“Saturday Night Live,” Hollywood Comedy, and American Culture: From Chevy Chase to Tina Fey
2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 2; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/studamerhumor.2.1.0119
ISSN2333-9934
Autores ResumoThe star-studded three-and-one-half-hour special that commemorated Saturday Night Live's 40th anniversary February 2015 was, if anything, a reminder of the show's enormous legacy for American pop culture. Even if few are willing to defend the late night sketch comedy's current quality, SNL continues to be a clearinghouse for the comedy world's heavy-hitters across media platforms. Yet most scholarship has isolated it as a TV show. Jim Whalley's 2010 book “Saturday Night Live,” Hollywood Comedy, and American Culture: From Chevy Chase to Tina Fey corrects this oversight by taking a long view of SNL from its 1975 inception through the late 1990s, alongside the film comedies starring its more popular performers. This extensively researched analysis identifies and examines the narrative and performative elements that followed SNL's marquee names as they moved from small to silver screens. Whalley assesses the production logic of these elements according to the relative success or failures of the films in terms of how they would have resonated with the experiences and values of popular audiences at the time of their release. SNL and its Hollywood graduates emerge through Whalley's precise and lucid prose as a key force for generational change in American film and TV comedy.To track this generational change, Whalley conceptualizes the audience of American culture as comprised of shifting age cohorts. Norman Ryder defines a cohort as “the aggregate of individuals (within some population definition) who experienced the same event within the same time interval” (qtd. in Whalley 7). The cohort that begins and structures Whalley's history is the baby boom generation—who comprised both SNL's original in-house troupe, the “Not Ready For Primetime Players,” and the show's first audience. Students of TV history know that by the late 1960s, networks had narrowed their crosshairs on educated, urban 18–35 year olds but struggled to deliver their eyes and ears to advertisers. Part of SNL's strategy was to define itself against the televisual landscape and the older cohort associated with it while stressing inclusivity within its own cohort ranks, leading to a self-conscious, largely apolitical divisive comedy that would become definitive of the show, and subsequently, the films.The first few seasons of SNL are the subject of the first chapter; and National Lampoon's Animal House (Landis, 1978), the first and most influential film to emerge from the same constellation of improv and print humor as SNL, comprises the second. The third chapter chronicles the pursuit of another hit starring SNL and Lampoon players, which was found in Ghostbusters (Reitman, 1984); the fourth continues into the diminishing returns of Hollywood ventures up through the 1987 sequel. The fifth chapter covers the same chronological ground as the third and fourth, focusing back on SNL, and on Eddie Murphy and Billy Crystal, whose careers on SNL and in film were exceptions to the slumps the show fell into over the same period. The difficulties are framed as growing pains: the baby boomers were growing older, spending less, watching less TV and fewer films, and leaving behind the iconoclastic hedonism so central to the appeal of the “Not Ready for Primetime Players.” The sixth and seventh chapters are about the tectonic shifts in the early '90s that targeted a younger cohort, with the seventh focusing on Adam Sandler's phenomenal success in particular.A few performers center the analysis, surrounded by supporting players. Sandler, Bill Murray, and Chevy Chase are given the most attention, in addition to Murphy, Crystal, Dan Aykroyd, Mike Myers, and Chris Farley. Women are mostly woefully absent, reflecting their historical marginalization on the show; despite her mention in the book's title, Tina Fey only appears in the final two pages of the conclusion. For the comedians he does discuss, Whalley conceptualizes their performances using Steve Seidman's influential study Comedian Comedy (1981). Comedian comedy, according to Seidman, is a Hollywood subgenre structured by an established comedian's performance in the lead role, which combines elements unique to the fictional character with the comedian's extrafictional persona—that is, a consistent role played across separate performances. Most of the films discussed in Whalley's book are comedian comedies. When not explicit spinoffs of characters debuted on SNL, such as The Blues Brothers (Landis, 1980) or Wayne's World (Spheeris 1992), the films carry personas finessed on the small screen into similar feature length versions. The wisecracking, street-smart, lone black man in a white world Murphy plays in 48 Hours (Hill, 1982) and Beverly Hills Cop (Brest, 1984), for example, is consonant with his brash but depoliticized portrayal of black masculinity on SNL. The self-reflexivity of SNL carries over, too, in the comedian comedy's tendency toward breaking the fourth wall.Whalley engages with a carefully chosen bibliography of previous scholarship over the course of his study. The book is most productive when it capitalizes on the gaps left open by the needlessly hard divisions that remain in media studies between film and television. The chapter on John Belushi and Animal House, for example, fills in a blind spot of William Paul's classic tome on gross-out comedy and horror, Laughing Screaming (1994), that neglects the genesis of that film's most iconic character, Bluto, in Belushi's SNL persona. The discussion of Adam Sandler is especially exhaustive, as Whalley reaches beyond Sandler's film and TV work to examine his comedy album They're All Gonna Laugh at You! (1993) and Sandler's official website in detail. “Saturday Night Live,” Hollywood Comedy, and American Culture is a bit murkier when navigating the knotty intersections of identity beyond generational cohorts. On the one hand, Whalley introduces some nuance to Ed Guerrero's analysis of Eddie Murphy by noting that his urbane white fans from SNL would have likely echoed the animus toward the working class whites he famously shows in 48 Hours. On the other hand, the account of Sandler's working-class populism is oddly charitable. Especially considering Sandler's well-known off-screen political conservatism, his films' qualified inclusiveness toward ethnic and sexual minorities suggests an ideological ambivalence among Sandler's fans and begs for further elaboration than is provided here.What Whalley's book does provide is an incisive and detailed history of Saturday Night Live from the unique perspective of its impact on Hollywood film production. The contemporary comedy scene is, perhaps more than any other genre, platform agnostic; its talent migrating freely between TV, film, and digital platforms. SNL's movie stars, then, offer an exemplary case study. Whalley's synthesis of box office and video rental data, popular press archival research, and highly intertextual close reading, guided by Seidman's, Ryder's, and Altman's methodologies, is a sterling example of how that research can be done. His use of Seidman's comedian comedy concept, in particular, joins Philip Drake, Frank Krutnik, and Peter Krämer's work to show how relevant the concept remains for contemporary comedy. Whalley's lean, fact-loaded clarity also makes the book that rare thing: a work of scholarship entirely accessible to the general reading public. “Saturday Night Live,” Hollywood Comedy, and American Culture is equally valuable as a historical resource and methodological primer for scholars and students alike, and as a smart, fun read for any fan of American comedy.
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