Professional writers?

Has anyone watched Saturday Night Live recently? It's bad. Very, very bad. I watched until partway through the Weekend Update. I had to stop watching when they brought out the kid from Good Burger. He was dressed up like an old lady and doing that bit about how women use Halloween as an excuse to dress up like whores (sexy nurse, sexy kitten, etc.). Am I the only one who has heard that bit from at least three comedians and seen it on at least five shows? I turned off the TV then.

The funniest thing about the show happened a little before the aforementioned disaster. For those of you who haven't heard, The Writers Guild of America, the union for TV and movie writers, is about to go on strike. To show its support for the union, SNL started off Weekend Update with a guy pretending to be a big TV executive. The sketch was very high school, i.e. not clever, not funny. So they had him come out and talk about how TV execs. only make like 20 million a year so they couldn't possibly afford to pay writers any more than the 200,000 average salary that they get now. He then talked about how DVDs cost sixty cents to make and then when they sell them for twenty dollars they end up losing money. Then he went on to say that if they paid the writers more, he wouldn't be able to line his pool with gold. Really witty stuff.

I was slightly offended by this bit, actually. A half-assed, most-likely oversimplified, unfunny parody during a comedy show. Up until this sketch, I had been on the side of the union. As a writer, I'm all for paying writers obscene amounts of money. But everything about this TV exec. satire had me rethinking my position. That is, until I recognized the mindboggling, perfect but undoubtedly unintentional brilliance of the sketch. Pay attention now because I think you'll like this next part. What I saw last night was not just a sketch designed to get people to support the Hollywood writers' campaign for more money. What I saw last night was a poorly written sketch designed to get people to support the Hollywood writers' campaign for more money. That's Mark Twain brilliant right there.

I've come up with a compromise: Management will agree to pay the writers more if the writers will agree to stop sucking so much (I'm looking at you, writers of almost every show I loved last season but now suffer through this season).

I'm grateful for the few remaining good shows (20).