I Need to Do My Cootchie up and downs...

Put that cootchie up, put that cootchie down. I frickin' love Saturday Night Live. A lot of people don't. You probably don't. But as I sit here watching the latest episode hosted by Scarlett Johanssen, I just thought about how much I love this show. I started watching SNL in the late 90's. My group was Ferrell, Shannon, Oteri, and Kattan. I missed Farley and the rest by a couple of years, but I didn't care. I was hooked. I mean, Craig and Ariana (the Spartan cheerleaders), the Roxbury guys, Goth Talk, Mango.... I could go on and on. The show had me, and even though I was in middle school, then high school, I still would stay up late on Saturday nights to watch this show that was highly inappropriate, hit and miss, and live. Then I went back in time, met Spade, Sandler (who was the Jimmy Fallon of his day), Farley, Martin, Ackroyd, and Radner, and of course the puppet master of it all, Lorne Micheals, and I realized how much of an American pastime SNL is. But go onto a message board for SNL, NBC, or comedy in general and all you get are complaints about how unfunny the show has become. But I challenge these people to watch an episode and not laugh at least once. And okay, maybe you're thinking that you should laugh more than once during an hour and some odd minutes, but think about this: This show is basically produced in one week. It goes from concept to script to rehearsal and finally to show. When you look at a show that everybody's always comparing SNL to; Madtv, you get a show that has basically the same cast, without a new guest star every week, where they get endless reshoots. If an audience isn't digging a skit, don't put it in the final broadcast. The beauty of SNL, past the hilarity of the skits, is that everything is done on the fly, sets, costumes, scripts, everything. It's hit or miss because you don't have do overs, you don't get second takes, and you certainly don't have comedy gold every time. Sometimes the audience doesn't go for it. That really effects how funny you're going to find it at home. It might be a perfectly funny skit, but it's a bad night. So for all the haters out there I would suggest that you think about how off the cuff ans spontaneous it really is, and maybe you'll come out thinking differently.