Jeez, that is twisted.

the only drug packets scattered around S.N.L. these days are Emergen-C

Which is why, Fey aside, the show is less funny than in the Belushi days.

I hate all the German/Greek stuff in that article. Actually I hated just about everything in that article. I'm in a pretty hateful mood this morning.

I'm thoroughly offput by the degree to which this profile obsesses on Fey's weight and looks.

Her makeover is the stuff of legend. The Hollywood agent Sue Mengers warned her pal Lorne Michaels that he simply could not bring Fey out of the writers’ room and put her on-air for “Weekend Update.”

“She doesn’t have the looks,” Mengers told him.

Her "makeover" is "the stuff of legend."

Meanwhile, when her husband is asked about how she looked before, he says

“She was quite round,” he says, “in a lovely, turn-of-the-century kind of round—that beautiful, Rubenesque kind of beauty.” And as for her clothes: “Things that didn’t match. She used to wear crazy boots. She would wear just a lot of knee-length frumpy dresses with thrift-store sweaters and kind of what was comfortable. It still looked kind of cool on her.

Doesn't sound like she was complaining. Sheesh - the writer couldn't find any angle other than Ugly Duckling? Fey is one of the funniest comedians of our age and probably the funniest and smartest female comedian and comedy writer out there. She's interesting, yet the article chooses two main points to illustrate: she's "German" and she used to be a fat chick. Oy.

On preview: I agree, mullacc, the attribution of her personality to ethnicity is pretty lame, too.

It is "Vanity Fair," after all. An incisive, smart profile would probably have been to much to expect.

It does show how far SNL has fallen and how much its values have shifted since the Not Ready for Prime Time days. Gilda Radner wouldn't have made the cut today, either, and she was one of the most creative and hilarious performers they've ever had. And let's not even get started on what some of the men have looked like.

I don't think it's a lack of drugs that's SNL's problem. It's fearfulness, corporate management, lack of imagination and lack of smarts. The cast, Kristen Wiig aside, has nothing going for it. Seth Myers is grinding it into mush with his juvenile, obvious writing - there are 7th grade lunch tables funnier than that show is right now.

Gilda Radner wouldn't have made the cut today, either,

Belushi or Akroyd, too, (I have trouble convincing younger people that Dan Akroyd was, once upon a time, a comic genius).

there are 7th grade lunch tables funnier than that show is right now.

Hahaha. I think I sat at some of those tables.

mullacc: I hate everything that Maureen Dowd writes, so I'm not sure it's a hateful mood as much as it is a natural reaction to Maureen Dowd. She writes in what some people find a very offputting style and I think she always chooses the most obnoxious and petty details to focus on in her writing.

Tina Fey is a goddess, a goddess in granny glasses, which is good for me.

Which is why, Fey aside, the show is less funny than in the Belushi days

I don't buy that at all. The fault of SNL's perceived inadequacy these days is not that the cast members aren't on drugs, it's that Lorne Michaels has become something of an epic hack. He has the final say on all the sketches and he tends to go for the easier, safe sketches, or the "franchise sketch" (Celebrity Jeopardy for example) where the originial is funny, the second can be funny, but then they run it into the ground.

KoP: it was a joke, I know that drugs didn't make Belushi funny, Belushi made Belushi funny. It was more making fun of the yuppie Emergen-C atmosphere (which may actually be breeding the unfunniness).

she used to be a fat chick

The thing is, the article specifically states that she is 5'4" and a half and that her weight topped out before she hit 150. That just barely qualifies as overweight.

I didn't think this was a very favorable profile of her, frankly. She came across as very controlling and prudish. Seemed like there were a lot of backhanded compliments.

And I don't know, I think jon kind of has a point. It may not have been the drugs themselves, but the loosey goosey, experimental atmosphere of the early days really produced a different kind of comedy. SNL is very much a corporate entity now. People are popping vitamins and writing "Omletteville" sketches for Justin Timberlake instead of doing lines and writing lines like "Dead Honky" for Richard Pryor.

SNL is very much a corporate entity now.

