saturday night live, institutionalized laughter and garbage can comedy

If you are honest with yourself, you have to admit that the typical moment in an SNL broadcast is lame. Audience silence, sketches with no pacing or point, comedians way out of their league. At the same time, SNL keeps churning out really memorable comedy, from the icky, to the sublime, to the sorely needed. What explains this bizarre skew distribution of output? How can a show that is so predictably lame have such a long tail?

My explanation is two fold: SNL relies on institutionalized audiences and produces occasional gems with a garbage can model of comedy production. On the first point, SNL is a classic institutionalized organization. It’s continued survival is not accounted for by its output. Just check out fan discussions. Even die hards will admit there have been stretches of *years* where the show’s quality is atrocious. The show is peppered with a ream of horrible actors and incompetent guest hosts. And don’t get me started on all the horrific SNL movie spin-offs such as It’s Pat, The Ladies Man, and Coneheads. The show is a comedy Chernobyl.

The forces of capitalism should’ve put this puppy to sleep ages ago, but the show retains non-laughing audiences who boost ratings. I guess the show’s occasional high points and path breaking past are enough to keep executives from axing the show. People must feel an institutionalized desire to watch the show. It’s just what you do on the weekend and you just tolerate it and pretend it’s all ok.

This brings me to my second point. The show’s halo effect helps it last long enough so they can gather the people needed for it’s garbage can style production system. In organization studies, we call an organization a “garbage can” if stuff gets done when streams of people and events randomly come together. SNL is well known for hiring a bunch of people and just having them write a bunch of sketches. Unlike most television, the actors, the writers, and the producers are often the same people. So everybody is rushing and just writing about a whole crazy range of things. They throw themselves at the political issue of the week, or various pop culture trends, or whatever. And if you throw enough comedians at enough issues with 90 minutes of time to fill, you will surely generate the occasional zinger, even though make a lot of junk.

This makes me glad that I have the Internet. In the 1980s and 1990s, I would actually have to watch an entire show hoping to find that precious sketch that worked. Too many times, I’d sit around at 1am , all disappointed and ask – that’s it? But now I can let other people distill the weekly 1.5 hour SNL broadcast into what it truly deserves to be: a five minute youtube clip.