Long Live the Delightfully Dumb Comedy
In the 1990s, a new comedy scourge descended upon cinemas: movies based on Saturday Night Live sketches. The trend was decried as the latest example of Hollywood running out of original ideas, and the films, starting with Wayne’s World in 1992, hewed closely to SNL’s formula of recurring characters and loud catchphrases. Each project would take a sketch people recognized, stretch it to something resembling feature length, and pad the premise as much as possible with special guest stars, parody songs, or action sequences.
None of the follow-ups succeeded on the level of —its 1993 sequel, , made less than half of what its predecessor did, and films such as and were notorious bombs that grossed less than $1 million atfrom 1988 to 1991, devoted a few episodes of his podcast to pseudo-reviving one such project: —“a title you probably couldn’t use today,” he concedes.
