Meaning | SNL is for me and all the other outsiders

My parents had friends and attended and threw parties, but still there was something about adult age that struck me as serious when I was a kid – adults spent their days to have their oil changed, filled in paperwork, go to funerals – and The pure silliness of “SNL” seemed charming, lured in violation of it. If you were lucky, you might be able to build a life around Silliness. As it turned out, I did, and I didn’t: I’m not a comedian, but as a novelist I built a life about doing things up and reconstituting what the culture offers.

Back in the Minneapolis, the pandemic pulled on and eventually my family became with our TV-Se sofa of a rescue chihuahua named Weenie. When we all saw episode after episode, it dawned on me that in addition to being a child’s festive idea of ​​adult age, “SNL” embodies several other evasive and ambitions ideas: an idea of ​​New York for people who like me never have lived there; An idea of ​​having funny friends or staff instead of annoying one; An idea of ​​being able to metabolize political instability in bite jokes instead of feeling helpless about it; An idea of ​​glamorous after -party that we want to participate in when most of us don’t really want to quit so late. (Although I might just mean me here. My kids are now teenagers and go to bed after I have done it. But my family has never seen “snl” live; we usually see on Sunday around 7pm)

Many of us feel at varying degrees like outsiders – we are not beautiful or famous or funny or coastal – and “SNL” gives us access to beauty, fame, humor and New York. “SNL” mirrors both and defines all these things; Sometimes when I’m in New York, it feels New Yorky for me because I see pictures I’ve seen on the show, like the Prometheus statue outside the Rockefeller Center, 30 Rock Marquee or the apparent grain in the subway. A couple of years ago, a Jaded Magazine editor asked if it annoyed me that my publisher sets me up at hotels in Midtown, where it’s overloaded with tourists. The risk of sounding like a midwestern stereotype had never found me that Midtown could be unwanted; I still can’t believe that a publisher pays for me to stay at a nice hotel and then I’ll go to walks in central park.

As the months went by, the pandemic still did not go away and I, as many people, experienced personal challenges beyond the global. I decided that the novel I was trying to write was too depressing and set it aside. Desperate after cheering myself I started a new set on a show a lot like “SNL”

I did a huge amount of research that was so wonderful that it did not feel like work, including reading the nearly 800 pages of oral story “Live from New York”, then the documentary “Saturday Night” and listening to about a million comedian podcasts. When I finished a ticket to see a dressing test of the show in March 2022, only two aspects of seeing it personally surprised me. The first was how often two or more role crew in the same sketch were at different phases (for example, the role crew who played a mayor at a news conference and the role crews who played journalists).