Sick Palin Humor Highlights National Disease

I don’t watch Saturday Night Live. It’s on too late. I’m not a big TV-watcher. And bad episodes have conditioned me to avoid the show. Some people have managed to live through the really bad SNL years without quitting. I haven’t been a regular watcher since the Eddie Murphy days. Probably not even then, now that I think about it.

I used to wonder how SNL could have bad seasons. They have a whole lot of money to buy writers and actors, and it’s hard to think of a job a TV writer would find more alluring. That’s me, guessing. For all I know, it’s a miserable job. I don’t know what the atmosphere on the set or among the writers is like; maybe good writers jump ship as soon as they can. Still, to an outsider, it’s difficult to understand how the SNL crew ever managed to do their job badly. But they pulled it off, many, many times.

At my advanced age, with my burgeoning Christian sentiments, I can’t imagine sitting up past eleven p.m. to watch anything, let alone a disappointing, often tedious show that reinforces all of my worst traits. So I am not a fan. Sometimes they do something really funny, and I catch it on Youtube, but that’s about it.

I wasn’t watching this weekend, when they did a sketch about Sarah Palin. I can’t find it on Youtube, either. I guess their attorneys are pulling material so fast, it doesn’t survive the weekend. I can’t give an informed critique of the sketch. But I feel like I’m on firm ground when I say they had no business joking about her husband committing incest. The Palins have kids. Those kids have friends. I’m sure many of those friends watch SNL. This is not something they needed inside their young minds. Imagine your kids’ friends, joking about your family and incest. Not wholesome. Then imagine actors joking about it on national television.

SNL is like flavored malt liquor, or clove cigarettes. It’s supposed to be for adults, but the nature of the product makes it appealing to children and to adults barely over the age of majority. It’s a little sad, if you think about it. An ensemble of not-so-young people, dedicating their lives to producing material which many grown people find too sophomoric and crude to enjoy. There is a certain dignity in doing kids’ programming, like Captain Kangaroo or Misterogers Neighborhood, because everyone knows you’re acting, and that when the cameras are off, you’re a regular grown-up. But when you’re in your thirties and forties and you’re doing SNL humor for high school and college kids, it’s a different story. You stoop to the level of the audience, in a way that infects your life. You may end up clinging to the adolescent mindset, at least in the public eye, long after you should have moved on. It’s one more example of the perversity of modern culture, in which adults take their moral cues from the benighted young. I think that explains the astoundingly broad and clumsy toilet jokes in the Austin Powers movies. Shakespeare gave us a subtle pun about a petard. Mike Myers gave us an overflowing bowl, on camera.

I’m not sure who is insulted more, by that kind of humor. Is it the audience, because it suggests they’re too stupid to understand anything smarter, or is it the writer, because it demonstrates that he believes he lacks the talent to write intelligent material?

I read about the incest sketch. It appears that the intent was to mock provincial East Coast journalists, who assume the worst about the backward folks in Jesusland. Still, wouldn’t it have been better to avoid the subject? Even if they were trying to defend Sarah Palin, in their own way, they probably ended up adding to the layer of slime which had already accumulated on her and her family, thanks to leftist slanders.

We ought to declare the Animal House/Porky’s era dead, once and for all. We should make an effort, as a nation, to get past adolescence. You can be funny without cruelty or obscenity. You can do it without driving a wedge between the generations. Writers shouldn’t be looking for ways to inject shock into their work. They should be looking for ways to remove it. I think about this a lot, with regard to my own work. When I see people like Sandra Bernhard and the SNL bunch blowing it, I think about things I’ve written, and I cringe. I’ve been trying to improve, but when you’ve become jaded by repeated exposure to obscenity and cruelty, it takes time to wear off. It affects your ability to perceive your own crassness. There are things I wrote last year that I would not publish today.

I let myself be duped by a corrupt popular culture that convinced me that in order to do well, I had to pull out the stops. That was stupid. Artists thrive on restrictions. They make you work harder, and you end up producing things that make your audience work harder, and they are rewarded for it.

The other night, I watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for a while. There are two romances in the film. One is between two career martial artists, and the other is between a governor’s daughter and a thief. The first involves only glances, touches, and loaded remarks. The other involves a lot of groping and simulated sex. And which is more powerful? The first. The thwarted lovers who can only express their feelings obliquely burn up the screen. That’s what happens when an artist makes his audience do some of the work. An artist who deals in the obvious and the sensational is a sort of slut. He hits the audience with everything he has, right away, because he doubts he has the ability to hold their interest if he restrains himself.

God bless Sarah Palin and her family. They should not have to endure this, simply because a comedy writer in Manhattan hasn’t gotten it together yet.