When Saturday Night Live premiered in 1975, the country had just watched Nixon resign, Vietnam collapse, and disco rise. The show was a weekly release valve, part sketch comedy, part cultural exorcism. It wasn’t supposed to last—it was literally called “Saturday Night” because NBC needed to plug a hole in the schedule. Five decades later, it has survived by never fully dying. But now, staring down Season 51, SNL isn’t being heckled by critics or competitors—it’s being roasted by its own creator.
According to a Daily Mail report, Lorne Michaels privately complained that parts of his current ensemble are “unfunny.” Which, if true, is an audacious diagnosis from a man whose casting decisions gave us both Eddie Murphy and Jim Breuer. But it’s also an acknowledgment that SNL has hit its existential wall. When the showrunner himself is describing the show as humorless, what’s left for the rest of us to say?
The Summer of Mass Extinction
The bloodletting started quietly—no confetti cannons, just press releases. Heidi Gardner gone after eight seasons. Michael Longfellow, Devon Walker, Emil Wakim—axed before most casual viewers even learned their names. Writers Celeste Yim and Rosebud Baker slipped out the back door too. The cast board in Studio 8H, once overstuffed with faces, now looks like an underfunded yearbook.
This is SNL’s bloodiest offseason in years, and the show hasn’t even rolled cold open yet. Michaels insists he feels “pressure to reinvent,” which is NBC-speak for “the Peacock app needs a new algorithm hook before more subscribers defect to Paramount+ for old Frasier reruns.” But the housecleaning reeks less of reinvention and more of triage: removing body parts just to keep the patient breathing.
Fans, predictably, are livid. On social media, #CancelSNL trends once a month like it’s a recurring sketch. Some argue the departures gutted what little chemistry the ensemble had. Others claim the show is beyond saving. The irony is that for all the fury, SNL remains untouchable, like an ancient monument everyone agrees is ugly but refuses to bulldoze.
The “Funny” Problem
SNL has always had funny people. It has also always had not-so-funny people. That’s the system: cast wide, pray for stars, let the audience sort the wheat from the weekend-update chaff. Some blossom into legends. Others linger as furniture. Lorne Michaels’ complaint that parts of his cast are “unfunny” isn’t a revelation—it’s literally the premise of the show.
The problem isn’t that certain cast members lack punchlines. It’s that the format no longer covers for them. Sketch comedy thrives on surprise, but after 50 years, SNL is the opposite of surprising. We know the cold open will be politics. We know Weekend Update will be a balancing act between “reasonable chuckle” and “scrolling TikTok until Colin Jost is done.” We know a celebrity cameo will walk in mid-sketch to applause louder than any joke. The mechanics are so visible the audience doesn’t need to laugh anymore—they just need to clap like trained seals when the cue light flashes.
Lorne isn’t wrong that the show feels unfunny. But the joke isn’t on the cast. It’s on the format itself.
Kenan Thompson and the Immortality Bit
Of course, not everyone is gone. Some cast members are untouchable. Kenan Thompson, entering what feels like his 142nd year on the show, remains the human glue. His longevity is no longer comedic—it’s mythological. Watching him appear in a sketch now is less about the punchline and more about marveling at his sheer existence. He is SNL’s equivalent of the national debt: always there, never resolved, occasionally joked about, permanently inherited.
Bowen Yang, by contrast, is safe not because of tenure but because of sharpness. He actually feels modern, quick, unpredictable—qualities the rest of the show desperately tries to borrow through viral TikTok edits. Chloe Fineman has all but announced her return, suggesting her celebrity impressions still pull enough clicks to justify another contract.
And James Austin Johnson remains cemented in place thanks to his Trump impression—a performance so accurate and grotesque it saves the show from the indignity of Alec Baldwin returning with spray tan and half-interest. Johnson’s impression is less a parody than a possession, and for now, it is the closest SNL gets to relevance.
The Audience Revolt
Viewers are split between furious and apathetic, which may be the worst combination. Rage at least means you care. Indifference is death. Fans angry at Gardner’s exit threaten to boycott, though most of them will still watch clips on YouTube Sunday morning. Others insist the show has outlived itself, demanding cancellation like a mercy killing. But NBC will never euthanize its most famous cash cow. It still draws headlines, still launches the occasional career, still convinces advertisers that live television matters.
SNL exists in a bizarre cultural limbo. Everyone claims it isn’t funny anymore, yet everyone still reacts to its sketches online. It’s like attending the funeral of a relative you didn’t like—obligatory, begrudging, punctuated by inappropriate laughter.
Reinvention by Nostalgia
Michaels insists reinvention is coming. But what does reinvention look like when the very premise of your show is “do the same thing every week forever”? SNL’s solution has always been nostalgia. Dig up old stars, old sketches, old formulas. Weekend Update hasn’t changed since Gerald Ford. The “live from New York” cold open is so ritualistic it might as well be in Latin.
Reinvention, if it comes, will be cosmetic: shorter sketches, TikTok synergy, a guest host younger than the franchise itself. True reinvention would mean burning the format down and asking if sketch comedy still matters in a world where TikTokers write, film, edit, and post a sketch in less time than it takes Lorne to pick up a phone call.
But SNL will not risk obliteration. It will do what it has always done: fire a few people, keep a few favorites, book a politician for the cold open, and claim “freshness.” Reinvention by subtraction. Comedy by inertia.
The Fifty-Year Curse
Half a century is not a blessing—it’s a curse. SNL has lasted so long it no longer has to justify its existence. Its relevance is assumed by tenure. Its sketches don’t need to land—they just need to happen. The mere fact that it’s still here is treated as accomplishment enough.
But the longer a joke drags on, the harder it is to laugh. Saturday Night Live has become the longest-running bit in television history: the sketch where the audience keeps waiting for the twist, only to realize the twist already happened decades ago, and we missed it.
The Satire of Survival
The irony of SNL is that it survives because people declare it dead. Every obituary fuels another season. Every angry tweet is free marketing. Every fan screaming “Cancel it!” ensures NBC never will.
It is America’s comedy fossil: preserved in amber, occasionally mistaken for something alive. The cast changes, the jokes repeat, the news cycle provides endless targets, and through it all, Lorne sits in the shadows, a cultural crypt keeper, deciding who stays, who goes, and who is funny enough to survive the next cull.
The Haunting Observation
Saturday Night Live will premiere Season 51 on October 4. There will be a cold open about politics. There will be sketches that drag too long. There will be a Weekend Update that feels like homework. Fans will complain online. Clips will circulate Sunday morning. And then the process will repeat until the season finale, when another batch of exits is announced and the cycle begins again.
SNL isn’t funny anymore. But maybe that’s the point. The joke has shifted. The real comedy is structural: a half-century institution that can’t figure out whether it’s alive, dead, or just embalmed in ratings points. Lorne Michaels calling his own cast “unfunny” isn’t revelation—it’s confession. The punchline landed years ago, and we’re still clapping out of habit.
And perhaps that is the darkest truth about Saturday Night Live at 50. The show doesn’t need to be funny anymore. It only needs to exist. Because in America, longevity is the only real applause.