Saturday Night Live RapeWatch: Galfinakis Edition

It’s time for the glorious return of the Saturday Night Live RapeWatch, which has been on a hiatus due to my depression with the overall terribility of the show, save for the Jon Hamm edition, which featured all of the brilliant comedy we’ve come to expect of him, and not enough objectionable material to warrant me getting angry enough to write about.

We’re back now, though, so let’s take a look at Zach Galfinakis’ first outing as a host of SNL!

A largely terrible episode, the few bright spots did nothing to rescue the show from the overwhelmingly unfunny mediocrity that’s become its trademark. Seriously, people, when ‘What Up With That’ is your episode’s high point, something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

But we’re not here for general SNL criticism, that’s what the rest of the Internet is for. So let’s go over the objectionable content!

Things were off to a questionable start when Zach made a rape joke during the monologue – it may be borderline, since it was a statutory rape joke, but I thought it worth bringing up because it’s part of a confusing trend that suggests male children can’t be victims of molestation. Everyone accepts that a female high school student molested by a teacher is the victim of a crime, but put a male high school student in the same situation and you’ve got at best a joke, and at worst something that’s considered admirable.

The second rape joke was just nonsensical, and the perfect example of the writers using rape for the shock value to cover their inability to actually come up with a joke. The premise was that a new kind of underwear was being made partially from banana plant fibres, which raises the risk of ‘Monkey Rape’. Because monkeys are known for using bananas as masturbatory aids. Seriously, is the joke any less funny had Smuggy Smuggerson said ‘increases the risk of your penis being eaten by a monkey’? I don’t think so – but that wouldn’t have accomplished what the show seems to often be designed to do these days: desensitize people to the horror of rape.

Things were also pretty robust over in our control category. In addition to two sketches with random homophobia-themed humour, there were two sketches whose entire premise was built around the idea that men being (or acting) gay was, in and of itself, something that needs to be pointed and laughed at.

The final count:

Rape – 2
Homophobia - 4

And for the record – no, I don’t know if that’s how his name is spelled, and no, I’m not checking. I’m also not checking if he actually shaved his beard off for that last sketch.