Anyone else notice that SNL's "Weekend Update" was neverending this week? I say "neverending" in a good way because there was lots of good stuff, but man oh man was that long! It went from 12:16:07 - 12:32:14, which makes it almost as long as an actual newscast. It featured not one, not two, not three but FOUR special features:
Darrel Hammond
as
Lou Dobbs
ragging on Canada (yay
and Labbatts!);
Keenan Thompson
and
Fred Armisen
as the NY Mets
Willie Randolph
and
Omar Minaya
,
Seth Meyers
and
Amy Poehler
ragging on
Senator Larry Craig
in a promising new feature called "Really" (not unlike "The Word" on
The Colbert Report
, if I had to make an analogy), and a special guest appearance by
Chevy Chase
, who still is and you're still not. Yes. Sort of a lot of a good thing. Maybe it's because we're
as not following much baseball, but we would have killed the Mets bit in a heartbeat (even though it was pretty much Keenan's only screen time, and oddly one of the sketches they chose to
on the YouTube page), and maybe would have tightened up the rest of it, just because the Lou Dobbs segment was almost three minutes long itself. Here's a condensed version, in honor of our shared citizenship with
Lorne Michaels
:
It was wonderful to see Chevy Chase on SNL again, and we assumed that if Lorne allowed him back that he's mellowed somewhat. We also pulled some highlights — relevance: He's SNL's "Political Specialist" — and, further to our point above, during the editing process I discovered that by cutting out the unfunny bits, the material was much stronger. But it's Chevy Chase, so you don't complain when he sends it back to Seth with "Back to you, Fred." It's cool. Maybe he still thinks it's the 70s and was flying on coke.
In any case, we'll take our own advice now and wrap this up, but just note that if this is an early indicator that SNL is planning to aggressively pursue news parody in this election year. Lots of material; looks promising. This may have been an elaborate excuse to run the Canadian video.
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