Saturday Night Blunders

I think that often-times the best moments of Saturday Night Live are when the cast cracks up.

Now, there is a limit to that—a limit that Jimmy Fallon and Horatio Sanz surely tested during their run. When you're cracking up too often, it starts to look like some high school talent show where the popular kids are just goofing off onstage and all their friends in the audience are cracking up because it's all just a big stupid joke. I don't think those guys did it intentionally. But I know that *I* began to associate them more with fucking up than them being reliable comic performers.

But when it's not wall-to-wall, it can really stand out. And you can ALWAYS hear the audience respond to it. Check out this "Debbie Downer" sketch where Rachel Dratch is the one who can't keep it straight:

Debbie Downer en Yahoo! Video

The audience goes wild because they're witnessing something genuine and human. Something spontaneous. Unscripted.

Sometimes I watch these screw-up videos over and over, just analyzing where it begins. Where one performer begins to lose it and sets off the others. It's so fascinating to me because it represents endearing human weakness and I'm always looking for ways to more properly pretend to be a human being...