Have you seen it yet? With thanks to Crow for turning me on to this, it’s the (I think) second appearance of Jean K. Jean, “France’s top Def Jam Comedian,” on Saturday Night Live.

For years, I’ve thought that Saturday Night Live has been, well, let’s be honest, sucking. It’s fallen into a trap that has claimed many once successful cultural institutions: somewhere at the turn of the (new) century, SNL decided it was going to mandate what was funny, instead of tapping into modern culture and teasing out the humor like it had done successfully before. As a result, much of their comedy has become insider, vague, too bizarre, and more often than not, just plain boring and unfunny. It’s not that there haven’t been some flashes of brilliance, particularly in the wave of digital shorts set off by Samberg and Parnell’s internet hit “Lazy Sunday,” but overall, SNL has largely been of no import to American life.

In the last year or so, however, there has been a slow revival of relevance, which was certainly accelerated in late 2008 by the combination of a widely followed Presidential election and Tina Fey’s uncanny resemblance to Sarah Palin. Perhaps awakened by the wide public reaction to the freak pair of doppelgangers, SNL’s writers began listening to the beat of culture once again. The result was a flurry of politically-tinged sketches that were refreshingly relevant, timely and, most importantly, again because of Tina Fey’s ascension to comedy goddess, a little bit self-aware.

That crucial awareness has carried through to this year, where several episodes have featured sketches built on self-deprecation and cultural insight, two things that SNL has lacked for nearly a decade. Finally, this once celebrated form of comedy is seeing the light of day in sketches like Bill Hader’s impression of Dateline and Keith Morrison a few weeks ago, which mocked both cultural icons and the sheer absurdity of the jokes themselves. Hader’s constant refrain of “oooohs” and “aaaahs” drew immense laughs not just because they were funny in and of themselves, but because after the first set they became so over the top that viewers could see Hader having fun with the material.

This week, (re)enter Jean K. Jean. The concept itself, a French comic doing a purely American style of comedy, is pretty simple, and carried out without any French trappings other than a beret. The jokes themselves are just stock gags about Obama taken to a different level via obviously lame puns on the French language. What made last night’s sketch so hilarious was the way Keenan Thompson played his character with utter panache, the awkward and maybe even embarrassed looks Seth Meyers shot at him during the 2-shots, and Thompson’s pitch-perfect punch line-capping refrain of “ZUT ALORS!” It wasn’t inside jokes or high-mindedness that made this one a winner, it was the two actors being given room to be wacky through jokes like “most definite-oui,” “menage Obama,” “Liberté, Egalité, and Bootay,” and “Incroyably.”

So I hope you take a lesson from this, SNL: sometimes, terrible puns and a cheesy catch phrase mixed with the right amount of self-awareness is just what the doctor ordered, even on a late night TV legend. It gave the show a little breathing room, and it sent the message that the writers don’t take themselves as seriously as we thought. A little of that may be all we need, because for the first time in ages, I’m looking forward to seeing what’s on next Saturday Night.

Following up on an earlier post, I just watched the first episode of the new Jimmy Fallon program. I’m pretty sure all of my predictions have proven true. Let’s forget the interviews, because let’s be honest, he got the short end of the stick with De Niro and Van Morrison. So, the pre-interview content: really, Jimmy Fallon, really?

First of all, did you catch it? The first joke, the ’snowday’ one? I was totally right, Jimmy does not want to be there, he wanted to have his first show canceled due to snow. It’s what he lead off with. I’m a genius. Freud has nothing on me.

Moving on, I have huge beef with Fallon’s monologue delivery. He basically begs for pity laughs with every joke, laying them out completely evenly as if he’s afraid of insulting the writers by admitting one joke is funnier than another. Look guy, not all jokes are even, we know that, and it’s not the audience’s job to find them funny, it’s your job to sell them. David Letterman (disclaimer: I’m a huge Letterman fan, he can do no wrong in my book) gets away with it because he lets the audience know which ones are clunkers and which ones are golden. It’s part of his shtick. Fallon, on the other hand, especially with the awful China joke, smiled innocently and begged for pity laughs. Even in front of a friendly audience during his first show, he didn’t really get them.

There was one funny joke in the monologue, and that was the Iraq one. But again, his completely even and earnest delivery, combined with an odd habit of inserting sentence-killing filler words like ‘actually’ pretty much muted the humor in it. You might say he’ll be able to learn, but let’s remember that he had experience doing news jokes on SNL’s Weekend Update. The difference there was that he had Tina Fey writing the jokes and backing him up every other line. Moreover, as he proved on Weekend Update, his charm is supposed to be that he laughs at his own jokes. So why didn’t he? Nervousness? Be true to yourself, man. Maybe he’ll grow into it, but this monologue was weak.

