After a screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show1also vintage 1975, FWIWlast night, we watched the Saturday Night Live cold open, with the newly uncancelled Alec Baldwin as Bret Baier. It was… not good. As SNL rolls on into its 50th season, one thing we can safely say about the show after all these years is that it is still on the air. Anything more than that is going out on a limb.

Well, longevity has its place, as Dr. King said. SNL has been up and down and all over the map during its long run. As it happens when I opened the Times this morning I saw the following:

After watching the second episode of the sketch comedy series “Saturday Night,” which was hosted that evening by the singer Paul Simon, John J. O’Connor called the show’s attempts at comedy “dreadfully uneven.”

And indeed, have rewatched all those old episodes relatively recently, I can vouch for the fact that it was never as consistently great as we’d like to believe. But we’ve come to depend on its being there, good bad or indifferent, and if it were to go away, what would take its place?

Back in the present day, I was a bit surprised that they didn’t really do much with That Fucking Guy’s Dementia Dance Party, but then again how do you parody that? It was too late, I guess, for them to make hay out of TFG’s weird rant about Arnold Palmer’s penis… which again, itself seems like satire.

I worry sometimes that some of us may subconsciously be wishing for him to win because if he goes away we’ll miss the comedy. I mean, Dana Carvey has been doing his best to flog Joe Biden Is Old jokes but the jokes themselves are old. Maya Rudolph’s Kamala is charming but not all that funny. In addition to the alcohol business, TFG has been good for the comedy business. But if he gets back into power I don’t think it’s going to be all that funny.

Hitler was funny too, at first. And I know, I promised less Hitler. So I’ll leave it there for now. Peace out.