Dana Carvey's return to Saturday Night Live was as entertaining as it was mystifying. It's not that I wasn't excited to see a classic cast member back on the show - it's just that I'm still not sure what he was promoting... and if he wasn't promoting anything, what was he doing there? Don't they know what SNL is for?
Anyhoo, we're not here to critique the content of SNL (if you're looking for that, try the rest of the internet), rather I'm planning to examine the lightheartedness with which the show treats the most abhorrent of topics. So, without any further ado... The numbers!
This week was almost unusually clean - it's possible that the presence of Carvey convinced Seth and the boys to tone things down a little, as there were no homophobia jokes to speak of. There was even an extended sketch about a children's beauty pageant that didn't feature even an allusion to paedophilia. The only rape-themed humour of the night came in Carvey's Church Lady sketch, which featured the middle-aged bible-thumper fantasizing about molesting relentlessly self-promoting teen singer Justin Beiber.
Actually, the purported attractiveness of Beiber is one of the most mystifying bits of modern cultural ephemera as far as I'm concerned. I'd never attempt to hazard a guess as to what teenagers find attractive, but I feel like I understand adult women enough to find it implausible that they would get weak in the knees at the sight of a teenage boy who looks like a pre-teen girl.
The final tally this week was-
Homophobia: 0
Rape: 1
All in all a respectable show - but Russel Brand is hosting next week, which is Spanish for 'All Bets Are Off'.
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