40 Acres, a Mule, and a Crummy 90-Second Spot on Weekend Update
2003-05-18 05:45:08
Consider the plight of the Black Man. The Black Man on "Saturday Night Live," I mean. Has there ever been a more pathetic thing than a token unredeemed for 28 years? Where is the NAACP when you really need them?
Someone is always The Black Guy On Saturday Night Live. This is an actual Occupation with a capital "O," you realize. garrett morris > eddie murphy > chris rock > tim meadows > tracy morgan. Those are the only five black men who have been regular SNL cast members in its 28-year history. And they are sequential, starting with Morris and ending up with Morgan, who is leaving the show after this season (which ended last night, incidentally, with as horrible and yet as deviously predictable device as a Dan Aykroyd-Jim Belushi "reunion" singing quasi-white-man-blues in shiny suits backed by a big bland soul band and featuring choreographed dance routines. I do not lie and I can't deny.) Each has followed the other upon the deparfture of the former, with the exception of Morgan, who was added to the cast halfway through Meadow's run.
And with the exception of Murphy, all of them have been allowed only the slightest keyhole for their talent (or lack of it, mainly) to shine through owing to the sort of racial and sexual ghettoization SNL has practiced since the very first of days, and make no mistake about it, no matter how hip or culturally and socially relevant SNL has tried to appear throughout the years, and especially at the beginning, there has always been a stigma at Studio 8H attached to being the Non-White Guy. Or one of them. (I know, I know, you're saying "What about Chris Rock, man? He makes me laugh so hard that actual LIQUIDS HAVE COME OUT OF MY ORIFICES just from watching him. What! Gives?" It's true, yes, but this ignores that most people who like Rock now have KINDLY FORGOTTEN his stint at SNL, where he was relegated to such signpost roles as "Angry Black Man," or "Angry Black Politician," or "Black Man Delivering Street 'Lingo' In Attempt To Make The Show Retain Vital Demographic." His SNL work, in a word, blew; he knew, we knew it, he didn't even try to hide it, unlike, say, Meadows, who always and oddly seemed to play at his very best when he was being thrust into blackface and made to step to Some White Guy's Mammy.)
In any case, it's a very odd thing. 28 years of black guys. There will be a New Black Guy, of course, the sixth in our procession (SNL, by the way, didn't discover the position of cast Black Chick until the mid-80s, with the arrival of the late Damitra Vance. The current Black Chick is the racially ambiguous Maya Rudolph, who just happens to be the single brightest talent in the entire cast, which is not saying much under ordinary circumstance, but trust this undead monster: Rudolph is the shiznit. She can make me laugh AND cry, and I'm shedding little monster crocodile tears just thinking about the moment they unloose her star turn in "SNL Running Joke Feature Film Number 47," coming to a big screen near you sometime after they figure out some way to make people think Jimmy Fallon is actually funny (see "SNLRKFF#46.)) I'm guessing it will be Dean Edwards, who, according to the SNL website, is currently a Featured Player (as opposed to the old-fashioned Not Ready For Primetime Player) and can draw vast comedic experience from his numerous "Showtime at the Apollo" appearances. Lord help us all.
But the point is the line of succession is there. It's an actual freaking JOB TITLE. Just like "Fat Guy on SNL." There always has to be one. The presumed order of things must be maintained, titles must be bestowed and proper proofs of lineage established. Because it's gotten to be a long-standing tradition on SNL to pretend that the Original Cast, hallowed be their names (evan Garrett's) NEVER ACTUALLY LEFT. Or died, in at least two cases physically. Every SNL cast since has been arranged in such a fashion that the viewer might be led to believe, through the AMAZING FEATS OF COMEDY BEING PERFORMED, that John Belushi never went away. He just changed his name to Horatio Sanz. Chevy Chase has been similarly dopplegangered through a series of stiff newsreaders with little to no apparent comedic skills, a road that runs through Charles Rocket and Dennis Miller and ends at turn-out named Fallon.
The 1980-81 season, by the way, has been officially declared NON-CANON, and for all purposes SNL it can be presumed that Charles Rocket and Gilbert Gottfried NEVER ACTUALLY EXISTED. Same goes for that year with Anthony Michael Hall and Robert Downey Jr. I mean what fuck?
I was going to go on with this long diatribe against SNL for its VIVIDLY OBVIOUS policy of institutionalized racism via The Black Cast Member and the limiting effects of this role, while letting COMPLETE SHIT NO-TALENTS LIKE KEVIN NEALON prance and roll about in roughly every other sketch for years on end, but... THE WHISKEY IS GOING BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ.
Why would I be writing about SNL in the first place? THE WHISKEY, and soon I will be quite unable to spell "whiskey."
So we'll continue this in Part II of "Black Like Me: Not the Lorne Michaels Story," coming to Pigdog whenever this particular combination of freakouts simultaneously reoccurs in my pineal gland.
I should also mention that Lorne Michaels is CANADIAN. More on that LATER.
(End of Part One of "The Post-Modern Watermelon Man: Living The Dixie Life on the SNL Plantation")
T O P S T O R I E S
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
'Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch'
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
SF Hippies Can't Get Their Act Together
The annual 420 Hippie Hill event in Golden Gate Park, where large crowds of hippies, wannabe hippies, and hippie poseurs drape themselves in tie dye t-shirts and gather on a hill on 4/20 to smoke weed, was cancelled this year because the organizers couldn't get their act together. (More...)
Mozart to be inducted into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame
Joining such hard-rocking inductees as Abba, Chet Atkins, Nat King Cole, and Neil Diamond, the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame is proud to induct Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
The Deep Dark Underbelly of the Star Wars Myth, or Ramayana Remembered
It's a fact: Star Wars is a blatant plagiarism of an ancient Asian legend, and the long lines of devout Star Wars freaks are really unscrupulous Asian copyright busters. From Indonesia to Thailand to Nepal, videos are available for sale or rent before they're even released in the US and UK due to this nerdy camcorder-clutching bunch. (More...)
During a magnificent sunny day in a fast receding autumn, the Spock Science Monitor reporters once again blew the playa dust off of their computers and covered the 2002 Burning Man Decompression – held every year just east of Portola Hill in beautiful San Francisco. Both an afternoon and evening issues were released to the unsuspecting crowd of freaks attempting to in some small way experience the euphoria of the playa – if but for a brief afternoon far from the desolation of Northern Nevada. (More...)
Patient Joab's scientifick editorial discusses aspect of the space-time-beer continuum never before processed by sub-bush-robot minds!!! Too fabulantastic to contempulate! (More...)
Johnnie Royale's Guide to Wakes
Wakes can present problems for Bad People of the Future. (If you don't know what a BPotF is, you need to read more of the PDJ.) Sure, your friend is gone and you miss him and that really sucks; it does, I know. But all Bad People of the Future are gonna die, and they have all accepted that fact. They do deserve, however, to have one final kickass party to celebrate all the bad things they've done in the past, present and future. And you, as a friend, have to make sure that their desire for a final send off is well executed (sorry for the pun). That's just the way of BPotFdom. (More...)
A Blast from the Past! Pao Tzu goes over and under the crucial variables in the production and consumption of Salvia Divinorum. A must read for psychonauts of all stripes. (More...)