Word: snl
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...blackface posturing and righteous-pimp drawl. (The joke, by the way, is clearly not on African Americans; it's on the actor's belief that he can play anyone.) But Lazarus and the others out there in the jungle don't evolve or devolve; they are figures from an SNL skit or the director's own very smart Ben Stiller Show back...
...successive waves of teenage fans, although it makes for pretty luscious ironies. ''We've got to the stage where we end the night by destroying everything,'' Pete Townshend said in 1967, ''which is expensive.'' At their zenith in 1977, the Sex Pistols peevishly canceled a Saturday Night Live appearance. SNL creator Lorne Michaels, who has himself made a lucrative career out of counterculturalism, complained, ''It's very strange that a group that prides itself on representing the underground turns us down because we can't pay them enough.'' Punk, essentially a working-class British genre, never went fully mainstream...
...America lost its sense of humor? If it seems that way, perhaps that's because dourness is effective politics. In Minnesota, former SNL comic Al Franken hit trouble in his Senate race because of the dark legacy of his past: not drug use or infidelity but a joke he made in 1995 about 60 Minutes' Andy Rooney being a rapist. His opponent, Norm Coleman, and Coleman's surrogates jumped on the joke, accusing Franken of thinking rape is funny...
...recognize this failing in movies with other graduates of SNL. Trained at the Second City improv company, blossoming on late-night TV, they created or inhabited recurring characters who had five minutes to establish themselves. Even the most amusing of these characters, if they were to be expanded, were suited more to half-hour sitcoms than to feature films. But that's where the Blues Brothers, the Coneheads, Stuart Smalley, Pat, Mary Katherine Gallagher and the Roxbury guys went, not always justifying their films' running time. Leaving SNL for movies means you can't go back, which deprives the show...
...Wayne's World was one of the few SNL movie spin-offs that worked. It set Myers on a mostly successful Hollywood career, whose strangest entry, the indie 54 (in which he played Studio 54 co-owner Steve Rubell), was also the most promising. But Myers didn't do any other dramatic parts, maybe because so much money was thrown his way to keep reprising Austin Powers and Shrek. And it's taken him longer and longer to devise new characters. Pitka is his first in movies since Austin Powers (and Dr. Evil...