Clue #235: Live from London, it’s Saturday night! But will SNL be translated across the Atlantic? | culture

TAt the weekend, after the longest period of hype for British comedy in ages, Saturday Night Live UK finally launched on Sky. It reaches a degree of division that most shows don’t usually reach until after at least a few episodes, with some people wanting it, and others convinced it’s going to fail. There has already been a note of protective schadenfreude online, with every last bit of promotional material – even a fairly innocuous ad with the letters SN and L scrawled in baked beans – as evidence that the show will be a complete dumpster fire.

And maybe you will. Hopefully SNL UK will be better than many expect: there are some good young comics attached; some smart people behind the scenes (it’s encouraging to see a couple of members of the brilliant drawing group Sheeps on the writing staff); And the strong presence of original SNL creator Lorne Michaels, who is keeping an eye on things as executive producer. But equally, this is hellish work. Putting on a live comedy show every week is hard enough; But add to that the weight of the reputation of the original SNL show — arguably the United States’ most famous comedy export — and it becomes something else entirely.

That’s one of the concerns about this UK remake: that it will be trapped between the comedic traditions of its predecessor and those of the UK; A transatlantic mix that appeals to no one. So, how can this be avoided? Well, SNL UK could take some pointers from another comedy airing the same week: the second series of Last One Laughing UK.

Well, in fairness, maybe not Which You can really learn a lot about SNL UK from Last One Laughing: one is a scripted variety show that airs once a week; The other is, in essence, a reality comedy show, largely unscripted and edited in post-production. It’s like comparing apples and rodents. But what both shows have in common is that they are both franchises that started elsewhere: Last One Laughing is based on a Japanese formula that has been exported to 30 countries. Each version has the same basic template: put a bunch of comedians in a room together for six hours, remove them if they laugh and the last one who doesn’t wins.

In this mold, each version of Last One Laughing adds its own national comedic style: the Filipino version looks very different from the Canadian version, for example. Each iteration exists primarily for the audience of the country in which it was produced. “The Irish version is very Irish,” Graham Norton told The New York Times in an article about the success of the format. “A lot of the references in the show are in-depth Irish references, things that a UK audience wouldn’t even understand.”

The British version of Last One Laughing, available on Prime Video, has its own peculiarity, created by its own staff of storyboarders. In his first series, the madcap surrealism of Bob Mortimer collided with the erudite comedy of Richard Ayoade or the raucous, big-girl humor of Judy Love (this time, David Mitchell, Alan Carr, Diane Morgan and their ilk would create a very different comedic chemistry). The biggest viral moment from the first series was clearly a mock presentation by Joe Wilkinson about the RNLI: there’s no attempt to cater to some obscure international audience, and the show is all the better for it.

This is something SNL UK should be aware of as well, in order to create a measure of welcome separation from its namesake. In fact, the last time SNL was ‘adapted’ for UK screens, in the form of Channel 4’s Saturday Live series in the 1980s, it took barely anything from the original except the first and last words of its title. Instead, it drew from the tradition of British variety shows as well as the alternative comedy scene that was burgeoning at the time: the most successful weekly segment, Ben Elton’s five-minute intermittent show, which made him a star, would have felt out of place on the original SNL.

Advanced word is that SNL UK won’t blow up the format too much. The Weekend Update segment will be moved, although with a greater focus on Britain, and having Tina Fey as host for the first episode is sure to make the line between the US and UK blurred. But there is an awareness that British humor should come through the SNL brand. “We’re more open to the absurd and maybe the trivial,” said cast member Celeste Dring. “We’ll flirt with the darkness a little more.” Here’s hoping they pull it.

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