What It Was Like Seeing Saturday Night Live, Live

Sooo… this isn't something that I usually write about, but I saw Saturday Night Live last Saturday. Seeing the show has always been a dream of mine since I started watching at the age of 12, and it's something that's been incredibly influential in my perception of how comedy works and my future aspirations of becoming a comedy writer.

The first episode of the show I watched was Christina Applegate's 2012 stint as host, and one sketch in particular always stood out to me: "Tech Talk." Taking the form of a show discussing technology, it found several phone critics complaining about the latest Apple product before the host (played by Applegate) brings out three Chinese employees to effectively shame the privileged reviewers for the audacity of their complaints. It's a hilarious and fairly sharp sketch, but it underlined Saturday Night Live's diversity problem rather frustratingly; this is a show that has never had an East Asian castmember, and here were three people effectively performing some variant of yellowface for the sake of the joke.

As an Asian-American person myself (I'm half-Chinese), I've found SNL's struggles with diversity to be particularly frustrating, but when Awkwafina was announced as host— hot off of a fantastic summer in two blockbusters (one being the first movie with an all-Asian cast in 25 years), I knew I had to get out there. This was someone like me (let alone the first host of East Asian descent in 18 years) hosting the show that fostered my love of comedy; I didn't have to look at Aziz Ansari or Kumail Nanjiani as a sort of proxy hero, and that felt good.

The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Ghouls

"Dude, it's so sad! We need to help them get their scare back." "He's right, we'll do anything. Is there a page we can like or a wristband we can wear or something?"

Sorry this post is a bit late, but I've had a busy and exciting weekend which I will be sure to write about! And also college. So if you're not cool about this coming out late, then... sucks to be you, man, I guess you have to find someone else to read. Good luck with that!

Watching "The Ghouls" helped me realize that modern Gumball episodes are at their most successful when they succeed in two regards: one, they have an interesting structure bound around a strong concept, and two, that they're just downright fun (see: "The Founder," "The Vegging," "The Candidate"). Unfortunately, the past season has been filled with a frustratingly disproportionate amount of episodes that only really succeed in one of those regards (usually the former). "The Ghouls," then, is an episode that is fun... but it's difficult to properly evaluate on the level of how it's put together considering the weakness of a lot of every aspect of it otherwise.