‘SNL’ Scraps Traditional Cold Open To Address Paris Terrorist Attacks

“Paris is the city of light.”

So marked the sad beginning of last night’s Saturday Night Live, an episode that could have found its cast and crew in a difficult spot.

As a rare live comedy show on television, SNL is often tasked with being entertainment’s first responder, given the weight of addressing – or choosing not to address – terrible news that has taken us by surprise.

The show had little choice as for how to deal with Friday’s terrorist attacks on France. Too sad and soon to make light of, too important to ignore, the show had to say something, yet that something couldn’t be funny.

So the show scrapped its cold open, and had cast member Cecily Strong come out on the host stage and say a few words about the tragedy, beginning with the sentence above.

The short speech was a “we stand with you” tribute to Paris from the city that can well relate to its tragedy. Strong, who speaks fluent French, handled the moment well, with the quiet dignity and just-simmering emotion it called for.

But the moment brought to mind how odd it is that comedy shows and their hosts or casts are now expected to address these topics with regularity, having earned a cursed promotion of sorts from mere laugh bringers, to bell wethers of our collective emotional state.

After 9/11, once many of us moved beyond the first wave of horror and the collective shock of the moment, public discussion began addressing when it would be OK to laugh again, and when (and how) the late night shows would return.

David Letterman answered first with one of the deepest and most emotional moments of his career, and soon after, both Jon Stewart and SNL did the same. In the case of the latter, it featured Mayor Giuliani, Paul Simon, and a stage filled with police and firemen.

The cultural moment showed how we’ve come to rely on these programs, asking them to reflect our national mood back to us while, at the same time, leading us to the next phase of healing in our collective tragedies.

But it also showed how SNL had come to share this aspect of the national stage, and how Stewart and others had not only matched, but surpassed it in many ways as those we trusted to do so.

Elizabeth Banks was last night’s host, and as the actress, and director of Pitch Perfect 2, launched her stint with a singing, dancing monologue designed to show off her newfound directing skills – a monologue that found some laughs when it brought in a green screen to have her dance in front of an octopus and other incongruous scenes – it was hard not to watch with recent events in mind.

This feeling only grew as the episode progressed. Two recurring sketches aired pre-Update: Black Jeopardy, and the pretentious school performance art sketch, which mocks liberal/PC pronouncements via the pompous and politically naive performance art of a group of students.

There couldn’t be two sketches in SNL’s arsenal more appropriate for dealing, whatever their political take, with this week’s events at Yale and the University of Missouri. These are the sort of news items – centering on SNL’s young demographic, and pitting issues of racial fairness, which SNL itself has wrestled with in real life, against the sort of free speech the show was founded to champion – one could see a sharp political satire show having a field day with.

But the remainder of the episode reinforced how SNL is not that show, having fallen behind so many, from John Oliver and Stephen Colbert to Comedy Central’s 11:00 hour.

Black Jeopardy inappropriately places one white contestant on a quiz show geared toward black people. Banks’ privileged white girl -“I dated a black guy once, I don’t see color” – seemed the perfect foil for recent events, but never rose above “clueless privileged white girl” stereotypes.

The sketch gave no indication of taking place in the same universe as this week’s protests, even using Tupac death conspiracy theories as a punchline. The sketch’s laughs were informed and genuine, and it remains one of Sasheer Zamata’s best showcases, but in a week like this one, it seemed to take place in a bubble.

The performance art sketch came just two scenes later, and in the worst tradition of SNL’s legacy of recurring sketches, it was merely a close repeat of its previous play, a carbon copy of structure with jokes filled in like Mad Libs.

This left it to the show’s current-events-mocking vehicle, Weekend Update, to tackle the protests.

After riffing on the presidential candidates, with jokes about Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson and more – including a great Michael Che joke about how, if Bush really killed Baby Hitler like he said he would, it would have left Germany in “the weak bumbling hands of Adolf’s brother, Jeb Hitler” – Update co-hosts Che and Colin Jost finally did a back and forth about the incident at Yale University. (Go to the 5:15 mark of the clip below.)

Che and Jost have relied on the back-and-forth more this season, trying to create a rapport that allows them to tackle subjects on a deeper-than-one-joke level, while also hoping for a strong and funny team dynamic.

But their take on the issue – which boiled down to, “white kids, shut up about race,” and, “don’t wear offensive costumes” – was, as it so often is lately, muddled by their awkward personal chemistry, and the flat writing that too often accompanies their larger bits.

After Jost spoke first about how, in a racial debate, he doesn’t say, “I’ll go first,” the camera shifted to Che, who replied, “you literally just did that.” But the dialogue felt real, as Che seemed to genuinely admonish him.

If these two lines were designed for a laugh, they failed miserably. But if, as it seemed, they weren’t, and this was Che’s real response, then why didn’t they write the bit differently? Why wouldn’t you have Che go first in a bit about racial sensitivity? It’s mystifying, and leads to the conclusion that there was, at some point, a laugh designed in there somewhere, and either the writing or delivery simply didn’t work, leaving an awkward moment between the two in its wake.

Jost and Che have increasingly attempted dealing with racial issues by turning themselves into a racial Odd Couple, using banter about Jost’s whiteness to illustrate genuine points about racial differences. But so far, that strategy – if it is that – hasn’t worked, as there’s something in the pair’s comic timing that rarely jells during these bits.

They did get one big laugh when Che mocked Jost’s sending him race-related emails to get his thoughts, but the rest died on the vine, with Che’s ending joke getting no laughs at all. Given how little they managed to say about such a controversial, emotional-filled news item, it seemed appropriate that the very next joke centered on Snookie.

SNL can joke well about certain buzzwords and thoughts on the collective mind – two separate sketches last night had Uber jokes – but the show seems long past its ability to effectively satirize more important issues. With Seth Meyers gone – the former head writer and Weekend Update anchor spearheaded much of the show’s political material during his stint, including writing Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin sketches – no one has stepped up to fill the political void.

Tonight’s show illustrated how SNL rarely seems up to the weight of current events. In a time of myriad complexities, it’s reliable but safe mocking of the day’s politicians feels like a modern-day version of a pie in the face or seltzer down the pants, with easy, reflexive jokes taking the place of more creative or thought-provoking approaches.

A later sketch telling the story of Ben Carson, featuring the bizarre details of Carson’s youth that he’s provided lately, felt like an easy slam dunk that produced weak laughs, taking a comedy gold mine and pouring it directly into the script with little further thought. Moreover, the writers found it necessary to telegraph the joke wide, placing “Source: Dr. Ben Carson 2011” on the screen, in case anyone in the audience spent the past week in a coma and missed the news.

The closest the episode came to relevance was in the commentary of, surprisingly, Pete Davidson, who rarely delves into political material, but delivered a deft rebuttal to Houston’s rejection of an anti-discrimination law for transgendered people, spelling out the illogic of fearing transgendered people in bathrooms.

Sadly, much of the rest of the episode more closely resembled the other character at the Update desk this week, Kyle Mooney’s old school stand-up comic Bruce Chandling, an out-of-touch relic with no understanding of how to translate real life into laughs.

Larry Getlen is the author of the book Conversations with Carlin. His greatest wish is to see Stefon enjoy a cheeseburger at John Belushi’s diner. Follow him on Twitter at @larrygetlen.