Dear Seth Meyers: Your ‘Weekend Update’ on ‘SNL’ needs help

"So, a guy walks into a bar..." (Image by Getty Images via Daylife)

Dear Seth Meyers,

I won’t mince words… as not only the host and (presumably) lead writer of the famous “Weekend Update” segments on “Saturday Night Live,” but also as head writer for the entire show, I think your position of leadership on the “SNL” staff demands that you hear these kinds of things:

“Weekend Update” needs help. You’re slowly driving it into the ground.

It’s hard to say, because you seem like a genuinely funny guy. Your success in television comedy at the tender age of 35 is remarkable, and your life offscreen is downright enviable. You clearly have the talent to find the absurd in our modern world — particularly when it comes to politics.

Indeed, it may seem even stranger for me to speak harshly about your “Weekend Update” segments because — thanks to everything I just delineated above — it’s filled with some truly funny jokes.

But that’s just the thing, Seth: your “Weekend Update” is “jokes.” A string of jokes; a barrage of set-up-punch-line sameness that never changes. The fact that most of your jokes are amusing may disguise the fact that you’re just telling the same jokes every week — or, to be more specific: the same kinds of jokes — but it can’t forever. Week to week, the routine doesn’t change; your tempo, your inflection, the volume of your voice, the cadence of the words — the entire structure of your act is as solid and predictable as a suburban office building — it gets the job done, admirably, even… but where’s the finesse? The life? The goal?

Here’s how it generally goes:

1. You take a headline from the week’s news.
2. You then crack a one-liner about that headline.
3. Repeat for seven or so minutes.

I don’t think it’s even the sameness of the structure that gets me as it is the way you feel you have to really sell that one-liner. You oversell it. You club me over the head with it.

You’ll segue from the set up/news story to the punch line by saying something like ”Long story short…” or ”You may also know them/it better as…” or you’ll play off a well-know caricature of the person in the news story… and then you hit that punch line like a borscht belt comedian working the same act for the 15th straight Saturday night for the 15th straight year. You raise your voice a little and then plow through that punch line with rote skill, barely leaving time for the rim-shot that surely seems to be missing from each one-liner as much as someone standing off-camera yelling “bada-bing.” And then it’s off to the next joke, next set-up, next punch line, next week, next month…

It’s practically Henny Youngman-esque.

Have a look for yourself from this week’s “Saturday Night Live.”

If it wasn’t for the mock guest/interviews that sometimes separate your… let’s just call it what it is: your stand-up act… each “Weekend Update” would be exactly the same. The words are different, but the act is the same.

At the rate you’re going, eventually Lorne Michaels could just remove the desk and world map backdrop and have you stand in front of a brick wall with a mic… because what you do is stand-up.

And your stand-up is funny… but it’s not why I tune into “Update” each week.

I don’t want to be one of those people, Seth, who harkens back to some mythical glory days of “Saturday Night Live.” The show has always had its ups and downs, but there were “Update” hosts in the past who seemed to maximize their ups — and whose take on not just the news, but the format of a “news update,” made watching the segment a must-see weekly appointment. Dennis Miller was a funny host — and while his erudite-for-the-sake-of-erudition act may have grated on some nerves, you truly never knew where he was going with his satires week-to-week. Norm MacDonald was a daring anti-comedian, his punch lines less punchy than impressionistic — really abstract deconstructions of jokes that made them funny and awkward at the same time. MacDonald seemed almost gleeful at not telling setup/punchline jokes (which is probably why he was fired, to the eternal regret of this “SNL” viewer.)

Your previous boss, Tina Fey, played it safer, just as you do, but she never oversold the funny the way you do. She eased into jokes, changed her voice and tone, sometimes adopted a slightly different personality to fit the punch line. But you, Seth, you ram each joke at me like a street vendor hawking a going-out-of-business carpet sale: volume on “10,” subtlety on “Off.”

Like I said before, it’s not that you’re not funny. Clearly you’re inventive and talented and, the above notwithstanding, you make me laugh.

But your “Update” is sinking under sameness. It’s like seeing an unknown comedian on a Thursday night. It’s fun, it gets you out of the house and it takes your mind off work for a few hours — but come Friday morning, can you remember more than one joke you heard?

Jokes can be funny — yours often are — but jokes aren’t the legacy of “Update.” At its best, “Update” can satirize not just newsmakers, but the news industry — even the TV industry. Dan Ackroyd and Jane Curtain didn’t just tell one-liners, they satirized Shana Alexander and James Kilpatrick’s “60 Minutes” debates and exposed the emptiness of rote left-right cable news shout-fests years before CNN drilled them into our society.

Please, Seth Meyers — aim higher.

Sincerely,

Matthew Greenberg