2024 Fun Comics Advent Calendar, Day 11: Tina and the Comedy Factory

I just noticed that I never actually mentioned Tina Fey's last name in this comic. Whoops!

This was originally going to be a much longer piece. I had planned to do the complete ending scene from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with Lorne Michaels as Willy Wonka and Tina Fey as Charlie Bucket. I even had dreams of selling it to a humor website for $50 or so. But as I got further into it, I realized my plan wouldn't be practical and that no editor would buy it anyway. So I just kind of bailed on it after a few panels. Those panels are visible above. I think this is about as good as it was ever going to be. Sorry or you're welcome, I don't know which.

Oh my god, I've been watching SNL wrong my whole life.

David Koechner and Mark McKinney as the Fops on Saturday Night Live

The cast of SNL in the early 1980s. Eddie Murphy in foreground.

My parents weren't lenient about everything, but they were very understanding about letting me stay up late and watch TV as long as I didn't have school the next day. In the summers during my elementary school years, for instance, I got to watch The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and even Late Night With David Letterman. I had the same privilege on Friday nights during the school year, so it really bothered me that Dave's show originally only ran from Monday to Thursday, ceding its place on the NBC schedule to Friday Night Videos once a week. But I still saw plenty of after-hours talk shows back then. By junior high, I was already writing my own Top 10 lists. So thanks for that, Mom and Dad.

As near as I can figure, I must have started watching Saturday Night Live when I was 8 or 9. It was the early 1980s. Dick Ebersole was running the show then, and Eddie Murphy was the star attraction. I've been a faithful SNL viewer ever since, regardless of the show's quality. Whether it's good, bad, or (most likely) mediocre, I'm there for every new episode. I'll keep watching SNL until either it expires or I do.

So what? Well, I've come to realize that my way of watching SNL is actually all wrong and directly in opposition to the wishes of the show's creator, Lorne Michaels. Except on those rare nights when the cast and crew are firing on all cylinders, Saturday Night Live  can be a chore to watch. With commercials, it's 90 minutes long -- almost the length of a feature film -- and most weeks, you can feel every minute of that. The musical guests are often of little interest to me, so I wind up muting them. When the show isn't hosted by a comedian, the opening monologue is often torturous, too.

Even the sketches -- the jewels in the show's crown -- can be painful. We've all heard the stories about how cast members and writers compete ferociously to get their sketches on the air, and yet SNL often feels like it's desperately filling up time with any material it has available. Many sketches follow a pattern I call "ever-escalating variations." This means that the performers do different versions of the same basic joke over and over for five minutes, only making the central joke slightly more intense with each repetition. SNL studio audiences have become so familiar with this formula that, occasionally, they won't laugh at a joke until it's repeated. They're waiting for the pattern to emerge. Over four decades, essentially, the show has trained them how to watch sketches.

This problem is more noticeable in the sketches that involve recurring characters. From the Coneheads to Stefon, SNL has had many, many, many, many such characters over the years. They're the lifeblood of the series. And each of these characters generally has his or her own catchphrases and signature routines that become well-known to viewers. A classic SNL recurring character typically does the same exact things in the same exact order in each appearance. Even if you love the character, it can get a bit boring for the every-episode viewer like myself because you can predict exactly what this person is going to do well in advance.

But here is where I've been screwing up. Check out this 2013 interview with comedian Mark McKinney, who served as a writer on SNL in the 1980s and came back as a cast member in the 1990s. This guy knows what he's talking about from an insider's perspective. And here's what he says about Lorne Michaels and recurring characters:

"Lorne pointed out, and I think this is absolutely true, that even if you have big fans who are really into your show, they'll probably only see every second one. Or sometimes every third one. So that's the logic, at least on SNL I know, about why they sort of repeat characters."

So there you have it, folks. Straight from the source. I've been watching SNL incorrectly for decades. Lorne wants you to watch every second or third episode. Maybe you're not even supposed to watch all 90 minutes each week. I've noticed that, the Sunday after a new episode airs, there are highlight videos all over YouTube and the rest of the internet. And, generally, it's only two or three sketches that get any real attention out of any given show.

