It was a great time Cambria was beautiful, and we watched Little Women and Uncut Gems. In December, I went out of town to spend the holidays with my wife and dog. I’ve relished in this newfound freedom - you’ll know and maybe even be annoyed by it if you follow me on Twitter - but it’s nice after over a decade to finally be allowed to say publicly what I’ve always said privately among friends. But after my two years at JKL, I decided that I didn’t really want to work in variety-sketch anymore, thus freeing myself from the entertainment industry omertà on ever saying that any TV show or movie is bad. Were I still a professional TV writer desperate to remain employed in the industry, I’m exactly the kind of person who would never say a negative word about SNL publicly. i love kimmel.” This wasn’t correct - I quit Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2016 - but it showed that Che was motivated to respond to my critique because it came from a fellow writer of late-night network variety TV. In a follow-up post, Che revealed the reason why my criticism specifically bothered him so much: “he works for kimmel. There are some very talented comedians who work on SNL, such as Bowen Yang and Kyle Mooney unfortunately, that’s not evident in the overall quality of the show. (Last year’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” parody singalong with all the members of the Trump cabinet, and the Deal Or No Deal sketch that culminated in Trump choosing a box of “hamberders” stand out as particularly low lows.) Since 2015’s SNL40 40th anniversary special, the show, which has always featured celebrity guests, seems more reliant on cameos and stunt-casting than ever - whether it’s every member of Trump’s cabinet being portrayed by a movie star, or an SNL cast-member from only a decade ago showing up to raucous applause sign applause for the tenth time this season. This is a show that happily invited Donald Trump to host when he was merely a super racist presidential candidate, and then went on to do the weakest political comedy of all-time during his presidency. The reason why I hate modern SNL is very simple: I’ve watched it. I am a bearded white guy with glasses who hates SNL, so for one of the few times in this piece I will award Michael Che some credit. i think you’ll be fine, man.” He followed up with a screenshot of a DM from a follower asking who I am, to which Che responded “hes one of those bearded white guys with glasses that hates snl, not much about his personal life on there, but im sure its awesome.” Over the screenshot was a big block of white text reading “lol the shit people worry about. But within 15 minutes, Michael Che found my post, and reposted it to his Instagram story. When I posted this, I didn’t tag the show, nor mention any of its employees by name. I posted screenshots from the submission document with the pithy caption “The funniest thing about the SNL Writing Submission site is it absolves then from stealing your ideas, and then also says if you include a link to your social media it counts for everything you’ve ever posted as well.” At first, the post got maybe a dozen retweets. I thought it was notable that SNL was essentially giving themselves the power to cherry-pick the feeds of anyone who submits, so I did what I always do when something is even mildly annoying to me: I made a nasty little post about it on Twitter. But the SNL submission included a unique clause, one I’d never seen before, basically stipulating that if you include a link to your social media, everything on it would be considered submitted material and subject to the same legal absolution. The submission agreement included the same type of standard language you’ll find in any writing submission, absolving the show from claims of theft should any future segments end up similar to submitted material. It began last June, when SNL launched a website to take open writer submissions. Michael Che, the head writer of Saturday Night Live and host of Weekend Update, can’t stop talking about me.
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