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Jay Pharoah as President Obama, and Bill Hader as House Speaker John Boehner, demonstrate how unfunny SNL‘s ‘Fiscal Cliff’ cold open can be despite an overabdundance of rich source material to lampoon:
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If you want to see funny political comentary then watch “Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld”, NBC will never attack Obama like they did Bush and Palin. The writers want to stay A-List.
Greg Gutfeld is the most unfunny person in the USA.
Hack is too nice a word to describe his lack of overall talent.
Alex: you’re 100% correct!
Casey: get a real sense of humor!
If by “rich material to spoof” you mean a president who thinks he’s a king but has no clue how to create a job because he never had a real one.
Yeah, funny. Until the Great Depression 2.0 hits next year.
Yes, it could have been funnier, but at least they took the time to lampoon it as the trumped-up farce that it is. What’s sad is most of the crooks in Congress who got us into this men were re-elected.
Why stop at the ‘cold open’ – most of the show was not funny, wait, stop, most of the season has not been funny, wait, stop, SNL hasn’t been funny for quite a while.
SNL is almost always lame there’s nothing unusual about a lame opening sketch. They have to fire Lorne Michaels and until they do this the show will be bad more often than not. Last night’s show was awful hardly any good sketches. You can tell when it’s going to be a stinker from the opening if it’s funny you will see a good show if it’s lousy like last night then the show that follows will be a bad one.
Lorne Michaels has turned into the Rick Berman of comedy. With all his money, he clearly no longer cares and has allowed the show to degenerate into irrelevance. Most sketches resemble dreck amateurs post on YouTube. People keep watching because it’s engrained after so many years and there’s no competition. If there was anything else worthy that was on at the same time, game over. The show is vulnerable.
I don’t know one person who is concerned about the “fiscal cliff” – both parties can screw off as far as I’m concerned.
Yes, the cold open was pretty lame, and the J-Pop talk show sketches have run their course. But there were some nifty skits. “Dylan McDermott or Dermot Mulroney?” took a classic meme and gave it a funny racial edge. “Maine Justice” was enjoyably demented. The news segment was decent. And Foxx reminded me that he used to be quite the goofball before he became a movie star.
I love that supposed SNL watchers like the first two commenters say SNL hasn’t been funny for years while claiming to still watch the show. These apparent masochists then bring the self-hatred online with hoary complaints. Suspect.
I love the comments here. Unemployment is at the lowest level since Bush’s policies destroyed the economy. I’m sorry Obama didn’t run companies into the ground and ship jobs to China like Romney did. We don’t need a job creator who will only create jobs overseas.
The show was horrible.
The worst SNL in years. The opening was terrible, the monologue was all over the place, the bitches game show skit was horrendous, and it just kept going downhill. What the hell has happened to this show?
Worst episode ever!
And who decided that TWO game show sketches would be a smart thing to put in the same show?
And TWO TV show parody bits too?
Maine Justice may be the worst sketch ever in SNL’s History.
Jay Pharoah is not funny.
Are you kidding me? That opening scene was the funniest part of the show. Jamie Foxx was horrible, beyond horrible! And they did 2 game show skits?? WTF?? The opening was funny.
In the pantheon of bad SNL skits, this one isn’t too bad. I’ve always liked SNL because its live, experimental, and completely unpredictable and that is why it needs to stay on TV. We all know that MOST skits are bad (a truism since the show began in 1975) but once in awhile they do something brilliant. When people criticize SNL I can’t help but think they are missing the point.
they attempt to be highbrow and pedantic but miss the mark so badly its embaressing…the writing is lousy, has no energy or puns and is enuf to zone you into sleep once you start watching…every actor delivers lines with a desperate perceptible glance at the audience looking for affirmation that it was ‘amusing”…it is not! yes there is a glut of great material…get NEW WRITERS! even go for low brow laughs…stop the dull mediocrity…Michaels what is wrong with you?? really man???
Classic instance of force-feeding edginess and resulting in an unfunny, juvenile, obvious, distasteful, unpleasant bit the audience barely responded to: Mrs. Claus during the Weekend Update segment.
Comedic actor Dion Flynn has the best President Obama impression going, and isn’t getting his props for it. He’s brilliant in “The Concession speech” video with Jimmy Fallon as Mitt Romney, that’s all over the internet. … Why are the execs at NBC afraid to tell Lorne that this show jumped the shark years ago?
As Michaels will never be fired, why not start with head writer Seth Meyers?
Sheesh, it wasn’t THAT bad. Pharoah’s timing (reading?) was off, which broke the flow a bit, but it was hardly the trainwreck most of the comments seem to think it was. “Maine Justice” was loony and enjoyable. There’s an ebb and flow to everything – watch something else for a while if you’re so uptight about your entertainment choices…
Hey, I stayed up specifically to see what SNL could do with an alleged “comedian,” Jamie Foxx. Wow, incredibly bad. I never laughed. Not once.
Losing Kristin Wiig and Andy Samberg seems to have sapped most of the laughs out of the show. I want it to do well…and don’t understand why the writers can’t make it work.
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler as Hilary and Palin may be the last time a political sketch was funny. Also loved Will Farrell as GW Bush.
Wiig’s characters, from the Target Lady to Penelope to Gilly and more, were just amazingly funny on their own. No one is stepping up to even begin to fill her shoes.