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- Season 49
- Season 48
- Season 47
- Season 46
- Season 45
- Season 44
- Season 43
- Season 42
- Season 41
- Season 40
- Season 39
- Season 38
- Season 37
- Season 36
- Season 35
- Season 34
- Season 33
- Season 32
- Season 31
- Season 30
- Season 29
- Season 28
- Season 27
- Season 26
- Season 25
- Season 24
- Season 23
- Season 22
- Season 21
- Season 20
- Season 19
- Season 18
- Season 17
- Season 16
- Season 15
- Season 14
- Season 13
- Season 12
- Season 11
- Season 10
- Season 9
- Season 8
- Season 7
- Season 6
- Season 5
- Season 4
- Season 3
- Season 2
- Season 1
- 20. Jake Gyllenhaal; Sabrina Carpenter May 18, 2024
- Host Jake Gyllenhaal; Sabrina Carpenter performs.
- 19. Maya Rudolph; Vampire Weekend May 11, 2024
- Host Maya Rudolph; Vampire Weekend performs.
- 18. Dua Lipa May 4, 2024
- Dua Lipa hosts and performs.
Saturday Night Live is a ground-breaking NBC Sketch Comedy Variety Show, broadcast live from New York City in what had been, until its premiere in 1975, TV's "graveyard shift" slot.
- Characters
Saturday Night Live, being a long running sketch show, has...
- Awesome
What really makes this awesome is how Giuliani says the...
- Recap
A Recap page for Saturday Night Live. George Carlin/Billy...
- AwesomeMusic
In the early, more experimental years, Saturday Night Live...
- Funny
Saturday Night Live is a sketch comedy show that, despite...
- Heartwarming
December 17, 1988: The Schillers' Reel short film "Love is a...
- YMMV
Fandom Heresy: With Jean Doumanian's time as producer being...
- Laconic
A page for describing Laconic: Saturday Night Live. NBC's...
- Radar
A lot of Saturday Night Live's humor (for better or worse)...
- TearJerker
The much-despised (and with good cause) Jean Doumanian era...
- Characters
Saturday Night Live is a sketch comedy show that, despite its near-constant changing of cast members and writers and occasional dips in quality (often due to the aforementioned cast and writer changes), has remained on NBC for over 45 years and counting.
- Overview
- Has Named The Following Tropes:
- Individual sketches on the show are examples/subversions of common Tropes such as:
is a ground-breaking NBC sketch comedy/VarietyShow, broadcast live from New York City in what had been, up until its premiere in 1975, TVs "graveyard shift" slot.
Often shortened to SNL for ease of reference, the show was specifically designed by its creator, Lorne Michaels (who was once a writer on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In), to showcase young and edgy talent as a direct reaction to the older comedians who dominated primetime but were fundamentally clueless about the tastes, styles and preoccupations of young Americans circa 1975. Rotating celebrity guests added to the "fingers on the pulse of pop culture" vibe the show reveled in. Steve Martin has hosted and been in more episodes than some cast members have (and is likely the host that most viewers believe was actually a cast member). Other frequent and popular hosts are John Goodman, Tom Hanks, Alec Baldwin, Christopher Walken, and now, apparently, Justin Timberlake. Paul Simon of Simon and Garfunkel and Dave Grohl (who has performed with not just his main bands Nirvana and Foo Fighters, but also with Tom Petty, Them Crooked Vultures and Queens of the Stone Age) are the show's most frequent musical guests.
Reveled during its early years in a feeling of being just shy of completely out of control, and pushed the boundaries of television far beyond what anyone had ever seen before. The cast is continually shifting, with veterans departing for solo careers and young performers being recruited regularly.
The number of stars that emerged from this show is mindboggling by itself. Just among the first year cast, SNL launched the careers of Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi and Jane Curtin, as well as frequent guest performer (though never host) Andy Kaufman. Other famous cast members include Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Robert Downey, Jr.., Will Ferrell, Al Franken (making it the only late-night entertainment show to produce a United States Senator), Gilbert Gottfried, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Billy Crystal, Phil Hartman, Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, Dennis Miller and many more. Among the most recent cast members, Tina Fey has a very dedicated fandom in no small part because of her success with being head writer and cast member on SNL, the film Mean Girls, and the sitcom Thirty Rock.
