It’s Saturday Night White!

SNL

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, the past few weeks have been fairly controversial ones for Saturday Night Live.  Upon this season’s premiere, SNL Czar Lorne Michaels hired 6 new featured players to take over spots of departed members over the last few years.  It was one of the largest cast turnovers in the show’s history.   However, outcry has bubbled up suggesting that SNL has not done enough to diversify itself.  Case in point: there has not been a black female cast-member since 2007, when Maya Rudolph left the show.   For a comedy show that takes it’s pulse from NYC, that’s kind of unacceptable.

Jay Pharoah took SNL to task for it’s lack color, and Kenan Thompson made a weird comment almost defending the producers stating that they just never find black women comediennes and actresses that are ready for the big stage.  I think I fall somewhere in the middle of both actors opinions but if I look at history, I tend to stand closer to Pharoah.  In almost 40 years, SNL has had four black women in the cast. Four.  That is one every ten years.  So if I were following Kenan’s logic, they only find one that is ready every ten years.  Come on…  What bothers me about that argument is that Lorne Michaels has complete control over who comes in for an audition.  I can’t get inside the man’s head, but if I had to guess, black women, don’t fit the demographic he thinks the show draws?  He very well might be right, but what that mindset does is forces Kenan or Jay to wear a dress to play a black woman.  Yes, black men wearing dresses has been part of comedy for eons, but it’s cheap, and panders to the lowest demo of comedy fans.

The lack of qualified black women on SNL to me is more of an indictment of the search process.  Take Mad TV for example.  Say what you will about the show from a critical standpoint, but it was miles and miles more diverse in its 13 years, than SNL ever has, or ever will be.  The show was far more culturally representative in every sense.  The show had black, white, hispanic, asian, and other ethnicities represented in such a fashion that it never felt like tokenism.  It felt like a show that could represent all cultural perspectives of comedy would be a better show.  For many seasons, as much as people refuse to remember Mad TV was ever good, it was the better late-night comedy option.  It was edgier, and it took itself less seriously, and it was lead for many of those years by strong “minority” women comedians.  For SNL, at this point, adding a black female cast-member would largely feel like tokenism. Wouldn’t it?  I don’t know the answer for sure, but it seems like the powers that be over on NBC probably, in a gesture of “please kill these diversity news stories,” have tapped Kerry Washington to host next weeks episode.   I don’t even really care that they got her, because people would complain no matter when they did it this year.  The fact of the matter is that she is the star of the most popular show on television right now, so she deserves to be on the show.  But I hope that when the writers realize they can finally do a Michelle Obama sketch, or you, have a black woman in any capacity in a scene, they realize how great diversity is.

I wouldn’t care about any of this if SNL didn’t just hire 6 white dudes and ladydudes.  It would be nice to see the show actually care about mixing it up.  Diversity for diversity sake is dumb, but I guess what I’d hope for is a sea change in terms of how SNL thought about casting in the first place.  New York is arguably the most diverse city on the planet. It’d rule if New York’s main comedy staple could reflect that. Also, cut the crap about no one being ready.  Nicole Byer is probably one of funniest up-and-coming comediennes around.  I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

About Russ Stevens

Russ Stevens is an editor and writer at Rookerville and a guidance counselor at Nyack HS. He mostly writes about either loving or hating things. In his spare time, he performs Improv comedy with his troupe Priest and The Beekeeper and is a co-producer of their monthly variety show Pig Pile. He loves all the New York sports teams that are historically bad, and he hates lateness more than anything in the world.

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