Like many Americans too young to even appreciate or comprehend the slightly ribald, sly-winkish-type humor on Saturday Night Live, I remember sneaking to the television late at night to watch reruns of the show that ushered in the next iteration of a television comedy revolution begun with Laugh-In and the Smother's Brothers.  Now, I'm lucky if I make it to the only segment that hasn't lost its eye or edge, sometimes, "Weekend Update."  SNL will turn 35 next year; it remains a fixture of network television, a coveted destination for sketch writers, improvisors, and comic actors, and supposedly a funhouse mirror for the culture's social and political foibles.  Cutting edge, hip, smart, and very funny. These are words that no longer apply to Saturday Night Live. Has it reached its end? Must it continue to linger around the watercooler like the doddering professor who refuses to admit they no longer have the interest or desire to perform their obligations?

This weekend, I watched SNL's Greatest Television Parodies.  Contained within the show was both a retrospective of so many beloved performers and characters, who, sadly are no longer making American laugh (Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Chris Farley, Phil Hartman) and a panorama of how the show has changed over the years. You could essentially see the show expand and contract with the likes of silly and smart parodies in the 1970s such as Bass-o-Matic, Little Chocolate Donuts, and Hey You: the Perfume of One-Night Stands, to the more honed work of the 1990s through the turn of the century with Happy Fun Ball, Old Glory Insurance, Mom Jeans, and CheapKid.net. (The 1980s, some of the show's most dismal years was noticeably unrepresented in the collection). The work and its players of the last decade possessed an intelligence and savy about their culture that mirrored the early days of Second City, the Chicago-based training ground for improvisation and sketch comedy, where many on SNL cut their teeth.  In the late-1950s and early 1960s audiences attended shows at Second City equipped with knowledge of Kaufka and Kennedy and could equally keep up with the non-sensical and sophisticated material.  

Since Tina Fey's departure as head writer (along with others of the writing and performing staff such as Amy Poehler and Tracy Morgan who followed her to 30 Rock) the show has lapsed once again into, well, lameness. It's a tollerable enterprise, but rarely entertaining or thought-provoking. It has reclaimed a frat boy feel, reminiscent of the Sandler-Spade-Farley triumverate, but without the style, charm, or guiling that those writers and performers brought to their pieces.  

Instead, it squanders the talents of performers who might show greater reach and larger promise by sticking them in hackneyed premises (the, now unendurable, game show sketch, the talk show sketch, the date sketch) that deliver more of the same.  Must we watch Kristen Wiig sputter and stall her way through a performance of awkward, inappropriate admissions for 4 minutes? How many times will Keenan Thompson perform a one-dimensional, generic type instead of a fleshed out, interesting character?

Saturday Night Live is an American comedy institution. Like any other, it suffers through periods of drought and abundance.  As we come to the end of the first decade of the twenty first century, it's worth asking if this paeon to comic innovation deserves its iconic status.   What does it contribute to the world of comedy? What might it have to say, if we want it to, about our world at large? And if the answer is nil on both fronts, is it possible to imagine a television or comic realm without the Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time-Players?