Has it come to this? Saturday Night Live, America’s long-reigning arbitre de l’élégance1 is being laughed at by the great unwashed for its fat-assed bourgeosity and likely fear of offending “big stars”? That ’tis true ’tis pity, and pity ’tis, ’tis true. Last Saturday SNL ran the “cold opening” shown above, banally riffing on the “Amber shit in Johnny’s bed” kerfuffle emerging from the latest Amber/Johnny lawsuit, which I myself riffed on earlier—Who got f*cked the hardest in the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard defamation suit, the Washington Post, Elon Musk, or the ACLU?—though, I may say, from a considerably more elevated intellectual level.
I was, in fact, quite ignorant of the whole sheets n’ feces aspect of the trial, which, frankly, doesn’t seem to have much relation to Johnny’s actual complaint, that Amber’s implicit maligning of him in her opinion piece for the Washington Post about her experience as a target for vicious online sexual harassment cost him his sixth go-round as Jack Sparrow in the now-beyond-self-parody Pirates of the Caribbean roadshow. But, well, clearly, I’m in the minority in this respect.
And also clearly in the minority in my ignorance of the real substance of the trial, which many are following avidly, and which they accuse SNL of balllessly avoiding. Sample comments posted on YouTube follow:
“This skit will go down in SNL history as one of their biggest missed opportunities.” Luke Martin
“You know this sucked when the actual trial is funnier. Damn they dropped the ball” Clarissa
”There are literally hundreds of TikToks about this trial that are funnier than this cold open.” J.L.M.
I have no idea of what was “really funny” about the trial, or why SNL so clearly pulled in its horns on this one, but, well, the public has spoken. Hang your heads in shame, you overpaid 30 Rock pussies.
1. Or, I guess, arbitre de folie. I may have been a little sleepy when I wrote this one.
