factually sloppy argument that the U.S. Constitution guarantees such a right through the unenumerated right of privacy. The SNL phrasing is deceitful, technically accurate but misleading. The draft does not state that no woman should have an abortion, and specifically states that the opinion takes no position on whether abortion should be legal or not.

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Oh, Good…A Non-Political Reason To Avoid Saturday Night Live

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Sanz and Fallon

It’s a sad truth, at least for me: the more you know about comedians and comics, the harder it is to laugh at them. There are notable exceptions of course (and as always): Martin Short, John Candy, Carol Burnett and a few more apparently are or were genuinely nice and relatively normal human beings. As a rule, however, extraordinary comedy talent is nourished by misery and emotional pain, and misery and emotional pain have a strong tendency to produce broken, sick, untrustworthy people.

For a lot of audience members, this isn’t a problem. For me, it is. I love great comedy, I’ve directed comedies, I’ve written comic scripts, revues, parodies and essays, and I’ve performed comedy. But once I learn that a comedy genius was or is a horrible human being, or acts like one sufficiently frequently not to be trusted, I just don’t enjoy watching and listening to that performer any more. The list of those who have landed on my “Can’t Make Me Laugh List” is too long to compile, and I really don’t care to encourage debates about whether it should matter that Charlie Chaplin was sexually attracted to little girls, or that Danny Kaye was a cruel misanthrope. It matters to me.

There are a few compensating advantages of this mindset, though. I haven’t watched a single minute of Saturday Night Live for so long I don’t even remember exactly when I started finding the show repugnant after years of never missing an episode. The reason I stopped watching was the show’s increasingly smug political bias that began to swallow the satire whole. I know it was somewhere around the George W. Bush presidency. (I had a similar experience then with David Letterman and The Daily Show.) SNL’s conversion into a full-time shill for progressives and Democrats became especially nauseating when it became addicted to using left-wing thug Alec Baldwin as a guest. There is no one on Earth I hate enough to find Alec Baldwin mocking him or her funny, and when it comes to Baldwin’s Trump impression, only the biases of Saturday Night Live directors and audiences can explain its popularity. As a director, I’d consider his amateurish routine unacceptable in a Cub Scout skit.

Fortunately, a recent emerging scandal looks like it will give me a new reason to detest the show that has nothing to do with politics.

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Ethics Potpourri, 4/5/2021, Including, I Blush To Say, An Easter Weekend Lap-Dance for God

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I hate potpourri.

1. Amateur poetry ethics. This has annoyed me for a long, long time. Althouse posted a notice from a local restaurant requiring patrons to wear masks. The thing suddenly devolves into verse, and in writing that, I am being generous. Here’s a sample:

I’ve been listening to and reading crap like that since I was ten, and when I was ten, I wrote better light verse by far. Since then, I’ve written song parodies and light verse for fun and profit, and still do. It’s a skill. It takes practice, and it requires care and detail, like most tasks. OK, I know that today’s nearly useless schools don’t teach little things like rhyme, meter and the basics of verse, but if you don’t know how to do something competently, don’t do it. Is this supposed to be a Dr. Seuss parody? I can’t tell, and the first rule of parodies is that they must clearly be parodies. Dr. Seuss has famous style and meter, and this whatever it is doesn’t match it. The problem is that people who author embarrassing junk like this don’t know they are incompetent. They think everyone will think they are clever, but anyone who regard something like this—that presents “forget” and “respect”as rhymes, for example— is clever is illiterate.

2. It takes one to know one. On ABC’s “This Week,” yesterday, former NJ Governor and once-rising GOP star Chris Christie correctly characterized the Democratic attacks on the Georgia voting reform law. “It expands early voting, George, and the president said it ended it. Listen, here’s what Joe Biden’s got to live with when he wakes up this morning on Easter morning. He is doing exactly what he sat around in the campaign and the transition and accused Donald Trump of doing,” Christie said. “He is lying to cause racial divisions in this country. That’s what he accused Donald Trump of doing, and he’s a liar and a hypocrite.”

Yes he is, but who cares what Chris Christie thinks? He’s also a liar and a hypocrite; he has no followers outside of his family, and he sold his integrity to grease Donald Trump’s route to the Republican nomination. This is another example of the unethical media practice of choosing a revolting advocate for the position a news organization wants to discredit. It’s Cognitive Dissonance Scale manipulation 101: make sure the “authority” opposing the dishonest Democratic talking point is widely regarded as toxic jerk.

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Gullibility And Media Brainwashing Check: If You Believe This, You’ll Believe Anything

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The Washington Post claims that “The first crisis of the Biden administration could be looming: America may have a president, the first in generations, who is impervious to impressionists.”

Riiiiight.

This is a topic I know a little bit about, having written, produced, directed and performed in satirical political reviews both professionally and otherwise for decades. I’ve also followed Saturday Night Live until relatively recently. If I hadn’t already abandoned the show as tired, biased and hopeless, Alec Baldwin’s inept and unfunny Trump impression would have driven me away.

