Re: Saturday Night Live - Season 34
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Originally Posted by Chris Lockwood
I haven't heard any complaints along those lines, probably because Armisen is not making fun of people's race when he plays Paterson or Obama, and because with the makeup, he looked quite a bit like the real men. He did a better job than Kenan Thompson would have done (due to Kenan's voice and looks- hard to picture him as Obama).
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I agree with your points, but the complaints are out there. I think the minstrel show archetype is so close to the surface that anyone -- even a Hispanic-Asian man doing a dead-on impression -- is going to offend certain black voices. Thompson definitely wouldn't have fit either role.
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| To me it's the same as Hammond playing Jesse Jackson or Billy Crystal as Sammy Davis, Jr. (Or for that matter, anyone on SNL who plays a real-lfe person of the opposite sex.) They're impressions, not attacks on anyone's ethnicity. |
Of course, both Hammond and Crystal took the same low-level heat for those portrayals as Armisen is now. Part of it's because SNL always seems to bring a white, urban perspective to a lot of its humor. Back in the 1990s, "In Living Color" and even "Mad TV" since could get away with a lot more because they didn't operate from that voice.
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| I didn't think the Paterson skit was meant to be a slap at the blind, more just a silly takeoff on him. |
Comedy is based on caricature. Armisen exaggerated the clumsiness caused by Paterson's blindness just like he exaggerated the voice and the governor's sense of humor. Because Paterson is a pretty funny guy in his own right, this gave them free rein for one of the funnier political parodies in recent years.
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Originally Posted by Jerome Grate
Youtube didn't think it was funny, they've completely blocked the showing of the skit.
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More likely, NBC Universal had the videos pulled so that they could get ad revenue from having their own stream embedded everywhere. The race controversy and the blind controversy mean interest has to be through the roof. Plus the fact that it's just plain funnier than most of what we've gotten from recent SNL (though this year has been better than most.)
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Originally Posted by Jerome Grate
According to the videos on youtube, one said youtube blocked because it was offensive, and the other videos wouldn't play and websites came up, I guess where you can go and see it.
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Where do the videos on YouTube get their information.
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