Saturday Night Live and the Institutionalization of Counterculture (brought to you by T-Mobile)

This weekend, I did something fucking crazy; I watched Saturday Night Live live, as it aired on broadcast television. Well, on Peacock, anyway. On my laptop. In bed. Until Saturday, in recent memory I’ve only consumed SNL on Sunday mornings with an Earl Grey tea and maybe a bagel. I made an exception for the 12th episode of the 50th season because there were rumors that Bob Dylan may be the actual musical guest, as opposed to the advertised musical guest (and host) Timothee Chalamet, who was recently nominated for an Oscar for portraying Dylan in A Complete Unknown. I’m not even the biggest Dylan fan, but I like spectacle.

I am also, reluctantly, an SNL apologist. I’ve kept watching nearly religiously, save for a short period in the late 90s and early 2000s when I didn’t own a television, and neither did anyone I knew. The show’s roots are in the counterculture, something that we need now, perhaps more than ever, and unfortunately, the show has devolved into a mostly unfunny parody of itself. When it began in 1975, SNL confronted and indicted the intractable governmental and corporate structures of a country fresh off the Vietnam War and Watergate in an era where mistrust of our institutions was at an all-time high. Saturday Night Live, under the guidance of producer Lorne Michaels, National Lampoon and Second City grads, and the expected anonymity of a Saturday at 11:30pm timeslot, was free to indulge in a kind of comedy that had not been seen stateside. And their comedy didn’t just inform the cultural zeitgeist, it defined it, as Steve Martin told SNL biographer Tom Shales, “They did the zeitgeist, they did what was out there, what we all had in our heads, this new kind of comedy.”

My introduction to SNL was in the early 80s when, as a 10-year-old, my buddy Adam Taylor had me over for a sleepover. He said we had to stay up until midnight because there was this TV show that you could only watch then that was the “funniest fucking thing ever.” My parents didn’t have the energy to allow their children to stay up much past 10pm, but Adam’s folks were perpetually going through a divorce, and their marital woes opened up a whole world that was unavailable in more stable homes.

[Quick sidebar: Adam Taylor was, for a few years, my best friend, but in seventh grade, he had a boy-girl birthday party I wasn’t invited to and didn’t know about until I went to his house after school on Friday—the day of the party—as I always did, and his mom was blowing up balloons and asked me if I wanted to help setup for the party, knowing full well I was not invited, and I ran home crying. I was so traumatized by the event that three decades later, I would mention it so often in therapy that my therapist would pull it out as a callback punchline, like, “Well, okay Mike, sure she stole your cat and set fire to your Kia, but at least it’s not Adam Taylor’s boy-girl seventh-grade birthday party.” All of which would make a funnier sketch than anything on SNL since Kate McKinnon was abducted by aliens.]

But, in Adam Taylor’s family room in the fall of 1986 on a Sony TV bigger than anything I had ever seen, I became enamored with Saturday Night Live. The cast in that twelfth season (I would learn years later) was a return to form after some forgotten years sans Michaels, and a new golden age of the show was born. Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Victoria Jackson, and Kevin Nealon introduced me to a kind of comedy I had not known existed. I thought Dennis Miller’s “Weekend Update” was genius and would impersonate his scribbly send-off when handing in assignments, much to the disappointment of my teachers. I appropriated the show's voice as my own and quickly evolved from quiet kid to class clown to the disappointment of my teachers, principals, and parents. On Halloween, Adam and I dressed up as Hans and Frans, stuffing our fathers' tracksuits with newspapers, and threatened to pump up the purveyors of candy. Soon after came the Mike Myers years, a source of Canadian pride, Wayne Gretzky hosting and the birth of “Wayne’s World”, and the seminal performance by our own national band, The Tragically Hip, when lead singer Gord Downie changed the opening lyric from “He said, I’m fabulously rich” to “He said, I’m tragically hip,” and a nation rejoiced in a wink just for us.

Saturday Night Live wasn’t just a comedy show; it was part of my life and informed who I was as a person. Even as my sense of humor evolved with Kids in the Hall, Python, Mitch Hedberg, Tom Robbins, and Hunter S. Thompson taking more prominent roles, the sentimental attachment to SNL remained. Long after the TV-less years and into the cable-less when my peers had all abandoned the show, and I had other things to do on Saturday nights, I still found ways to watch, first with bit torrents and then the advent of streaming television. Jason Sudeikis, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and the early- to mid-aughts casts did some of the show’s best work, even if I came to it through YouTube and Vimeo clips. Now, with Peacock, SNL is again a regular part of my week, even if I don’t know what a Chappell Roan or GloRilla is.

Nearly every generation has a culture pundit who claims Saturday Night Live is dead. It’s part of the cyclical nature of criticism. Norm McDonald even made that claim live on air when he returned to host post-too-many-OJ Simpson-jokes-offended-Warren-Littlefield-firing. But I’m not worried about the show being funny. What concerns me is that a show that once defined the counterculture now perpetuates a corporate and politically dangerous one. I’m not naïve about the fact that producing television in 2025 is exponentially more complicated than it was in 1975 or 1986 or 1996. We live in the era of mass media conglomerates, and the flow of information is controlled by a precious few who protect the ruling class and the stock dividends with the zeal of Simon in his bathtub.

