Saturday Night Live’s nostalgia is ruining the joke
In April, Kristen Wiig hosted Saturday Night Live, an occasion that, under normal circumstances, would merit some excitement. But anyone familiar with the peculiar lore of SNL would know better: This was Wiig’s fifth time hosting, and when someone hosts SNL five times, the opening monologue becomes absolutely unbearable.
This is the fault of SNL’s longtime schtick known as “the Five Timers Club,” where the conceit is once you host the show five times, you get a velvet smoking jacket and entrance into a mythical exclusive society full of other laureates like Steve Martin and Tina Fey and Justin Timberlake.
It is also an excuse for the show to indulge its worst impulses: Packed with A-list guest appearances, Wiig’s monologue saw Paul Rudd pitifully ask why he wasn’t asked to be one of the celebrity cameos; Matt Damon, who has hosted only twice, wearing a Five Timers jacket because executive producer Lorne Michaels said he was so good that he deserved it; and Jon Hamm and Martin Short begging Michaels offstage for a chance to host again. In total, eight of the country’s most beloved actors joined together to fawn at the altar of SNL and, specifically, its creator.
There are infinite ways for SNL to be unbearable: a sketch outstays its welcome, the rookie featured player keeps flubbing his lines, the writers forgo jokes altogether and instead force us to listen to a bizarre piano ballad in an attempt to say something earnest about politics. But by far the worst version of SNL is when the show becomes more interested in its own mythology than making people laugh.
This year, the institution’s 50th, promises to be full of such moments. In the season premiere, host Jean Smart recalled her younger self watching the very first episode of SNL, knowing she’d one day host the show, while the “SNL50” branding was everywhere, from interstitials to the top story on Weekend Update.
The slate of hosts this fall are largely limited to repeat hosts, including John Mulaney and Michael Keaton, who will return for their sixth and fourth time hosting, respectively. The nostalgia tour extends beyond the show: On October 11, Saturday Night, a movie that dramatizes the story of SNL’s 1975 debut, will premiere in theaters. In the meantime, Questlove is producing a documentary about SNL; filmmaker Morgan Neville of Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is, somehow, producing five of them.
The worst version of SNL is when the show becomes more interested in its own mythology than making people laugh.
And on Valentine’s Day 2025, SNL will host a “homecoming” event at Radio City Music Hall, produced by Michaels and Mark Ronson, in addition to a live primetime reunion special with current and former cast members to air the following Sunday.
The film Saturday Night, directed by Jason Reitman, received just-okay reviews, with many critics irked by its exorbitant flattery of both Michaels and SNL. Rolling Stone called it a “gushing love letter”: “Saturday Night Live has long swooned over its own self-mythology, and Saturday Night is happy to add to that backpatting as the show’s golden anniversary approaches,” writes David Fear. Put more plainly, according to the New Republic, the film is little more than “a cinematic circle jerk.”
To be fair, franchise nostalgia is a plague affecting more than just SNL. Pop culture is in a deeply self-referential, self-obsessed mood: Endless reboots that recycle previously successful intellectual property is a symptom of an entertainment industry that has strained under the weight of crushing corporate consolidation. The result is films about recognizable companies’ origin stories (Nike, Pop Tarts, BlackBerry, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, to name a few), TV prologues (The Rings of Power, House of the Dragon), and constant sampling in pop music.
Or take, for example, the sprawling Marvel Cinematic Universe, which sold movie tickets throughout the 2010s by promising hardcore fans that they might see their favorite character in a post-credits scene. Or the other blockbuster cultural product of the decade, Taylor Swift, who orchestrated the highest-grossing tour of all time by packaging and repackaging nostalgia for her fans.
When SNL commits the sin of self-referentiality, it feels worse, not because it’s any more guilty than the rest, but because SNL is supposed to be funny. There’s nothing hilarious about watching rich and famous people congratulate themselves (that’s what award shows are for!). Instead, it comes across as profoundly lazy.
SNL’s best moments have always been the ones where you haven’t a clue what kind of brain they could have come from. With few exceptions, its topical and political material is never as memorable as its quirky characters and absurd sketches — recent standouts include last year’s silly Beavis and Butthead sketch and Lisa from Temecula. In other words, SNL works when it lets the young comedy nerds who staff the show do their thing without reminding us that we’re watching a show that’s been on the air for 50 years.
That, however, isn’t usually what happens when an aging leader doesn’t understand that the best use of their power is to hand it to someone else. Lorne Michaels is a show business icon who is also nearly 80 and can be forgiven for wanting to stick around long enough to enjoy a victory lap (50 years helming a network powerhouse is nothing to sneer at, after all).
Despite Michaels’s statements to press in 2020 that he was planning to retire after the 50th season — a position repeated in 2023 when he hinted that his replacement “could easily be Tina Fey” — he recently told multiple media outlets that he now plans to stay indefinitely. “I’m going to do it as long as I feel I can do it,” he said to the Times, adding to the Hollywood Reporter, “As long as it’s important and I can be useful, I’ll stay.”
To say you watch (or even care about) SNL in 2024 is itself kind of embarrassing, though this has been the case for decades — people who tuned in as children or teenagers tend to believe no cast could possibly live up to the one who introduced them to sketch comedy. You could say it sucks at any point in its history and you’d at least be a little bit right, but it’s especially depressing to watch talented writers and performers spend their energy deifying and worshiping their own employer.
Like too much of pop culture right now, SNL is relying on audiences pointing and saying, “I get that reference!” instead of creating work that’s genuinely fresh or funny or compelling. After all the meta in-jokes, all the celebrity cameos, all the cutaways to the big boss looming offstage, there’s hardly any room left for laughs. If the bland season premiere is any indication, don’t expect many of those this year.