It’s easy to come up with a funny impression of Joe Biden. Hell, I could do it: even if it wasn’t very good, it would be better than Baldwin’s Trump. There is one reason and one reason only that comedians are reluctant to mock Joe Biden: he’s a Democrat, and political satire today goes one way only.

The same hypocrites were afraid to make fun of Barack Obama, who was a cornucopia of mockworthy traits and tics for anyone with the guts to exploit them. The Post would really have us believe that any comics drew blood with an Obama impression, or even tried? Ah, but they were terrified of being called racists. (Has there ever been anyone more easy to ridicule than Maxine Waters? How about Sheila Jackson Lee? Have you ever seen them skewered?) TV comics today are, much like the mainstream media—pure partisan agents. They don’t want to be funny as much as they want to signal their virtue.

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Everyday Ethics: The Really Nice People You Are Indebted To Who Come For A Visit And Refuse To Leave

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

That was the classic SLN skit from the Seventies that kept going through my mind today, and I felt guilty about  it. After all, it wasn’t a rude John Belushi who had come to our house. It was the wonderful woman who had rescued our dog from neglectful owners, taken him to her home, nursed him to health, and allowed us to adopt him. We are so grateful to her for her compassion and kindness, so when she and her friend, who also had been involved in the rehabilitation of Spuds, asked to stop by and see how he was doing after being a member of the Marshall family for three weeks, of course we said yes.

Spuds was, predictably, thrilled to see them, and they were emotional about seeing him in such good health and spirits. We invited the two women in, of course, offered them refreshments, engaged in conversation about our dog’s progress and adventures.

How long would you say would be a reasonable time for such an encounter? They stayed for three hours, from 2 pm to 5.

We showed them the house, Spuds’ toys, and the neighborhood. I allowed them to take the dog for a walk, with me as guide. The only topic of conversation the entire time was this dog and other dogs, because we have nothing else in common really, though it’s not as if they wanted to talk about anything else. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 9/20/2019: Not Funny!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Ah! It finally feels like a September morning!

1. Not fake news, exactly, just half-baked news. On the New York Times front page, right hand column above the fold is the headline “Claim on Trump Is Said To Involve Foreign Leader.” Reading it, we learn that an unspecified complaint has been made by a an unnamed whistle-blower “in the intelligence community” that is “said” (by no named source) to involve President Trump saying something, promising something or implying something, at least partially involving the Ukraine, according to two sources also un-named. This is apparently all being investigated by the appropriate inspector general.

I’m serious. This is what the Times considers front page news now. Instantly, “resistance” members and Democrats will leap to the conclusion that whatever it is, it’s impeachable. Those who are thoroughly sick of the successive coup attempts will assume that this is one more concocted sliming by the Deep State, so we can have a “Russiagate” style investigation that will hamstring President Trump’s second term. Those who are focusing on the mainstream news media’s war on the President will conclude that the Times, having once again exposed itself as less a journalism organization than a Democratic Party hit squad with its self-indicting misrepresentation of accusations against Justice Kavanaugh, rushed a non-story into print as a diversion.

For my part, I’ll wait for actual facts, thanks. I don’t trust “the intelligence community” not to manufacture ways to undermine the Presidency, not after Comey, McCabe, the FISA fiasco, the FBI lovebirds texts, and Mueller’s statements, among other smoking guns. I don’t trust the Times reporting, I don’t trust President Trump not to do or say something that crosses ethical or legal lines, and I certainly don’t trust Congressional Democrats to determine what are serious transgressions by this President and what are typical maneuvers that have only become ominous because he isn’t Barack Obama. Continue reading →

Pacific Coast Time Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 3/20/19: Guys and Dolls

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Good morning from San Diego!

Well, I was speaking to 600 seats just now, but only about 300 lawyers. Several came up to me afterward, inspired or stimulated, and thankful. In ethics, as in the theater, I have come to adopt William Saroyan’s creed that if just one person sings your song, your life as an artist has meaning. Like Saroyan, I have come to adopt that out of self-preservation and to stave off insanity.

1. It looks like a Saturday Night Live writer plagiarized at least two skits this season. The story is here.

The combination of SNL’s insane schedule, the pressure to be different and edgy week after week, and the temptation of YouTube made this inevitable. The rules on borrowing, adapting, copying comedy material has always been a gray area, often settled by the good faith and collegiality—or not—of the comics themselves. By accident, I just saw an old “Everybody Loves Raymond” episode which was an obvious rip-off of an even older Dick Van Dyke Show episode in which Laura writes a children’s book, and professional writer Rob offers to help her improve it.? Plagiarism? Comedy skits in vaudeville were passed around like the flu: Abbot and Costello weren’t the first to do the “Who’s On First?” routine, they just did it so much better than anyone else that they owned it. Was Lucy plagiarizing Red Skelton with her “Vitameatavegimin” skit, where a pitch woman gets drunk doing multiple takes of a TV ad that requires her to drink the alcohol-laced product, when Red had been doing the same routine for years as “Guzzler’s Gin”? Continue reading →