Every episode features the guest host deliver an opening monologue and participate in most of the evening's sketches. Actors, musicians, and comedians are the most common selections. They have always had a standing band for various musical numbers, but often with a guest musician to perform a piece or two in the middle of the program. If the host is a well-known musician, they will often fill both roles, and sometimes guest musicians participate in skits too, though not as often as the host.
Widely viewed as always having been better when one was younger, whenever that happened to be (normally the first five years [from 1975-1980] are cited as the best years of the show's life, but there have been viewers who claim that the 80s and/or the 90s were when the show grew its beard). In fact, the show seems to operate in cycles — it starts out outrageous and fresh and stays that way for a few years, then when its outrageousness becomes the norm the show gets panned for "not being funny". The claims are solidified when a favorite cast member leaves, and the show goes through a down period as it tries to find new cast members and get rid of the ones who have run their course. Then when the right cast members are found, the show becomes funny again (usually through the eyes of new fans, though there have been cases of old fans who have abandoned the show in the past and now have rediscovered it).
•Ambiguously Gay: The Ambiguously Gay Duo, and "Lyle, the Effeminate Heterosexual".
•"El Niño" Is Spanish for "The Nino"
•Every Year They Fizzle Out
•Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Running Gag of Norm McDonald-era Weekend Update sketches.
•Happy Fun B•The Thing That Would Not Leave
•The Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer
•Abuse Is Okay When It Is Female On Male: The Tiger Woods press conference sketch on the episode hosted by Blake Lively (who played Tiger Woods' ex-wife Elin Nordegreen). It doesn't help that the musical guest for that episode (Rihanna) is the same Rihanna who was beaten up by her now ex-boyfriend, Chris Brown (who would later be the musical guest for the season 36 episode hosted by Russell Brand.
•Then there are the many sketches where Fred Armisen plays a character who ends up getting beaten by a woman (the Annuale commercial from season 33 had him getting kicked in the groin and punched in the face by Amy Poehler, Kristen Wiig punched Fred during the mosh pit riot on the "Death Metal Golden Girls Theme" SNL Digital Short, and the "Flags of the World" Digital Short had Nasim Pedrad hit Fred in the head with a "Girlfriend on the Rag Flag.")
•Acting Unnatural: One of the challenges in the digital short Extreme Challenge.
•Actor Allusion / Celebrity Paradox / Hypocritical Humor / Take That Me: On the Season 22 episode hosted by Robert Downey Jr., there was a parody sketch of 1970s crime dramas where a detective (Norm MacDonald) finds a bag of heroin and asks "What kind of creep needs this junk to get through the day?" His partner (Downey, who at the time was notorious for his drug problems and missed a week of rehab just to come back and host) then goes on a tirade about how horrible drug abusers are, whether they're famous or not. Need we remind anyone that it's 1990s Downey saying this for laughs?
•The monologue of this episode even had Downey show his vacation pictures, which included him accepting a package from a drug dealer, him getting arrested, him sharing a jail cell with a Scary Black Man who wants a kiss from him, him visiting Disneyland while in handcuffs, and a photo of a crashed car (which he identifies as a photo from Kelsey Grammer's summer vacation).
•There was also the sketch where Justin Timberlake played his own Irish ancestor, talking about how some day, one of his descendants will be a big star.
Aug 17, 2023 · Funny. Saturday Night Live. Saturday Night Live is a sketch comedy show that, despite its near-constant changing of cast members and writers and occasional dips in quality, has remained on NBC for well past 30 years (as of this writing, the show is in its 37th season).
Jan 2, 2023 · The following are just a few of the many ways that SNL has poked fun at some of the most iconic superheroes or tropes of comic book culture in general. Superhero Party (Season 4)
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The Nostalgia Filter and Seasonal Rot (see below) tropes were mentioned on the monologue to the Dana Carvey/Linkin Park episode, in which Carvey mentions how former fans of SNL always cite his era (from 1986 to 1993) as SNL's best era. It was even sung by Carvey with special guest, Jon Lovitz.