15.5.11

Saturday Night Live RapeWatch: Ed Helms Edition

It's the second-last episode of the year, and it offered us both the highest highs and lowest lows to which the show can reach! What do I mean by this? Robert Smigel was back, as was one of the two sketches that led to the creation of Saturday Night Live RapeWatch in the first place!

First, the objectionable - it's the 'guys singing to a song' sketch, where a song plays in the background where men reminisce about horrible things, then sing the chorus together. As always, the stories began awful, then drifted into reprehensible territory as one of them men bragged about being a doctor who molests his patients. I thought we'd seen the back of this sketch. Sadly, I was wrong.

On the good side of things, however, you had the Ambiguously Gay Duo go live-action, which was amazing for a lot of reasons, but the most important of them was the fact that it demonstrated that you can do an entire sketch about two men in tights doing apparently gay things, while a group of other men ponder their sexuality, without it being in the least bit homophobic. The jokes in the sketches are always borne from the absurd poses the AGD find themselves in, and the reactions of Big Head and his crew to them. We, the audience, are never meant to laugh from discomfort or judgement, so it doesn't count as homophobia - this is how you do it, SNL!

So, the counts are:

Rape: 1
Homophobia: 0

Great episode all around - let's see what they get up to on the Timberlake-hosted finale next week!

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