Lookin' For The Heart Of Saturday Night

With every fall the leaves on the trees are falling down: red, yellow, orange, and brown...

Oh yeah, and it also prime season for bitching about Saturday Night Live's painful decline. It seems to happen every year at exactly the same time. This has been itself a source of unending comedy for me, as different generations seem to disagree as to when SNL's golden years ended. The youngins' seem to pine for the Phil Hartman years, for example. For me, the show's history goes something like:

1975-1980: The True Golden Years
1980-early 1981: Jean Domanian takes over, with painful expletive-deleting results, but at least Captain Beefheart was a musical guest.
1981-1984: The Eddie Murphy Show (not that it wasn't brilliant, it just wasn't an ensemble).
1984-1995: Solely depending on the cast, equal parts brilliant, boring and cringe-worthy.
1995-present: Abysmal, unwatchable. Unless, like me, you get off on train-wrecks (apart from Robert Smigel, who has been consistently brilliant throughout his tenure with the show)

Well, a local comedy troupe finally decided to stop bitching and actually do something about it. At the Juvie Hall Theater, Saturday Night Rewritten takes the previous night's show and vastly improves upon SNL's poor excuse for sketches. The group (who, unlike SNL's "writers," are unpaid), having watched the show, meet on Sunday, go through the sketches and rewrite them. Says head writer Erik Marcisak, "Even if the sketch is only halfway decent, we wrote it in just an hour and a half, and it got put up in front of an audience that genuinely laughed. Ask any of our writers, and they will brag about that."

-SATURDAY NIGHT DEAD [Page Six]

-SATURDAY NIGHT'S ALL RIGHT FOR REWRITING