A Jester in the King's Court

This is post 1 in an ever expanding list of “Principles” that I’ve somehow started to develop. There was an old list of theses from High School…but they are about as deep as a High Schooler can be…so I’ve decided mid-20’ss is the way to go.

Principle #1: The SNL Principle (Chronological Snobbery)

I was a lucky child. Since my Mom was a single parent and had to work all day, yet wanted spend time with me (as anyone would), I was allowed to stay up rater ate at night. This may have lead to me being a 27 y/o that can’t get to sleep before midnight, but it also allowed me to be a 2nd grader that was sad when Johnny Carson retired. Truth be told, had I known how unfunny Leno would turn out to be, I’d have probably cried.

This means that as a child, I became a fast fan of Saturday Night Live. I watched it every week, I watched it’s re-reruns during the summers and I made many people laugh with my impersonations of Dana Carvey impersonating Bush and Perot. And the Church Lady. I loved the early 90’s SNL. In the mid-90’s, all my fav cast members were let go and replaced with unfunny losers like Will Farrel, Chris Katan, Cheri Oteri, Molly Shannon and they even let that moron Norm McDonald do Weekend Update. I hated the new cast, and I perpetually bemoaned how not funny they were.

Then something happened. I realized I was still watching it, and laughing at Mr. Peepers and Celebrity Jeopardy. SNL was still funny. Then some of those cast members left and people like Jason Sedakus and Kristin Wiig showed up. And everyone said, “Why can’t these people be as funny as the old cast was when they first started??” But, no one liked them when they first started. They hated them.

Now, all of a sudden, people seem to find this new cast funny. And, they are right. Because its always been funny. The problem is we grow so attached to things being 1 way that any change makes us initially hate the new way of doing things. We have no argument against the new way, and we work ever so hard to make ourselves hate the new thing, often against our own will; however we still manage to do it.

The fact is, this goes so far beyond SNL. It happens often with worship music, civil rights and changes in relationship. I have no prescription to fix this aside from to remind everyone that new is not always bad, and that the things that are old and comfortable now were once new and contemptible. What the 20-40 generation in the church call “old boring music” once were new drinking songs that got brought into the church with new lyrics.

Sociologically this is called Chronological snobbery, thinking either that what is either older or newer is better purely because of its position in time. Practically though, how many relationships have been cut off or halted because they are no longer what they once were, and no one wanted to see if the new norm was a good norm? And how many ways of doing church have been stamped out because they aren’t the way its always been done. And how many SNL cast members have been fired because no one will ever be able to be as funny as Tina Fey, and Wayne’s World is too brilliant to duplicate?