IT WAS THIRTY YEARS AGO TODAY
The better fare supports the show’s theme, abuses of authority in America. Take the sketch about the petty tyranny of two Wrigley Field security guards (Chris Farley and Timothy Meadows): only a few feet apart, they breathlessly communicate over walkie-talkies, bark out sinister code terms like “sector” and “pre-entrance area,” and sadistically hassle two friends of Harry Caray (“Read my lips, stay behind the line!”). Unfortunately, with no effort to show why the oafs act like snotty brats, the sketch just plays the surface. It’s a shame: recognizing an abuse is never enough. The next bit is a real laugh-getter in which Harry himself is the expendable authority: when he passes out during the seventh-inning stretch, he’s soon replaced by Caray clones planted in the crowd. (The trick is to sound innocuous and affable while you hustle everything in sight.)
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Most perplexing are the sketches that appear to say more than they do. A confrontation between an angry son and his adulterous father flows into a flashback in which the father receives bogus absolution from a yuppie priest; it ends as arbitrarily as it began. One bizarre bit is interrupted, Monty Python-style, because the actors insist on playing themselves. A sketch that’s a clone of Saturday Night Live’s Lupner family plays variations on the theme of nerdiness (the daughter takes her homework on a date in case things get boring). Though it’s a good excuse for some inspired mugging, it never gets beyond the familiar, and there’s no payoff.
