journalists shared short sketches of "S.N.L."

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New York from the time of pandemic: I never wanted to live in Minneapolis, but I wanted to make sure I stayed in Midtown

Back in Minneapolis, the pandemic dragged on, and eventually my family was joined on our TV-watching couch by a rescue Chihuahua named Weenie. As we all watched episode after episode, it dawned on me that in addition to being a kid’s festive idea of adulthood, “S.N.L.” embodies several other elusive and aspirational ideas: an idea of New York for people who, like me, have never lived there; an idea of having hilarious friends or co-workers instead of annoying ones; an idea of being able to metabolize political instability into biting jokes instead of feeling helpless about it; an idea of glamorous after-parties that we want to want to attend when most of us don’t really want to stay up that late. I might mean me here. My kids are now teenagers and go to bed after I do. But my family has never watched “S.N.L.” live; we usually watch it on Sunday around 7 p.m.)

Many of us feel to varying degrees like outsiders — we’re not beautiful or famous or funny or coastal — and “S.N.L.” gives us access to beauty, fame, humor and New York. Sometimes it feels New Yorklike to me when I am in New York, because I see imagery I have watched on the show, like the Prometheus statue outside Rockefeller Center or the 30 Rock marquee. A few years ago, a jaded magazine editor asked if it annoyed me that my publisher puts me up in hotels in Midtown, where it’s congested with tourists. At the risk of sounding like a Midwestern stereotype, it had never occurred to me that Midtown could be undesirable; I still can’t believe a publisher pays for me to stay at a nice hotel, and then I get to go for walks in Central Park.

As the months passed, the pandemic still didn’t go away, and I, like many people, experienced personal challenges in addition to the global ones. I decided to stop working on the novel because it was too depressing. Desperate to cheer myself up, I started a novel set at a show a lot like “S.N.L.”

I finished a lot of research that was so enjoyable it didn’t feel like work, which included reading the 800-page oral history from “Live From New York”, watching the documentary “Saturday Night”, and listening to a million comedian podcasts. The two aspects of seeing it in person that surprised me most were the dress rehearsal and the show’s ending. The first was how often two or more cast members in the same sketch were on different stages (for instance, the cast member playing a mayor at a news conference and the cast members playing reporters).

The subject of “S.N.L.” is a fascinating one because it has been at the center of American culture for so long that it has become a mirror for the nation’s history and your own. Dana Carvey’s work was my favorite era as a child and I still watch it today. (This made it extra fun when I talked to Carvey for our catchphrases package and listened to him do George Bush, Ross Perot and all the other impressions I used to copy at school.) Now I watch the show with my daughter. If she’s lucky, she may one day talk to Bowen Yang about why his George Santos sketches were so hysterical. I think thatSantos would be very happy to be remembered.

For better or for worse, I was given carte blanche access to TV at a pretty young age (I was allowed to stay up late, too). It was more exciting for a kid to watch SNL during its heyday. My favorite sketches from those years involved Sprockets, the Spartan cheerleaders and Mary Katherine Gallagher, as well as any time Chris Farley or Will Ferrell was onscreen.