Day 17: Life lessons from SNL

The Task was to pick a fight. Not sure I really did that.

Is there a saying out there that goes something like, "It was as anticlimactic as an episode of Saturday Night Live?" If there isn't, there should be. I first cared about Saturday Night Live when I was in middle school. In those days, it was a pretty good cast. Chris Farley, David Spade, Dana Carvey, Melanie Hutsell, Kevin Nealon, Molly Shannon, Cheri Oteri and Will Ferrell were all players who would take the stage during my middle school and high school years. Anyone who watches SNL accepts that from the cold open until "Weekend Update", SNL is at its best for that night (which doesn't necessarily mean that it is at its best). After "Weekend Update", it's understood the show will drag along at an awkward clunk. The best anyone can hope is that a post-update sketch will be funny in the way things are funny when you are a standing on the outside of an inside joke.

With all of this dead time, it's hard to understand why everyone has been okay with giving SNL an hour and a half time slot for over 40 years. It is still a decent show sometimes, and it somehow maintains cultural relevance through its political statements and the perceived dead-on impressions of political figures (Side note--Tina Fey was truly a good Sarah Palin. It was sometimes difficult to tell the Sarah and Tina apart. Kate McKinnon was a decent Hillary Clinton because she is Kate McKinnon and everything she does is interesting on some level because she is just so darn likable. But so help me, Alec Baldwin and his sour-faced Trump impression can exit stage right. He was funny during the election, but can we all admit we're over it?) However, week after week, SNL shows us that a person can in fact get too much of a good thing and dead horses are truly not in need of the beatings they are sometimes forced to endure.

It seems there is a lesson we, the SNL-aware, can take from the weekly overkill blunder. We all need to know when to quit. Sometimes we stand in the way of our own progress because we refuse to quit talking and start listening. Or we refuse to let go of a habit that no longer serves us. Sometimes we refuse to let go of a person who we know is toxic in our lives. It is so hard to know when to let go. We cannot, we will not be labeled as quitters. What would everyone think? Newsflash! They may be thinking right now, "Spare me. I feel like I am watching the last 30 minutes of Saturday Night Live, and it.Is.TORTURE!" Somethings I have had to let go were not all that traumatic (i.e. deciding not to pack my overalls when we moved from Kansas to Colorado). Other letting goes still leave me feeling unresolved (i.e. a friendship that ended on bad terms).

I am currently working on how to let go of pleasing everyone. It is a tough one, and it is one I struggle with even as I type this sentence. And the irony, of course, is that because the SNL writers have given up pleasing everyone, the final 30 minutes of that show gets to be filled with obscure, unrelatable humor that makes eyebrow-plucking look like a desirable alternative. And maybe there's a lesson there, too. A life model so to speak. The reality is that we're all good enough to bring our best to the cold open and even maintain a dynamite string of sketches. But, no one, not even Jim Carrey, a guy who was built for sketch comedy and improvisational humor, can keep the hits coming when he hosts the show. And so, we press on, and we finish, knowing that it is possible we will make fools of ourselves and not everyone will understand our intentions. But, we keep going until the credits roll, and we say our thank yous and collect our hugs because we stayed on stage the whole darn time.