This has always been my favorite too, with Armed and Dangerous being a close second.

"I LOVE the Heimlich Maneuver! It's one of my favorite maneuvers!"

The more I learn about SNL and read stories from its cast, the more I am convinced that SNL is the true death of comedy that poisoned our 20th century culture. It seems to be unanimously the worst thing to happen to every comedian that graces the show.

I'm on board with that.
But I will say "even a broken clock" etc.

I got that impression just by watching it when I was older than 12.

I've said this before: For forty years, SNL has been the comedy equivalent of watching baseball. There are good seasons and bad seasons, good lineups and bad lineups. Even in the best season, you'll see more strikeouts than home runs, more lulls than action, more also-rans than superstars. Also: most of the players are full of illegal drugs.

It's always been like that, even back during the early years that everybody who is old enough (I'm right on the line) remembers as being much better than they actually were. If you're someone whose life is dull and possibly lonely enough that you're at home watching TV on a Saturday Night, you know what to expect. Even at it's worst, SNL can be a comforting presence. You root for the team, and you love the sense of history and tradition it provides.

And every now and then, someone hits a home run, and that can still be pretty thrilling.

I remember baleen's was working on something SNL related and I think he was going to interview our boy Charles Rocket but as you said he checked out with a knife to the jugular. Poor bastard.

Salon, a website I find the very headlines of unreadable, did a long series of interviews with ex-SNL heavyweights who managed to go on and have careers. I was hooked on them immediately, as they were all magnificent horror stories about being caught between the financial difficulty of surviving in New York with the near career suicide of being on SNL, especially when the Worst Comedian Possible is mentioned (ye dare not speaketh its name lest ye incur the wrath of Pixels 2).