It was a corporate entity then, too, it was on NBC for crying out loud. But at least back then, the corporate types were perceptive enough to realize that they didn't have a clue about comedy and to stand back and let the funny people do their thing. Now every executive is a frustrated artist who has a team of scientists who have numbercrunched the laugh factor or something.

It was a corporate entity then, too
Not so much, really. It was a quirky experiment that they put on in the middle of the night when no one watched TV anyway. Nobody cared a thing about it until it proved profitable. Now there are movie spin-offs and merchandising to think of. Totally different head.

Nah, it's just that back then the suits were smart enough not to fuck with a good thing.

SNL is in its 32nd season. How many things are good for 30+ years? Not very many. If anything's fucked up, it's the viewers' expectations.

SNL is in its 32nd season. How many things are good for 30+ years? Not very many. If anything's fucked up, it's the viewers' expectations.

I have watched this show, off and on, from the beginning. For me, a one-out-of-three "funny" ratio always meant an outstanding show. Even at it's best, most skits are klunkers, regardless of the era.

LT and I spent a couple months last year watching the first three seasons. Not only was the show very different in format (a long longer due to fewer commercials, more than one musical guest, far weirder) it was quite a bit funnier than today's show. Apples to oranges. And yes, jrossi's right that at first, it really wasn't something NBC planned as a profit center. The conventional wisdom was that there would be no audience on Saturday night - people would either be in bed, or out somewhere. Other stations were broadcasting test patterns. They let the show air on a flyer - it wasn't directed by the network - and it happened to take off, so they happened to build it as a franchise.

It's had its good years and bad years. It was hilarious when new and pretty consistently funny 'til the early 80s; then it had another peak somewhere in 1988 - 1992, when Phil Hartman was on, and Tina Fey's era was pretty good, though Update has been better than the rest of the show for years.

People are popping vitamins and writing "Omletteville" sketches for Justin Timberlake

I love the Omletteville sketch - in fact, I love everything Justin Timberlake does when he hosts. I'm the problem :-(

Oh I didn't say it wasn't funny, TPS. Just that it was different. I think JT is a great host.

I like him for his recent Michael McDonald impression alone.

The clip of him hosting SNL in two minutes just kills me.

I remember reading something someone said about Maureen Dowd, or maybe something she said about herself, that basically stated that 99% of everything she writes is inspired/tainted by her insecurity. That's the impression I got from this article: Tina Fey is much cooler, smarter, hipper, popular, and right-on than Maureen Dowd will ever be. It made her do the mean girl thing -- that one where someone says "Ooh, I really like that dress you're wearing," and then they mentally add "because it makes you look like you're dressed in a Hefty bag."

It's all very 10th grade.

Maureen Dowd has mastered the rhetoric of derision, but any other talent is not apparent.

I really don't know much about Tina Fey, but that article seems pretty mean.

Not a great article, but somewhat redeemed by some good one-liners by Ms. Fey. My favorite: “PBS pretty” — pretty for a smart writer.

Yeah, MoDo is the epitome of the damner by faint effusive praise. Especially when writing about other women.

SNL has always sucked ass with the occasional moment of inspiration. On the first show after 9/11, Lorne Michaels asked Giuliani if it was ok if they could be funny now. Giuliani replied, "Why start now?" That SNL misses far more often than not has been a running joke since the beginning.

Oh, man, TPS. I don't even know who that guy is but that was hilarious.

MoDo - sounds Tolkienish. And somehow apropos.

I'm thinking Fey knew what she was getting into with MoDo and decided not to give her anything to work with. Smart move.

You know what show I miss? "In Living Color". MAD TV was good for a while, too.

Wow. Now I really wish I didn't know about Tina's scar. That's wildly disturbing.

Here's my secret wish. I want my daughters to be like Tina Fey and Gilda Radner. I want them to be funny and secure with themselves.

I have framed pictures of Tina and Gilda and Molly Shannon and Rachel Dratch and Maya Rudolph that I'm putting up in their room. They already love Amy Poehler, due to her voice work on "The Mighty Bee." I love smart, funny girls.

In fact, if you've ever seen "The Mighty Bee", that's what I want my girls to be like (BEE like!).

That was a depressing, left-a-bad-taste-in-my-mouth article. Bleh.