Next to Bill Hader, Seth Meyers is my favorite actor on Saturday Night Live. The Illinois-born Meyers seems witty, liberal enough not to make me angry, and just seems like a guy who has more than a few interesting views on politics and culture. That he is currently the head writer for SNL is intriguing to me, as about half the current skits are boring and cliché while others are surprisingly poignant. I could never watch the current offerings of the show without a DVR. The corporate capitalist commercials in between the show are just as nauseating as with every other television program, and the payoff of the skits has too low of a laugh factor to justify watching the show in real time. Meyers performed an exact hour of comedy at a sold out Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s Morris University Center, and I must have laughed 30 or 40 times. While 37, Meyers did his best to relate to college students, who comprised the majority of the audience, by offering up joke after joke about college life, from sex on futons, smoking dope, sexting, surfing for porn, and dating. While most of the punch lines were funny, I couldn’t help but think I was already too old for his humor a couple of decades ago. I still laughed though.
Disappointingly, he devoted only about a third of his performance to political matters. But that small percentage of time was quite humorous and witty. My favorite joke was that Romney must have been thinking to himself during the Republican primary debates “If I just keep my mouth shut people will see that I am the least crazy of all these mothef***ers.” Awesome stuff. Meyers also made a number of clever jokes about his performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner last year, including a hilarious retelling of how he had previously acted like a fool twice with Obama, once in worrying about whether the President could take off a mask of himself for a SNL skit they were rehearsing and the other about inadvertently pushing his girlfriend’s outstretched hand away when Obama tried to shake her hand. The delivery was great, and the timing very well executed.
Of course, my preference would have been for him to tackle politics the entire hour and to, as he does so well on SNL, make fun of Republican beliefs and conservativism. These are things I would like everyone to do all day long, but obviously I am not in charge of much of anything.
