Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Saturday Night Live After 9/11

http://www.usatoday.com/news/sept11/2001/09/30/snl.htm

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=474002147830401061&q=will+ferrell+osama+bin+laden&total=9&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=5


The Terror and Gallows Humor piece from before spring break got me thinking about humor after September 11th. Mentally going back to the days and weeks following September 11th has become slightly more difficult as more time goes by. That being said, the overall sentiment of that time still resonates in me. And one of the starkest memories I have of the days following the event was a sense that humor would never be the same. That it wouldn’t be ok to really laugh for a long, long time. And that certainly the events of September 11th themselves were off-limits.

So when I go back to that time and think about the first obvious attempts at humor following 9/11, there are a few things that immediately come to mind. First of all, I wasn’t much of an Onion reader back then so I missed out on that really interesting post-9/11 Onion installment. For me, humor in 2001 centered much more on the late night TV shows and especially Saturday Night Live. At fourteen years old, the comedy of Saturday Night Live was still fresh and hilarious. Thinking about Saturday Night Live in 2001 brings back memories of Will Ferrell still in the cast which now feels like a lifetime ago. While digging around the internet for 9/11 related pieces I came across this article from USA Today critiquing the first SNL following 9/11. I remember watching all the SNLs in the weeks following 9/11 because I had grown to miss “regular TV” during the insane 24-hour news network frenzy directly following 9/11 itself. This article highlighted some of the things I remember about the show during this time.

Overall, the event of just a couple weeks before was hardly brought up during the episode aside from the large-scale serious tribute to start the show. I distinctly remember Rudy Giuliani’s “why start now?” line, which I thought was pretty hilarious. The joke mentioned in the article from the Weekend Update segment applies pretty closely to the Doniger piece. Following a tragic event such as 9/11, the first acceptable targets were the enemies. In this case: Osama Bin Laden and Mariah Carey. Overall, the first episode back played it safe; there were no sketches featuring George W. Bush and the event itself was mentioned only a few times. As the weeks progressed, I distinctly remember this gradually changing. Osama Bin Laden and the hijackers became a central focus of the comedy on the show. Will Ferrell played both Osama Bin Laden and President Bush, demonstrating his earlier range and talent.

One sketch I remember in particular was aired following the release of a tape of Bin Laden taking responsibility for the 9/11 attack. I couldn’t find the clip online, but the sketch aimed to recreate the tape closely. It was presented in the same hazy and amateurish style of the tape and featured Will Ferrell as Osama Bin Laden describing the events of 9/11 to some friends. The sketch began to diverge from the dialogue of the actual tape when Will Ferrell started to describe the attitudes of the hijackers. He claimed that they wanted to attack America, but they developed cold-feet after learning that they would be involved in a suicide mission. They asked Bin Laden if they could instead just hijack a plane and threaten the people onboard, asking for the release of prisoners and landing safely in Egypt or something. Humor such as this and the Onion articles we looked at highlight a specific kind of comedy that was deemed acceptable following the tragedy. It was ok to mock the hijackers, painting them as cowards or imagining what kind of torture they were receiving in hell. Humor beyond that was much more controversial.

I also managed to track down a video of Will Ferrell as George W. Bush entitled “George W. Bush Calls Out Bin Laden.” Again, Bush himself is not really a target here, although this is slightly beginning to change. Bush is presented in the typical Ferrell fashion: dim-witted, child-like, and kind of a cowboy. Yet as you can tell by the crowd reaction, the audience is entirely supportive of everything Ferrell is saying. Looking back on this clip six years later, the comedy is still humorous while the subject-matter still stings a bit. We haven’t been attacked again, yet I’m sure many of us would like to see a return to this level of gusto from President Bush about tracking down Bin Laden. Almost any impression of George W. Bush today is presented in a much different tone than this one. The humor is aimed at the President instead of who we’re fighting and the message is more cynical and disparaging. This only stresses the importance of the passage of time. Since 2001 our foreign policy has changed, the country’s attitudes have changed, and comedy has changed right along with it.

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