We Did Stop

October 10, 2013 • 3:02 pm

Here’s a pretty funny spoof of the government shut-down based on Miley Cyrus’s abysmal song, “We Can’t Stop“.  It’s bit risqué, but not R-rated. It’s funnier if you can bear to watch the original video.

Cyrus hosted Saturday Night Live two weeks ago, presumably where this video appeared.

I have to say that. although I used to be glued to the tube every Saturday night, I no longer watch SNL. I started seeing it during the glory days of The Not Ready for Prime Time Players:  Radner, Curtin, Belushi, Akroyd, Chase, and Newman, and for decades it’s never come close to that original cast. Samurai deli-man, Emily Litella, the Blues Brothers, Weekend Update (“Jane, you ignorant slut!”), Roseanne Roseanneadanna: who can forget those? Gilda Radner and John Belushi were comic geniuses.

Gilda was at her best playing a little girl. I can’t find any clips of her classic performances, but here’s a compilation in which the sound’s been replaced with some cheesy music:

And the samurai sketches:

And then there were the killer bees, the Coneheads Consuming Mass Quantities.  . . . and so on. Maybe I’m just a curmudgeon, but I think that SNL, like rock and roll, has run its course.

h/t: John W.

68 thoughts on “We Did Stop”

        1. Weird – that link worked for me. Shhhhh don’t tell on me then. The CRTC will come shut me down 🙂

          1. Doesn’t work on Vancouver Island but I’ll be south of the border later today and will try it. I won’t tell on you, Diane:-)

  2. I don’t watch anymore, either. But that Miley Cyrus bit does capture the GOP insanity pretty well.

  3. …and for decades it’s never come close to that original cast.

    Oh, I don’t think that’s true. They’ve had some very funny people over the years. I’d set Will Ferrell over any of the original cast. They’ve hit some troughs, one of which seems to be now, but SNL remains a forum for outstanding comic actors.

    A little while ago, somebody here linked to the Chris Farley interview of Paul McCartney. It doesn’t get much more entertaining than that.

    2. SNL has always, even with the original cast, been 30 minutes of good material and an hour of filler.

      1. Have to mostly agree. This is yet another case of our human selective memory at work; all the Belushi and Radner skits people remember and cite are excellent not because a higher percent of their skits were excellent, but because we tend to selectvely remember the excellent ones. I bet if JAC sat down and watched any of the old 90 minute programs, he’d see that you’re right about an hour of it being relatively poor.

        Having said that, its certainly true that some comedians produced and performed better SNL material than others. I’d agree with JAC that Belushi and Radner were two. Murphy, Martin, Farley, Farrel…lots of them probably had more funny skits and moments than other SNL cast members.

  5. When you get to be my age, (I’m older than Jerry), you realize everything was better in the old days. Especially me.

  6. For some reason this Miley character is growing on me.

    She seems to have a way of pushing a few buttons and it actually looks like she’s having fun while doing it.

    Good on her.

      1. What do you mean “her” music? You mean music other people wrote for her that she is singing using autotune?

        2. Trophy wrote:

          What do you mean “her” music?

          You really don’t know what I mean by her music? I mean music she released, under her name, sung by her. It’s not a difficult concept.

  8. I liked the cast with Radner, Belushi, et al. but I also liked the cast with Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, Denis Miller etc. I think, like music, you tend to stick with whoever you grew up with.

    I remember we’d watch SNL then go out! Now I can’t even stay up long enough to watch SNL!

  11. Awhile back I went looking for some Franken & Davis clips on the Internet and could find nothing at all. I wonder if Sen. Franken is keeping them out of circulation on purpose. They used to crack me up.

    But the best SNL ever was Ed Grimley.

    1. Stuart Smalley was great – I bought his books as well as the Jack Handey Deep Thoughts ones.

      1. Yes, Ed Grimley is awesome. We used to immitate him in German class too….ich muss sagen!

  12. I was in high-school during the SNL glory years of the late 1970’s. Getting together at a friends house to watch SNL is one of my favorite memories. If you haven’t seen it watch the “Bass-O-Matic” sketch:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BQFv83QJ2Y

    It’s a spoof of a bunch of actual ads for real products whose names often ended in “matic” (e.g., Vegematic)

    1. Some of my favorites are Bass-O-Matic, Dan Aykroyd as Julia Child, Emily Litella “Making Puerto Rico a steak” and of course Eddie Murphy as Gumby.