SNL usually is well-served by judicious editing, i.e. cutting away all the filler and getting to the handful of funny sketches. The earliest episodes of the show -- with Belushi, Aykroyd, etc. -- were just a little bit before my time, but I saw highlights from this era through a half-hour syndicated series (called, I believe, The Best of Saturday Night and masterminded by Lorne himself) that played both on a local affiliate and, later, on Nick at Nite. I loved it. It wasn't until years later that I finally saw full-length episodes with the original cast. I thought it would be even better, but I realized I greatly preferred the condensed half-hour editions. Even "classic" SNL had a lot of dead time.

The weird thing is, I probably won't change the way I watch SNL, even if it prevents me from fully enjoying the show. I'll still be there for every new episode, and I'll still watch from beginning to end each time. Sorry, Lorne.

About the time John Simon appeared on 'Saturday Night Live'

Simon says: Infamous critic John Simon lampoons his own image on Saturday Night Live.

The mostly doomed cast of SNL's 1985 season.

The 1985-86 season of Saturday Night Live marked producer Lorne Michaels' somewhat uneasy return to the long-running program after a half-decade hiatus. Michaels' own skit-com, The New Show, had bombed badly in the interim, so he agreed to return to his old job upon the departure of showrunner Dick Ebersol at the end of SNL's tenth season. Although he'd eventually turn things around in a big way, Michaels' second reign at SNL was anything but an immediate triumph.

For reasons known only to him, the returning producer loaded the cast with actors from John Hughes movies, including Robert Downey, Jr., Anthony Michael Hall, and Randy Quaid, none of whom were known for sketch comedy. (Remember that Quaid and Hall had worked together in the Hughes-scripted Vacation, while Hall and Downey had crossed paths in Hughes' Weird Science.)

During that tumultuous, critically-panned season, considered by some to be among SNL's worst, the show was once again in critical danger of cancellation due to flagging ratings and general lack of audience enthusiasm. Most of the newly-signed cast members were dutifully fired at the end of the year, but the ones who survived -- including Nora Dunn and Jon Lovitz -- would soon become part of perhaps the strongest ensemble in SNL history, buoyed by the addition of Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, and Dana Carvey the very next year.

SNL was on the verge of a Reagan-era renaissance, but that was hardly apparent during the blighted '85-'86 season. Back then, it looked the show had finally had it after 11 years on the air.

But even during those dark times, there were occasional bright spots. Case in point: a mock trailer for a film called Critic, starring Jon Lovitz as an incorruptible movie critic for a fictional newspaper called The New York Trumpeter. Yes, Lovitz portrays a New York film reviewer in the sketch, but there is otherwise no thematic connection to his familiar role as portly, disheveled loser Jay Sherman in the similarly-named animated series, The Critic, which aired nearly a decade later on ABC. No, in the SNL sketch, Lovitz portrays Victor LaSalle, an absolutely incorruptible critic whose steely, humorless demeanor shows just how seriously he takes his job.

While The Critic was a comedy about a likable bumbler, Critic (there's no "the" in its tersely-worded title) is presented as a tense, nail-biting drama in the tradition of Network and All the Presidents' Men. There's even a touch of Citizen Kane in there, too, as the noble LaSalle bravely pans a movie financed by the same corporation who publishes his newspaper... and promptly loses his job over it!

The most unusual feature of Critic is a cameo by infamous, Yugoslavian-born theater and film reviewer John Simon, who at the time was one of the most hated men in his profession for his scathing, often cruel critiques, many of which contained vicious personal attacks on actors, writers, and directors. Here, in the upside-down world of sketch comedy, Simon is a simpering, insecure wannabe who got into film criticism because he didn't have enough talent to make it in show business. Lovitz's character, the pompous, pipe-smoking LaSalle, looks upon him with utter contempt.

Critic is a high-concept sketch, and the audience doesn't quite seem to get it. They clearly don't know who the hell John Simon is, as his appearance generates no reaction whatsoever. The only big laugh in the sketch is a cheap fat joke at the expense of Roger Ebert, which to me is the only low point in the proceedings. While writing about his heavy Eastern European accent, Simon dished a little about his SNL appearance in a blog post from 2011:

"Certainly I sounded foreign enough to Lorne Michaels when I appeared on Saturday Night Live. It was a skit about a good critic played by Jon Lovitz, and a dishonest critic played by me. Chatting backstage, Lorne asked whose army I was referring to when I spoke of my military service. “Ours, of course,” I replied, feeling at that moment very patriotic. “How else do you think we could have won the war?”

Modest as always, John.