By Stuart F. Andrews

With all the hyperbolic hooplah surrounding the 40th anniversary of Saturday Night Live, it’s no surprise to see a film about the history and impact of the show surface at this year’s Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival in Toronto.

Paying tribute to the radical, anarchic spirit of this iconic program, Live From New York! opens with a dizzying montage of clips set to Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. From here, director Nguyen champions SNL as one of television’s most relevant cultural institutions, a veritable jewel set firmly in the crown of American free speech.

All lovely sentiments for sure. That is, if they weren’t complete and utter bullshit!

The fact is that SNL has never offered much of a credible critique of U.S. politics. Just the opposite really. The show goes a long way to perpetuate the ‘necessary illusion’ of the United States as a viable democracy. Sure, they may poke fun at the idiosyncratic differences between Republicans and Democrats but that amounts to little more than worrying about whether to eat Campbell’s Chunky Soup with a fork or with a spoon! (For the record, only an idiot would try to eat it with a fork!)

Even the legendary ‘Tastes Great, Less Filling’ debates of the 1980’s presented more accurately defined positions of substance than anything you’ll hear from Republicans or Democrats running for office in a Federal election.

And as any freshman who’s been to one day of classes in POLI-SCI 101 can tell you, Republicans and Democrats are but slightly differentiated factions of the business class party. Both stand to the right of public opinion on key issues and both are funded by multi-gazillion dollar corporations like General Electric, one of America’s largest military contractors and the owners of NBC Television and of course, Saturday Night Live itself. It rarely matters which one of these parties is in the Whitehouse. They serve the same masters.

Case in point: Barack ‘On Crack’ Obama, the ‘Drone War’ president.

Barack Obama swept into office on a wave of popular support from Americans who rightfully desired ‘change’ (presumably for something a little more than skin colour.) However, the first thing he did was bail out the Wall Street bankers and then appoint the same crooks who engineered the economic crash into high level positions in his administration.

So why would he do such a crazy thing? Quite simply because it was the Wall Street wankers who funded his campaign. It’s not hard to figure out where these corrupt characters are coming from. Follow the money.

But would I go so far as to accuse Barack Obama of betraying the American people? Yes, I would. And no doubt time will vindicate that position. More accurately though, it’s the corporate hijacking of U.S. democracy that has betrayed the American people (and the rest of the world in effect) and will continue to betray us until there’s a radical shift in how campaigns are funded and publicized. Sadly though, we’re sliding in the completely wrong direction as spending limits have been dramatically lifted to favour the influence of big business on the electoral process.

So with the exception of a couple of random, accidental hiccups (i.e. Sinead O’Connor ripping up a picture of the Pope and the odd appearance by Ralph Nader), SNL has rarely offered up anything of a truly subversive nature over its interminably long history of awkward, live sketch comedy.

But what it does do quite brilliantly is something Chomsky once termed as the ‘seemingly liberal bias of the mass media,’ a quality of the show I remember was rightfully skewered in the 1992 Tim Robbins political satire, Bob Roberts.

The illusion of a liberal bias in the mass media functions like this: First, there’s the the hardline establishment view as presented by the likes of network news anchors who dutifully serve as echo chambers for the authoritarian party line. Then we get the satirical slant from a Saturday Night Live or a Daily Show that seems to offer a critical perspective. It’s this spectrum that paints a picture of a mass media able to tolerate free speech and public dissent. But it’s a form of dissent that operates within extremely narrow margins (such as poking fun at low hanging fruit like Sarah Palin).

To further confuse matters, you get right wing pundits like Ann Coulter bemoaning the liberal bias of the mass media, the same liberal media that managed to convince most of the American people that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks on 9/11.

And though there are a number of alternate political parties in the U.S., none of them get any real exposure in the media so therefore, none of them stand any real hope of ever getting elected. They certainly don’t have the luxury of being parodied on SNL the way personalities like Bush and Palin have.

But this is one area where SNL has relevance, although for all the wrong reasons. U.S. elections are less about voting on actual issues. Most people who vote don’t know where politicians stand on any given issue which is not surprising as political campaigns are deliberately engineered to be vague. They’re Public Relations exercises focused on the personal qualities of individual candidates involved, such as ‘Would I like to have a beer with this guy?’ ‘Do I like the way they speak, the way they walk, their hair….etc?’ In this respect, what happens on SNL is of vital importance, if only to the architects of a candidate’s public image.

So it was more than a little nauseating to sit there for 90 minutes and watch as this doc celebrated virtues that in good conscience Saturday Night Live could never claim to possess. But despite its fundamentally wonky position, the film could have been a lot of fun given the subject matter. Sadly, it isn’t. There’s a few funny clips scattered throughout but over half the running time is devoted to the issue of social diversity (or lack therein) of the cast members, a topic that gets tiresome about 25 minutes before they knock it on the head. Eventually, they move to the more interesting subject of how SNL has managed to keep pace with the digital age but by this point, it’s too little, too late.

Quite by accident however, director Bao Nguyen was bang on about one thing: The Revolution will NOT be Televised. At least not while General Electric are paying the bills!