Saturday Night Dead

Continuing in the curmudgeonly theme of last post's "what is our culture coming to!?", today I'll whine about what is supposedly the acme of entertainment on television: Saturday Night Live.  We're big Mumford and Sons fans in our house, so when we heard they'd be the musical guests on the show this week, we set our mental calendars for last night.

It was a fun but tiring weekend, which included a trip to Indianapolis to watch son #2 make his varsity debut on the high school soccer team.  Friday night's game was lightening-ed out, but there were two on Saturday during bright sunshine and sustained 35 mph winds.  Then it was a hurried trip home to get son #3 to the high school's band-palooza at which he was a volunteer.  That got me home just in time to see ND prevail for the fourth week in a row on the football field.  Everyone else in the house was too tired to stay awake past 9:45pm, so they set the dvr to watch Saturday Night Live via recording on Sunday afternoon.  In one of my poorer decisions of the week, I decided to stay up and watch.

Talk about a massive waste of resources and what can only be called the nadir of culture (did I mention this would be curmudgeonly?)!  Are the comedians of our culture really so uncreative that the only way they know to get a laugh anymore is by appealing to sex?  I felt like a dirty old man sitting on my couch by myself peering through this magic window on the wall at the celebrity host doing an opening song-and-dance number where he ejaculated all around the studio.  The next skits were similarly raunchy.  It's a good thing I'm not God, because I probably would have nudged a meteor in the direction of 30 Rockefeller Plaza and taught them a lesson.  I know that recorded history shows that sex has been a main staple of entertainment for as long as there have been comedy acts.  Can we improve as a species in that regard?  We've done away with slavery; we've hugely increased life expectancy.  Is it too much to think that we might elevate mainstream comedy at least a notch or too above Sodom and Gomorrah?

Yes, Mumford and Sons did play a couple of numbers from their new album.  But it was nothing you can't find on YouTube already.  IMHO we'd all be better off if SNL would die off quickly.