"Saturday Night Live" Started Last Night With One Of The Worst Cold Openings In The Show's History

I used to hate watch "Saturday Night Live" pretty consistently. I still tune in every so often. The last few weeks have featured a host that I genuinely like. Emma Stone always does a good job, and I legitimately think Adam Driver is one of the better "Saturday Night Live" hosts in recent memory. I watched last night's cold open and immediately turned it off. Comedy is hard. The fact that "Saturday Night Live" has sustained itself as long as it is a testament to Lorne Michael's ability to adapt, but "Saturday Night Live" is one of the worst shows on television. The sketch comedy shows at Barstool are objectively funnier, more timely, and better written than anything SNL has done over the last several years. 

As far as the sketch is concerned, there is a 40-second stretch at the beginning of the sketch in which there are jokes made, yet not a single person in the audience is laughing. People go to these shows looking to laugh if you can't get a live studio audience to applaud, you know you're fucking up. Please give me a nice 3-4 minute sketch and move on. I think one of the best things "Saturday Night Live" could do is make their show an hour instead of an hour and a half because they would cut out so much fat. 

This is a pet peeve that I've had with comedy over the last several years, but Donald Trump isn't president anymore. He hasn't been for almost three years. You don't have to keep mentioning him to get a cheap laugh in every comedy sketch or movie. Comedy. Congress. Trump reference. Tehehehehe. Congrats, you filled your quota. 

I'll say this is a compliment: Kenan Thompson does everything he can to try to save the sketch. One of the issues I have with "Saturday Night Live" right now is I just don't think the cast is very good at all. Kenan remains one of the few who continually puts his best foot forward. The joke where he says, "Our campus is the Internet," is the closest I came to smiling this entire sketch. He has a way of elevating unfunny material. See, I can be complementary when I want to be. 

There are so many great sketch comedy shows that we've gotten over the last several decades that "Saturday Night Live" has evolved into the comedy equivalent of a mom at a teenager's birthday party who gets drunk and tries to use all the hip lingo to keep up with her son's friends. You're just out of touch. It's true that "Saturday Night Live" has gone through many ups and downs in its nearly 50-year existence, but this is the longest it's gone without being funny. Not only is it not funny, it's not relevant. When was the last time you ran into somebody who said "Hey, did you watch SNL last night? "With cold openings like this, it's amazing to me that they have any audience. They pretty much have tenure as a TV show at this point.