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Channel Surfing ~ Tribune staffer Albert Ching meticulously planned out his prime time television watching schedule back in elementary school. This blog is the natural progression.

Archive for the 'snl' Category

‘Saturday Night Live’ - That better be one funny baby

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 by Albert Ching

wapap.jpgComedy supercouple Will Arnett and Amy Poehler are expecting a baby this fall. The news falling on a Monday clearly suggests hope for some good word-of-mouth for this past weekend’s #1 “Baby Mama” as it heads into its second week - “Hey, does the idea of Amy Poehler having a baby in real life intrigue you? OK, how about a fictional Amy Poehler having one!”

To celebrate, here’s a link to Will Arnett’s tremendously funny sketch on MTV’s “Human Giant” this season. It’s quite decidedly NSFW. Probably not safe for your home, either, unless you live with people are cool and not uptight about things like “[profanity deleted],” “[reference to genitalia deleted],” or “[unspeakable sex act description deleted].” “I’m gonna live forever!”

‘Saturday Night Live’ - Strip tease

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 by Albert Ching

From this past Saturday’s episode of “Saturday Night Live,” hosted by Ashton Kutcher:

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What exactly is the point of this sketch? To point out that paralyzed people, indeed, cannot use their limbs? To mock them for daring to dream of having a normal life? I’m all for dark humor, or even mean humor, as long as it’s funny and more importantly has a point to it (like your average “South Park,” for example) but this sketch seems to exist solely to mock disabled people, especially when the strip club patrons are disgusted simply by being anywhere near her (poor Casey Wilson. unless she wrote this sketch.). If there was a sketch about a burn victim, and all there was to the sketch was people vomiting every time they saw him, would that be acceptable? What a weird target to go after. I haven’t seen much outrage over this online, but I’m guessing it’s just because people with disabilities are still an “invisible” minority, and don’t have much of a lobby.

Hot tranny mess

Monday, March 10th, 2008 by Albert Ching

hotmess.JPGSo, apparently I did not post any blogs last week. Not one time! Let’s call it an early spring break and move on. Just imagine me doing everything that happened in “Where the Boys are ‘84″ and you’ve got a pretty good idea of the hijinx I fictionally got up to.

“Saturday Night Live” was only OK last night, but better than the previous episode with Ellen Page (but way worse than the awesome Tina Fey episode). Amy Adams is probably the most adorable person alive. I’m a huge K-Wiig fan as well, but I don’t know if they resemble each other enough to justify two consecutive bits revolving around that (even if one had fart noises). The digital short was OK, and eerily reminded me of the recently released Marvel comic book Kick-Ass. Vampire Weekend are cool, but between this appearance and the Spin magazine cover, I can only imagine that the HIPSTER BACKLASH has started already.

Sketch of the night had to go to Amy Poehler playing Christian from “Project Runway,” even if Christian from “Project Runway” is maybe the least famous person parodied on “SNL” since Kenan Thompson played Stanley from “The Office.” “Hi, tranny. It’s tranny.” Here’s the sketch (I can’t get NBC’s blog embedding code to work here), and wonder along with me why it hasn’t yet been posted by ever-vigilant “Project Runway” blogger Sam Mittelsteadt.

‘Saturday Night Live’: Politically Incorrect?

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 by Albert Ching

barack.jpgBefore you ask, the subject of this post isn’t just boring and straight-forward, the use of “politically incorrect” was actually meant to hearken back to the old Bill Maher Comedy Central/ABC show. Even though this post doesn’t actually have anything to do with that show. But, still.

Anyway, this past Saturday’s first new episode of “Saturday Night Live” in four-and-a-half months has caused a bit of a kerfuffle online and elsewhere. First (and appropriately so, since it was the cold open sketch), Hannah Pool of the Guardian (and, presumably, other people as well) isn’t very happy with the decision to have Fred Armisen play Barack Obama. It’s a complicated issue. On one hand, you want to say that color shouldn’t really matter, and that it should just be about whoever can do the best impression. Realistically, though, darkening up non-black comedic performers is rather culturally loaded, and it’s quite unlikely to picture a black actor playing a white character, unless the specific joke was how absurd that looks (see: “White Chicks.” Or better yet, don’t). It’s certainly not the first time this has happened on “SNL” - just in recent history, Darrell Hammond has played Jesse Jackson repeatedly, and Jimmy Fallon portrayed Chris Rock at least once. It’s at the very least probably not as offensive as John Goodman playing Linda Tripp. If you’re going to be upset about something, start with the fact thatbutton.jpg it wasn’t that great of an impression.

Also bumming people out? Tina Fey’s decidedly pro-Hillary rant on Weekend Update. The reaction seems to almost underscore her point - that a lot of people are anti-Hillary at this point, but they might not have great reasons why. The outrage over this seems particularly curious, though, in that she didn’t do anything to bash Obama at all, there were funny lines regardless of candidate or party affiliation like “I wanna watch that show ‘Starsky,’” it was just a comedy bit (one that included a Kirstie Alley fat joke involving a “Scientology cloak”), and, oh yeah, people are still allowed to have their own opinions.

For me, though, the most notable part of “SNL” this weekend (other than how solid the show was as a whole) was how Tim and Eric -esque the Kristen Wiig hot air balloon sketch was.

‘Saturday Night Live’ lives

Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 by Albert Ching

penelope.jpg“Saturday Night Live” hasn’t aired since Nov. 3, 2007 - exactly two days before the writer’s guild strike officially hit. It was a pretty good episode, too, hosted by the always delightful NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, with musical guest Feist and a surprise cameo from Barack Obama. The current cast (especially Bill Hader, Jason Sudeikis, Andy Samberg and Kristen Wiig, pictured) is great, and I’ve definitely missed them these last few months.

With the strike all but over pending the WGA member vote, “SNL” is returning Feb. 23 (so not this Saturday, but next), though the host and musical guest have yet to been announced. Hopefully it’ll be, you know, someone good. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was supposed to host the Nov. 10 with Amy Winehouse as the musical guest - that would have been awesome, but probably wouldn’t work now (no movie for The Rock to promote, Winehouse couldn’t make it to America for the Grammys). Jonah Hill was scheduled to hose Nov. 17 according to his MySpace blog , and he could do that “fat kid that curses and yells at people” thing he does so well.

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