Sounds alright to me - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

For people of a certain age, and Scott and I both happen to be about that age, the Saturday Night Live of our youth in the 1990s served as a foundation of humour. 

 

Last week, on page four, Scott wrote about the impact of Phil Hartman, the great Canadian SNL cast member, and, just recently, the great Norm McDonald was back in the news when O.J. Simpson died. People went back to watch supercuts of McDonald trashing Simpson as the host of SNL’s “Weekend Update” during the so-called “Trial of the Century”. Throw in Chris Farley, Will Ferrell, David Spade, Mike Myers, Tim Meadows, Molly Shannon, Cheri Oteri and more and you have a pretty clear picture of what was funny to us back then. 

 

Not only that, but for me, at least, SNL was how I learned about a lot of events. As a teen, I wasn’t exactly gobbling up the newspaper or the nightly news, so my window to current events was often SNL or something similar.

 

Fusing those two ideas together is easy. Whatever McDonald thought about O.J. was what I thought of O.J. If they made fun of Bill Clinton or George H.W. Bush, I then thought those people were silly. When The Simpsons made fun of Twin Peaks for not making sense, I then absorbed, through osmosis, the idea that Twin Peaks made no sense. See what I mean?

 

One of the most memorable sketches from that period features Farley as a motivational speaker named Matt Foley hired to whip teens played by Spade and Christina Applegate into shape after the family’s cleaner found a bag of marijuana. Foley was the kind of motivational speaker in the vein of a cautionary tale. He lived in a van down by the river, as he painstakingly reminded people through the sketch, and he didn’t want them to end up like him, also living in a van down by the river.

 

Well, if you’re a person who went down the YouTube rabbit hole in the last few weeks to watch McDonald’s bits on O.J., you might notice some other SNL sketches from that era pushed to you. For me, one was the Foley bit.

 

It served as a stark reminder of how much things have changed since it first aired in May of 1993. Throughout the comment section were people speaking from a post-2020 world about wishing they could afford to live in a van down by the river. What was a worst-case scenario in 1993 had become aspirational.

 

Now, there may be a bit of exaggeration in those comments (as everyone knows, online comment sections are not exactly the place to go looking for rational, measured discourse among courteous, well-informed people) but there is certainly some truth to them as well.

 

I’ve written before about Nomadland, the tremendous book by Jessica Bruder that led to the Academy Award-winning film of the same name starring the great Frances McDormand. It tells the real-life stories of people who, for one reason or another, have been driven to life on the road, living in their vehicles. Those profiled by Bruder in her book and then by director Chloé Zhao in the film have some money. They travel from job to job as seasons change and opportunities arise and pay for things like gas, food and vehicle repairs. 

 

There is now an ever-growing community of people living in tented encompments across North America in large cities, but even here in Huron County many experience homelessness. As we know, Huron County Council is addressing this with a pricey housing project.

 

As the quality of life declines in our part of the world, some of us are lucky and others are not. Looking back at something like SNL, while funny, provides a bit of a snapshot of a time when life was a bit easier.