      1. I also liked “I’m a handsome black man” which they expanded at one point to handsome . I thought it was so hilarious!

    1. My brother calls his wife of thirty years his spousal unit … and back when he had hair (which was pretty much essential), his “Ed Grimley” impression was locally famous.

  14. Oh my. I still can see Dan Akroyd doing the cooking skit as Julia Child… “Save the liver!”

  15. Gilda Radner was probably my all time favorite. Remember, “Let’s Talk Dirty to the Animals?”

    The animals,
    The animals,
    Let’s talk dirty to the animals!
    F–k you, Mr. Bunny!
    Eat S–t, Mr. Bear…
    If they don’t love it,
    They can shove it,
    Frankly I don’t care!

    (Better when sung… by her…)

    1. Ha ha – Yes, here’s an example

      Gilda was great and as a female, she was someone I admired because there weren’t very many female comedians. It wasn’t cool to be funny and female.

  16. The original cast was great, but I think the late 80’s and early 90’s cast was the best. Dana Carvey, Kevin Nealon, Dennis Miller, Victoria Jackson, Jan Hooks, and the two funniest cast members ever, IMO: Chris Farley and Phil Hartman.

    I guess I’m the only person who never found Belushi the least bit funny. Or CHevy Chase, for that matter.

    1. If you’ve never seen Phil Hartman’s SNL audition, it is a masterpiece of smart humor. He was a comic genius.

      2. That was genius. His German impressionist & his modernized Hamlet were great! I really miss Phil Hartman!

      3. Phil Hartman never did much for me. To me all he ever did was some version of “Cheesy Guy,” (cheesy middle aged Dad, cheesy narrator, cheesy salesman etc). He never really, to me, altered per role like many of the other excellent cast members.

        Vaal

  17. I have been a fan of SNL since Day 1, and I too remember all the old gags and comedians. I too miss those days, but I am not quite ready to pitch the show. I still see some merit in it, and if for no other reason, it spoofs the kind of stupidity we all cringe over in government and the media. If they don’t spoof it, who else can? Jon Stewart and Colbert bring a lot of good stuff, but I will remain an SNL fan.

  18. We cannot forget the Land Shark. The wonderful Monterey Aquarium even has/had a loop of the Land Shark running next to the HUGE real shark tanks..

    Loved Gilda’s Presisential erections and Soviet jewelry…never mind:-)

  20. I grew up in SNL’s heyday, too, Jerry and enjoyed the show every much; George Carlin’s comedy routine in SNL’s debut episode was hilarious. But there were clunker sketches, too, as I recall. However, my sister and I always waited with great anticipation for SCTV which always followed SNL on Chicago’s NBC affiliate WMAQ.

  22. I am the Mighty Favog. What’s ya problem?

    My sibs were lucky enough to see many originals pre SNL at Second City and we listen to Belushi, BD Murray etc on Nat Lamp Radio

    The scene in Caddyshack where Bill Murray eats the “floating vandalism” from the pool originally occurred at Kefauver High in ’64

  24. This reminds me of a button I saw for sale at a general store last weekend which read “it’s mot that I’m old. Your music really does suck.”

    I also enjoyed the Dana Carvey, Mike Meyers, Phil Hartman era. Hartman’s Bill Clinton ans Myrer’s Wayne’s World sketches were a delight.

  26. I also grew up, and loved, watching the original cast SNL. After SNL we’d switch over to Night Flight for a Rock N Roll fix. Man, those were the days.

  27. It’s fascinating the Belushi was always thought of as the chubby slob guy, but in the original SNL he was pretty much normally
    built, even “slender” by today’s standards of obesity.

    Vaal

  28. True, SNL slid down hill for a while but they are on the upswing now. The Barry Black (Senate Chaplain) sketch on Weekend Update was excellent. And I asked at the Smoke Shop last week if they had any e-meth for sale. Great Halloween costume prop if you want to go as Jesse. His appearance on SNL was a real hit (pun)

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