There’s no shortage of criticism on “Saturday Night Live,” the longest-running sketch comedy show in American memory. No matter what is being said about the show, the same phrase follows it like a curse:
“Whatever. SNL hasn’t been good since [insert random time period here].” My take includes “since Maya Rudolph left,” but others compare the casts of the ’70s or ’90s to the most recent incarnations.
Now that such iconic white performers as Tina Fey, Kristen Wiig and Jason Sudeikis have left the show, the new cast has the chance to live up to past hype and reform into something better.
They aren’t promising.
Rolling through the glittery credits, all of the faces except returners Jay Pharoah and Kenan Thompson are amazingly pale. Even Iranian-American cast member Nasim Pedrad is on the lighter side of the spectrum.
In the Oct. 5 episode, Pedrad wore brownface to impersonate comedian Aziz Ansari, and the Internet was up in arms about the implications of the practice and how far the mighty SNL had fallen.
The skit, or rather Pedrad’s minute appearance in it, does not poke fun at Ansari’s ethnicity. It only made light of his ridiculous stand-up persona.
Not that this excuses the use of brownface in the show. It’s ridiculous that SNL is so white-leaning that their only non-white female cast member had to be made up to look Indian.
What’s more, a weighty load has been placed on the only black cast members.
When Fred Armisen — white-passing but of German/Japanese/Venezuelan descent — left the show, his President Barack Obama impression was passed along to Pharoah. But what could be done with the darker Michelle Obama character? What about any black female celebrity impression, for that matter?
In an interview with TV Guide, Thompson said the absence of black female cast members is due to the lack of talented black comediennes competing for the job. In another interview, Pharoah disagreed, suggesting actress and comedienne Darmirra Brunson, of Tyler Perry fame, for the cast.
Regardless, this leaves the choice between cross-dressing Thompson or putting a female cast member in blackface for this season’s impression of Michelle Obama. That is, unless a guest host can fill the void.
In the past 10 years, there have been 118 white male SNL hosts and four black female hosts. Two of the four, Janet Jackson in 2003 and Queen Latifah in 2004, served as musical guests as well as hosts. When you include 2003’s Halle Berry, three of the four were light-skinned. Gabourey Sidibe stands alone as the sole dark-skinned female host, appearing in 2010.
Kerry Washington, another light-skinned black actress, is hosting later in the season, and she will no doubt be asked to portray the First Lady. But what about after her?
There’s no one else, except Thompson in drag or a blackfaced woman.
That’s the problem at its rotten center. The bare minimum in representation is not a couple of African American men and one light-skinned Iranian-American woman. The bare minimum includes black women, Asians, Latinos, Hispanics — a variety of skin tones and features. The population is not white with little spots of minorities, no matter what the media may lead us to believe.
The show prides itself on facilitating social commentary through its sketches, but how could that be possible with such a slim slice of said society represented in its ranks? The POTUS and FLOTUS alone, who are some of the easiest skit targets, give this cast enough trouble.
More important than racially charged portrayals is the bottom line: There aren’t performers available to play these characters. Representation isn’t a treat, something you luck out on when you hire one racially ambiguous woman (ahem, Maya Rudolph) and call it a day. In show business, representation is a necessity.
Creator and producer Lorne Michaels had better keep his eyes peeled for non-white talent, or SNL’s currency will wink out of existence.