Is Saturday Night Live dead?

After 46 years, it sure seems like it. The iconic comedy show, the once edgy and outrageous home of John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Dana Carvey, and Chris Farley, went “woke” a long time ago, and maybe the folks have finally had enough. Or maybe the new cast is a bunch of whiny, elitist, talentless hacks. Or maybe it’s both — a dog, after all, can have ticks and fleas. In any case, SNL’s viewership ratings just hit rock bottom.

It didn’t have to be this way, though. The previous week’s anti-woke, anti-lockdown guest host proved that. As Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva wrote on Sunday, “After Saturday Night Live’s ratings rose sharply with host Elon Musk last week, they dropped to pre-Musk levels last night. The season’s penultimate episode, hosted by Keegan-Michael Key with Olivia Rodrigo as musical guest, drew a 3.5 household [rating] and a 1.5 adults 18-49 rating.”

Not good, as they say. For context, those numbers were down from the May 8 show, hosted by Musk and musical guest Miley Cyrus, which posted some of the season’s best numbers: 4.7 and 2.7, respectively. (Full disclosure: This author hasn’t watched more than a few minutes of SNL in the past 20 years, but we’ve always been a sucker for a good train wreck.)

At this point, you’re thinking, Who cares? Or maybe you’re thinking, Who the heck is Keegan-Michael Key? But regardless, last Saturday night’s numbers were a season low. As Breitbart’s David Ng reports, “The precipitous decline comes as Saturday Night Live faces mounting criticism for its left-wing slant and anti-conservative bias. The show reportedly allowed cast members to opt out of performing with Musk if they felt uneasy about the billionaire guest host, who has voiced anti-woke opinions.”

It serves ‘em right, right? As for Musk’s “anti-woke opinions,” we’d say he’s earned the right to express them. It’s true that he hasn’t been the biggest fan of, say, blue-state COVID-19 lockdowns, but what’s wrong with a little patriotic tweeting now and again?

Maybe it’s time for SNL to be honest with itself and honest about its failure. Maybe it’s time to do a self-referential skit on SNL having jumped the shark. Or, if SNL don’t want next year’s season to be as abysmal as this one, maybe the whole crew, from Lorne Michaels on down, could revisit their roots and reconnect with “funny.” And maybe, while they’re at it, they could try to refrain from alienating half of their potential viewing audience.

Whatever it once was, SNL is no longer that. “Somehow,” writes the Daily Wire’s Joseph Curl, “the edgy show kept its finger on the pulse of culture, lampooning anything and everything. … But around the time George W. Bush took over the White House (SNL loved Bill Clinton), the show got hyper-political. What followed was eight years of mocking Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, followed by an eight-year lovefest for Barack Obama and another four-year hatefest for Donald Trump.”

Indeed, who can forget SNL’s pathetic excuse for not having given Barack Obama the same treatment they’d given to every U.S. president before him? There was just nothing there to mock, they sniveled. Obama was just too cool, too smart, too smooth to make fun of.

Yeah, right. Back in 2014, Kyle Smith, then with the New York Post, begged to differ:

“The charter Choom Ganger, confessed eater of dog and snorter of coke. The doofus who thinks the language spoken by Austrians is 'Austrian,’ that you pronounce the p in ‘corpsman,’ and that ATMs are the reason why job growth is sluggish. The egomaniac who gave the queen of England an iPod loaded with his own speeches, and said he was better at everything than the people who work for him. The empty suit with so little real-world knowledge that he referred to his brief stint working for an ordinary profit-seeking company as time ‘behind enemy lines.’ The phony who tells everyone he’s from Chicago, though he didn’t live there until his 20s, and lets you know that he’s talking to people he believes to be stupid by droppin’ his g’s. The world-saving Kal-El from a distant solar system who told us he’d heal the planet and cause the oceans to stop rising. The guy who shared a middle name with one of the most hated dictators on earth.”

Here we might add: the commander-in-chief who once paid a Memorial Day tribute to the “fallen heroes … in the audience here today.” The genius who said of a Kansas tornado that killed 12 people, “Ten thousand people died — an entire town destroyed.” The professed Christian who said to George Stephanopoulos, “You’re absolutely right that John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith.” The trans-racial healer who demeaned his grandmother as “a typical white person.” The Nobel Peace Prize winner who sagaciously said, “The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries.” The sorry bowler who made fun of our Special Olympians. The naked socialist who said we needed to “spread the wealth around.”

Nope, nothing to mock here, folks. Nor with Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris.

Thanks for the memories, SNL. Rest in peace.