SNL's Continued Downward Spiral Thread

The Benihana sketch was pretty funny. The commercials for 21 Jump Street make it pretty obvious how much weight Hill has put back on.

 

Actually, it is on Jonah that he was painfully obvious in doing it. Like I said last week, most hosts don't make it QUITE that obvious. Lorne mandates the cue cards because the writers are making revisions to the script right up until showtime. It's the reason Hader has a hard time keeping it together during the Stefon bits.

 

I'll give Jonah a pass on that one. Considering how much dialog was there and how ke was kneeling on the floor, that had to be tough... It wasn't even close to the equivalent of what Lohan did last week.

 

I think you meant to say "Liza Minnelli turning off a lamp" instead of "talking monkey." I personally found the monkey sketch to be one of the funniest late-episode bits in a LONG time, but to each his/her own.

 

Yeah I thought that was funny too.

 

I thought last night was fine. No belly laughs. Couple of things made me smile. REALLY liked The Shins.

 

I guess my issue with the cue cards is this - When would Jonah Hill or Lindsay Lohan have used cue cards anyway? I was under the impression you can't or don't use them on movie sets, and both are movie stars who have never really done any TV work.

 

But on movie sets, you might have months and months to memorize your lines and if you flub one, you can just do a second, third or 30th take. Tough to memorize a script if it gets rewritten an hour before the show after dress rehearsal, as if often the case.

 

Movies typically shoot a couple scenes a day. That's a little easier to memorize than 5-6 sketches.

SNL also switches sketches around almost up to the Saturday rehearsal, so it would be possible they would have to memorize 8-9 sketches. That's a lot for a week.

In Fey's book she said she did one of the first Palin sketches completely off the cue cards without even a rehearsal. But needless to say, she did it better than Lohan or Hill.

 

I think we often underestimate just how hard live sketch comedy is to both write and perform.

 

It makes you appreciate the guys like JT and Baldwin who are in almost every sketch and never appear to be reading the cue cards, even though they probably are.

 

This would certainly shake things up:

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/television/wiig-samberg-sudeikis-leaving-snl-weekly-reports-article-1.1056257