The comedian who knows they’re not welcome on Saturday Night Live: “I won’t be asked”
At the end of next month, we’ll see the first attempt to recreate Saturday Night Live, or SNL, on UK TV screens, and it’s almost impossible to know whether it’s going to work or not.
Some of it makes sense; the short sketches should be perfect for reposting to social media, in the same way that the US version has had success, and the cast they’ve pulled together reflects that, with several members who have built up a following via Instagram and TikTok.
But there are also some factors that, in my opinion, will be incredibly hard to overcome. Firstly, it’s on Sky, and much as they have millions of subscribers, with the possible exception of A League of their Own, they don’t tend to be able to pull in the numbers for light entertainment in any comparable way to the BBC or ITV.
Then there’s the inevitable backlash in some quarters to anything perceived as ‘woke’. Even a month before its broadcast you can already see the Mail Online drafting an article with a headline dismissing it as being wildly unfunny and too ‘right on’, and it’s going to happen, because the politics of the show are undoubtedly very left-leaning, So they have a lot of work to do, but fingers crossed they manage it because there hasn’t been a UK show like it in a long time.
Of course, it is an institution over the pond, having just celebrated its 50th year, and it remains the first port of call for any band that’s just broken through or a movie star with a new film to promote. But one comedian who won’t be putting in an appearance at Rockefeller Centre is Hannah Gadsby, the Australian stand-up comic who picked up an Emmy for their live special Nanette in 2018.
It proved to be something of a controversial win because the special is full of Gadsby addressing difficult moments in their life to say the least, including when they were sexually assaulted, plus they attempted to almost deconstruct the nature of stand up, refusing to self-deprecate and at some points ending stories without punchlines in order to make the audience uncomfortable and to understand the level of vitriol aimed at LGBTQ people.
Nanette angered some reviewers who felt that the show was too heavily focused on trauma and should have stuck to the more traditional, anecdotal style of stand-up comedy, but in the main, it was a huge hit. A few years ago, Gadsby spoke to someone else who had suffered public abuse in the form of Monica Lewinsky, who identified with many of the themes of their special and asked them if they would be willing to host SNL at some point in the future.
Gadsby replied: “It’s not a real question, because I won’t be asked. They’re not fans of my work. . . Plus, I’m too slow for network television. It’s OK, we’ll cope.”
While they didn’t reference exactly why the people at SNL weren’t fans, it’s believed that could be due to a social media back-and-forth with ‘Weekend Update’ host Michael Che, who said he hadn’t seen Nanette but didn’t find rape stories funny.
Undeterred, Gadsby went on to release three more comedy specials over the next seven years, touring them around the world and picking up two more Emmy awards. They also published a memoir which became a New York Times bestseller, and appeared in season four of the Netflix comedy Sex Education.
