SNL, Dave Chappelle, and the TikTok of It All

The headline coming out of this week’s Saturday Night Live was Dave Chappelle, as it always has been when he’s hosted. But with so much ink being spilled over Chappelle’s nearly 17 minute monologue—the longest in show history—it’s overshadowed one of the show’s biggest whiffs in recent memory.

That whiff being SNL turning a blind eye to the huge news that TikTok had shut itself down just an hour before airtime. (Although the app turned itself back on ten hours later, as of 11:30pm ET Saturday night, the internet was ablaze with news of the shutdown.)

While it’s obviously unrealistic to expect the show to have turned on a dime and put on a brand new cold open addressing the shutdown in near-real time, the app’s impending ban had already been written into the sketch, which could have at least been changed from future-tense to present-tense.

Instead, in-the-know viewers of a show whose hallmark, after all, is that it’s live were left feeling like we were watching something from a (slightly) earlier time.

Discussing the whiff on our live after show with the Saturday Night Network last night, Bill Kenney made the point that SNL could have made quite the splash if it had added even just a few lines addressing the shutdown to its cold open. 

TikTok came up again later in the show when Michael Longfellow made a long-overdue return to the “Weekend Update” desk with a bit that saw him pleading for the app to not be banned. While Michael Che’s introduction acknowledged that the app had shut itself down, Longfellow’s otherwise strong piece did not, again speaking of the app’s shutdown in the future tense rather than the present.

Yes, it’s easy to play armchair quarterback, and by all accounts the hours leading up a live SNL broadcast are already a frenzy, with more moving pieces than most of us can probably conceive.

But while the news was late-breaking, it also wasn’t entirely unexpected.

Although both the Biden and Trump administrations had both suggested they wouldn’t enforce it, the ban was always set to take effect at midnight as the show was airing. That the show—which has often soared highest when it taps into zeitgeist—didn’t have some sort of contingency plan in place is a miss.

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