The end of SNL came on November 7, 2015, when the show was hosted by Donald Trump, a year before he was elected the 45th president of the United States. At the time, Trump was a joke candidate, a benign punchline who would ultimately lose the Republican primary to Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or one of the Bushes. But that episode began the media’s normalization of Trump, as well as crafting the template by which the left would laugh at him, dismiss him. Comedians, especially late-night comedians—Fallon, Kimmel, Colbert, et al.—would continue to perpetuate the notion that Trump is a clown. I think we must've learned by now that he is not. He’s a dangerous presence. He’s not a benign punchline but a malignant dictator. Great podcast guest, though.

Hubris-filled neoliberalism would continue to be the hallmark of the show in both the lead-up to the election and the Trump era. A skit based on the debate between Hillary Clinton and Trump included the punchline, “Let’s just call you Mrs. President,” remarking upon the inevitable coronation of Democrat royalty that never came. That hubris resurfaced again in May of 2021 when Elon Musk hosted, again so the future fascist oligarch could be humanized on network television, while the left-leaning purveyors of cool dismissed him as a punchline. Not so fucking funny now, is it?

This past weekend’s cold open was an indulgent bit of political comedy, but not the cutting indictment I would hope for from a TV show that purports itself to be subversive cultural commentary. A scene of the Founding Fathers was interrupted by Lin Manuel Miranda’s Alexander Hamilton schtick, which itself was interrupted by James Austin Johnson’s Trump impersonation. Again, SNL asked its audience to laugh at the clown, but it is difficult to laugh when the clown is concurrently out in the world terrorizing the impoverished and marginalized. Moments later, after Timothee Chalamet’s monologue, a commercial parody—a hallmark of SNL’s counterculture comedy—aired featuring cast member Kenan Thompson and Marcello Hernandez skewering T-Mobile. Except, surprise, it wasn’t a fucking parody—it was an actual ad that aired five more times during the episode.

Ironically, the funniest parody commercials of the evening were also real commercials—ads for some revolutionary prescription medication that invoked memories of “Happy Funball”:

Discontinue use of Happy Fun Ball if any of the following occurs: itching, vertigo, dizziness, tingling in extremities, loss of balance or coordination, slurred speech, temporary, blindness, profuse sweating, or heart palpitations. If Happy Fun Ball begins to smoke, get away immediately. Seek shelter and cover head. Happy Fun Ball may stick to certain types of skin.

Phil Hartman is rolling over in his grave. Not to be lost in this conversation is the nepobaby, Ivy League, 1% crowd that makes up the bulk of the writers’ room. Martin Herlihy, John Higgins, and Ben Marshall, known as Please Don’t Destroy, should be the object of the show’s comedy but instead, they write it. Herlihy is the son of Tim Herlihy, the longtime comedy partner of Adam Sandler and former writer/producer for SNL in the 1990s. Higgins is the son of Steve Higgins, who is still a producer and writer for SNL and the announcer/Fallon foil for The Tonight Show. I don’t know who Marshall’s dad is, but he’s probably a dick. The trio even flouted their nepotism in a digital short with another nepopeer, Dakota Johnson, and in their feature film, Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain, as if to mock us, “Ya, we’re privileged, spoiled, fuck you!” I mean, another writer (Rosebud Baker) is James Baker’s granddaughter ffs. At least nine writers and cast members went to the Tisch School. Many others went to Harvard or Yale. You can’t be the prince AND the Court Jester. SNL’s model perpetuates the status quo, the dominant Boomer culture, and makes it more palatable so that the rest of us can continue to choke on it.

There are parts of SNL I still enjoy, otherwise I wouldn’t tune in. I’m not a hate watcher. When Sarah Sherman is on the screen, I have no idea what’s going to happen. I think Michael Longfellow is funny. “Weekend Update” is still good for a laugh or seven, even if it has become too meta, too self-referential, indulging in the personalities and celebrity of its anchors, Colin Jost and Michael Che. Two weeks ago, Dave Chappelle’s hosting (and 16-minute monologue) embodied what SNL used to be: subversive, topical, and cool. But those moments are few and far between, and I miss them. The culture misses them.

In an alternate universe where Saturday Night Live was still relevant for its scathing satire and not kowtowing to the establishment, the cold open on Saturday should’ve indicted Trump, not humanized. It should’ve been Donald, Elon, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Pete Hegseth, Zuck, Bezos, et al. trying on updated Hugo Boss Schutzstaffel outfits. It should’ve been the Trumps standing over the California fires throwing pieces of the Constitution in to burn. It should’ve been the Supreme Court Justices playing poker with human chips in the back of Clarence Thomas’ RV. It should’ve been a commentary on the fact that America may have died last week. It wasn’t—instead, SNL is complicit in the current horrific state of the union.

Bob Dylan never showed up. Chalamet covered “Outlaw Blues” and “Three Angels” with James Blake during his first set and “Tomorrow is a Long Time” in his second. I’m not sure if it was satire or not, but those songs are now legally dead. Chalamet was born to a Corcoran Group realtor and editor for UNICEF/New York correspondent for Le Parisien and attended Columbia and NYU. That he presented himself as Dylan, the “master poet, caustic social critic and intrepid, guiding spirit of the counterculture generation”—not on film but on a live stage—further illustrates that SNL is no longer counter anything, but rather simply an occasionally humorous appendage of the machine. It is a show that is not past its prime but rather a part of a larger problem, serving its masters in keeping the plebes entertained while the world burns around us. It is a malignant presence. It’s Lenny Pickett and the SNL Band playing while the Titanic sinks, taking the lower classes to the abyss.

Worse, it’s Adam Taylor.