*Editor’s note: Jumped The Snark has been and will be busy for the immediate future on another somewhat related but also not really project, and thus updates may be few and far between for the next two months. We’re going to do our best to keep up regular posts, but they may be of the very brief variety. That is all.
Jimmy Fallon. Parks & Recreation. Rashida Jones. Fred Armisen. Weekend Update. A.D. Miles. Dee Snider. Last night was a convergence of all of those things on Late Night.
Fallon proves once again that his show is the place to turn for pitch-perfect parodies (see: “Real Housewives of Late Night,” “Late“), and this time the team turns its scalpels towards the unfortunate phenomenon that is Glee. And not only does their version, “6-Bee,” capture the exact tone and rhythm (and hokeyness) of the show, it pits the Late Night glee club against the Parks & Rec squad, treating us to Amy Poehler, Chris Pratt, Jerry and Jumped the Snark long time favorite Rashida Jones (but wherefore art thou, Asiz Ansari?), as well as an appearance from another longtime favorite, Fred Armisen. And it all culminates in a truly impressive take on Twister Sister’s classic anthem of rebellion “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”
Vodpod videos no longer available.(You may have figured out that the one thing I hate, as mentioned in the title, is Glee (the show, and by extension its cultural resonance). A long time ago I intended to write a long blog post explaining why its characters are just caricatures, the tone muddled, the perspective confused, and that while I’m happy for Jane Lynch, her role in Party Down trumps her one-note performance as Sue Sylvester. And this thoroughly enjoying Late Night interpretation shows that without the dramatic musical sequences Glee would just be a cut-rate Degrassi. There, I finally said it).
And if that all wasn’t enough, later in the show we were treated to a charades battle of the former “Weekend Update” co-anchors, with Fallon and guest Tina Fey taking on Poehler (clearly pregnant by the way) and her old partner and current solo host Seth Meyers.
Vodpod videos no longer available.And to top it off, arch-nemesis and top search term Justin Bieber!
Vodpod videos no longer available.Keep up the good work, Jamie!
It was an up and down decade for Saturday Night Live, but then again it’s been an up and down 34 years for Saturday Night Live. The show started gangbusters in 2000, taking advantage of the 2000 election and perhaps becoming more relevant than it had at any point during the previous decade (media and communication majors and political scientists will be analyzing SNL‘s Gore-Bush debates for years to come, studying how the show interpreted the real events and how the sketches then in turn affected the election). Then the show kind of treaded water until the 2004 election when it once again made the best of the political fodder, although with the relatively benign John Kerry as a central character the political satire was not as entertaining or as incisive as 2000. But With a mostly new cast then the beginning of the decade the show returned to prominence in 2008, most notably mining the comedy goldmine that was the renegade Sarah Palin. However, although SNL’s strongest seasons were during the election years, the best sketches were scattered throughout the aughts, with a fair share of political material, but also crazy characters, inventive monologues, traditional bits and the now ubiquitous Digital Shorts. Here, in a particular but not necessarily meaningful order is a very subjective list of the top ten (and then some) Saturday Night Live sketches of the decade that was.*
Despite some recent 
Jumped The Snark 