Guilty Pleasure Monday:: Politicians, Athletes and Musicians Hosting Saturday Night Live

By Nathan Rabin | October 29, 2007 | 9:28pm

TV Features TV

From a certain forgiving perspective it's a goddamned miracle that Saturday Night Live manages to put on a new show most Saturday nights regardless of quality. They have a new host every week, the opportunities for mistakes are huge, live television is a notoriously harsh and unforgiving medium and ninety minutes is a vast desert of time to fill under the best of circumstances. Throw in the occasional comedy neophyte as host and an already combustible mix becomes a whole lot riskier.

Of course from the outset Lorne Michaels has strove to remove any lingering elements of risk or danger from the show. Cue cards and teleprompters are on hand to help the forgetful, recurring characters parrot the same inane catchphrases week in and week out and pre-taped bits like Digital shorts and TV Funhouse are immune to live fuck-ups.

Most Popular

For today's Guilty Pleasure Monday I would like to humbly salute the semi-fearless non-acting, non-comedian hosts of SNL, those cue card reading dynamos willing to risk public humiliation to make people laugh, or at the very least concede "Eh, for a football player/wrestler/rhythm guitarist/press secretary/consumer advocate/Vice President/mayor he wasn't so bad I guess". These folks deserve to be judged on a very, very lenient curve.

Watching somebody like Ralph Nader or Lebron James sweat their way through costume changes and silly skits is like seeing the junior-high principal wear a silly wig and sing a labored song parody for the big school talent show: you can't help but root for them even while cringing at the egregious lack of talent on display. There's a definite dog-playing piano quality to these performances: the quality of Walter Payton's Michael Jackson impersonation is less noteworthy than the fact he's impersonating him in the first place.

Sometimes these rank amateurs startle us with their comic chops. The Rock and Justin Timberlake each used high-profile hosting gigs on SNL to prove to a skeptical world that they were considerably more than a goofy wrestler with famously expressive eyebrows and a boy band survivor respectively. Of course wrestling is a form of acting but that's another matter entirely. More often these chuckle merchants for a day deliver performances that run the gamut from hopelessly wooden to just barely passable to full-on train wreck.

Fans of televisual awkwardness were in for a rare treat recently during Jon Bon Jovi's hosting gig. In an opening bit band mate Richie Sambora froze like a deer in headlights when called upon to literally deliver maybe three lines of dialogue. In an excruciating bit of live television gone awry Bon Jovi had to feed Sambora each of his lines like a hair metal mama bird doling out life-sustaining sustenance to his misguided charge.

Obviously I'm not alone in deriving a certain train wreck fascination from watching people who make their living slamming basketballs or throwing footballs or running cities attempt to make people laugh. Episodes hosted by athletes generally rank as the most popular Saturday Night Live episodes of any given year.

But unlike much of the audience I'm not tuning into a Lebron James episode as a Lebron James fan. I couldn't care less about him or most of the contemporary sports. No, I'm tuning in as an unabashed fan of stilted cue-card reading, amateur stabs at comedy and all-around awkwardness.

Am I alone in this regard? Is there anyone else out there who gets off on seeing the non-funny attempt comedy? I can't be the only person with a soft spot for skits like Waikiki Hockey.