Not every Saturday Night Live sketch works. And even more, not every Saturday Night Live sketch ages well. There are plenty that are racist, homophobic, ableist, sexist, and more as time has gone on. Every era of the show is guilty of it and the 50th celebration of the longstanding show took a moment to call out those sketches that Lorne Michaels probably wishes people forgot about. But on Amy Poehler‘s podcast, Good Hang With Amy Poehler, she spoke with fellow Saturday Night Live alum Will Forte about the sketches that haunt them and shared some wonderful insight into it all.
Comedy is an ever-changing medium. You have to grow with it and, as Forte pointed out, while there were plenty of moments on the show that weren’t great, it made him realize that it was all about an audience laugh, no matter how you got there. “There are so many things I look back now and I go – you think, ‘Oh, it’s all about getting a laugh,'” Forte said. Poehler agreed with him and went on to point out that not everything in comedy will age well. “The part about getting older and being in comedy, is you have to figure out: Everything has an expiration date,” she said.
Poehler went on to talk about the SNL 50 special that featured Tom Hanks showing all the sketches from Saturday Night Live history that no longer worked. “They had that segment, which was like, ‘Here’s all the ways we got things wrong,'” Poehler said. “And they showed way inappropriate casting for people. We all played people that we should not have played.” But the segment made her realize that she maybe should have known better when playing those parts. “I misappropriated. I appropriated. I didn’t know. I did know,” she said. “It’s very real, and the best thing you can do is make repair, learn from your mistakes, do better – it’s all you can do.”
A Funny ‘Saturday Night Live’ Way of Addressing It
During the special, Hanks took to the stage as if it was an “In Memoriam” segment. He stood on stage and pointed out that the sketches were all characters and jokes that should have stayed on the writers’ room floor. “Even though these characters, accents, and let’s just call them ethnic wigs were unquestionably in poor taste, you all laughed at them. So if anyone should be canceled, shouldn’t it be you, the audience?” Hanks asked the audience. “Something to think about.”
You can see Poehler and Forte on older episodes of Saturday Night Live.
Source: Good Hang With Amy Poehler