Next, Jimmy transitioned awkwardly (‘I’m not even going to tell a joke, I think it would be better with a….slow jam’) from the monologue to a segment called Slow Jamming the News, which relied heavily on The Roots’ admittedly groovy slow jam. Clearly the point was to delve into form-vs.-content humor and exploit the contrast between news and a slow jam, but something was missing: namely, the contrast between news and a slow jam. Straight news, especially the congressional record kind highlighted tonight, is by definition slow. Slow jams are…slow. Contrast would be slow jamming something really fast and exciting, like, I dunno, say, the play-by-play of a hockey game, or, alternately, rapping/death metaling the news or congressional record.

I’m not even going to write about the Target Demographic: Blond Mothers thing. Instead, I think I’m going to do a…slow jam. … No just kidding, I wouldn’t subject you to that kind of torture. Again.

Finally, we get to the weird game-show parody Lick it for 10. First off, if anyone wasn’t entirely convinced that Jimmy Fallon is a total corporate sellout, this ought to just about do it. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but for someone who kind of sort of maintains an alternative image, the blatant product placement must have been painful. There’s nothing wrong with a little product placement when it’s cleverly masked by a joke or gimmick. In Jimmy’s case, I’d like to see him do more with the NBC pages who bring the stuff out, à la Jack McBrayer on 30 Rock. Of course, there was none of that here, so the whole thing just came off as a lame half-parody of The Price is Right (a CBS/Viacom property).

But way more importantly, since when is having people lick stuff on television something new, exciting or remotely funny? Letterman’s been doing 10 times wackier and more interesting stuff for 30 years and Conan, Conan had a masturbating bear, for goodness sake, so I just don’t know what Jimmy and Co. were going for. If it was supposed to be a parody, or some commentary on game shows, they need to, you know, change something about the game show structure itself to a humorous effect. Simply making the object of the game licking various commonplace items isn’t enough, especially because this isn’t the year 1950, where a tongue on national TV might have been scandalous. I wanted to see him lick the goldfish, not the bowl, come on! For some ideas on how to make this game funny, I suggest the crew look up I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, who were/are (RIP, Humph) the masters of making a mockery of the game show.

Anyhow, it’s late now, and I’ll reserve judgement on Fallon’s interviewing skills until he has a few more under his belt. But suffice it to say that I was not impressed by Jimmy Fallon’s debut. His only saving grace may be that, as my good friend Crow pointed out, the standard was set so low by the countdown video podcasts on his ridiculously long-URL’d website www.LateNightWithJimmyFallon.com (pause for air) that he may have actually managed to surpass those ‘efforts’ with his debut tonight.

On a side note, Crow is a fan of Jimmy Fallon and sees potential in his debut. So there’s one.

And finally, before I sign off, loyal reader(s? please?), I want to note that I will soon be retooling the site just a little to make it a personal blog of myself, Gabe Stein, Keeping up the persona of No. 1 and constricting myself to dry bizzaro humor has proven too limiting to post regularly enough to build any kind of following, not to mention made it impossible for me to find other blogs for link exchanges, so I’m going to open this baby up to anything and everything I want to post about. Don’t worry, I’ll still be highly irreverent and bizarre at times, I just won’t be so dogmatic about what I post. Stay tuned for that, and good night.

I really think Late Night with Jimmy Fallon is going to catch on.

Why? Because it’s going to be disaster porn, but on a lighter scale that everyone can joke about. Each night’s going to be like watching the aftermath of a car accident, or an earthquake, or a youtube video of Berlesconi picking his nose: we might not really like it, we might even be totally disgusted and shocked, but we just won’t be able to turn away. The next morning we’ll all gather around the water cooler and talk about about it in hushed, depressed tones. We may even start repeating some jokes in the same vein as lame pickup lines.

Deep down inside, we’re going to start really liking it, because it reminds us that even though we may not be TV stars with our own TV show, even though we have no money left, even though America is in the midst of an inevitable Roman Empire-like decline, at least, at the VERY least we’re not poor old Jimmy Fallon.

Think about it: despite being a movie/TV/music star, Jimmy Fallon must wake up screaming every day. I mean, here’s a man who’s forced to get up and perform in front of the nation each night, something he’s obviously terrible at. He probably saw a ‘comedy writers wanted’ ad in the newspaper one day and thought he would be writing one-liners for a two-bit nightclub comedian. One thing lead to another, and now he’s suffering through being a US b-list celebrity. Can you think of any worse torture?