By Rob Sheffield. Roseanne was always a divisive gal β for some fans, she was an early example of an SNL character who got recycled way too many times. We are all Jane Curtin now. The predictable move would have been to make Father Guido the butt of the joke, as a lampoon of religious squares.
Herb is prone to temper tantrums, memory lapses, bigotry and smacking people in the face with his microphone. And sometimes dying. Do you think Lucille Ball is a pinko? Hip-hop humor was new to SNL , to say the least, even in the to-one time slot. Jan Hooks and Nora Dunn as a lounge-singer sister act, weaving show tunes and cheesy pop standards into their own private language.
The comic brilliance is all in their expert timing. An editor! The last time anybody stole that much from black people, everybody still dressed like me. Dan Aykroyd and Laraine Newman as a pair of cosmic hippie lovers β Sunshine was sometimes known as Sunset, for no special reason. As the two youngest players in the cast, Aykroyd and Newman knew the culture they were satirizing. The perfect example of a one-joke character who appears the exact right number of times once with the exact right number of jokes one.
And I was at the tennis camp, looking for a fourth for mixed doubles. Mmmm β good times. They shared their finest moment with Alec Baldwin, their mouths watering at the sight of his Schweddy Balls. But nowadays, we know that Isabel is suffering from an imbalance of bodily humors β perhaps caused by a toad or a small dwarf living in her stomach. Why do they talk that way? And his family was like, yes it is β now get out of the coffin.
The perfect combo of Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph. Betty and Jodi are two jaded moms from the Bronx, hosting a talk show even though they do not have time for this. Their kids, their lazy husbands, the way the city smells today? This whole world is bananas! Go have Angelina Jolie cook it. Kristen Wiig is the woman of a thousand faces, but her most enduringly brilliant character is Mindy, a marvelously emphathetic portrait of an over-the-hill Broadway diva.
