I'm trying to figure out how I feel about about the following little bit done as the bulk of the host's monologue on Saturday Night Live this week.
Blake Lively starts the host's monologue, mentioned she met the Muppets at the lighting of the tree in Rockefeller Center. Is suddenly interrupted by the Swedish chef--not the muppet, but one of the actors very cleverly costumed to look like the Swedish chef. And, of course, he talked like the Swedish chef. "Smorgaty smorgasborg, etc." Before long, he and Blakely were joined by some of the other actors, costumed as Fozzy Bear, Beaker, Gonzo, and Animal.
They say that they should kick off the holiday season with a holiday song. After some debate on what they can get the rights to, they land on a classic. But note what they do.
Together they all sing: "Hark the herald angels sing..."
Then just Animal: "Aaaaah gah gah gah aah aah yah!"
Then all: "Peace on earth and mercy mild..."
Then Swedish chef: "Smorgady borgy dee borg ee smorg."
Then (and let me admit that this was funny) Beaker starts singing, in a very clear, powerful unBeakerlike (and very female) voice, as the others looked on, rather shocked: "Joyful all ye nations rise, join the triumph of the skies, with angelic hosts proclaim ... beep bee-bee-beep beep bee-bee-beep," going right back into Beaker mode when the line would have been "Christ is born in Bethlehem."
Then, the Swedish chef sings loudly "Smorgady borg..." And then everyone together with him: "smorg smorg smorg borg!"
Actually, you can watch it here:
Now, on the one hand, I find this predictably offensive. I mean, you expect that people will co-opt the peace and mercy and joy of Christmas and leave Christ out of it. It's offensive, but it is predictable. On the other hand, I feel like, if one found this pattern predictably offensive, a skit like this would be a pretty good way to make fun of exactly how predictable this creative selective embrace of Christmas can be. I find myself hoping that someone is that clever, but I'm afraid that's not it.
But it was funny. Brilliant to gather this assortment of semi-verbal muppets to sing a traditional Christmas carol. I wonder how many people realized how carefully their lines were chosen, and what words were missing.
3 comments:
When I was in junior high school band, the Christmas concert at my public school included the choir singing an arrangement of Hark the Herald Angels Sing that replaced "God and sinners" with "all good people" as the ones being reconciled.
I was predictably offended.
But the thing was, I witnessed my friends in the choir as they informally rehearsed the song, and they kept messing it up and singing the real lyrics. They had to really concentrate on that line in order to sing the bastardized version. I'm not sure how much the audience noticed, but the performers ended up thinking about the actual words of the hymn much more than if the arranger had left well enough alone.
Great story, Rachel. And I'm sure that the actors, like your choir members, went through it enough to know what was missing. I still wonder, though, how many audience members did. It seems to me that, esp on the SNL skit, the brilliance is that they found a way to sing the song without those lyrics that still made sense, i.e., of course that is how that muppet would sing a line. I think for most people it would have gone by without a second thought.
I think you're right that it would be mostly unnoticed. Actually, I'm still not entirely convinced the SNL thing was deliberate.
It does seem too overt to be accidental. But then, if you were going to write a skit in which muppets sing nonsense in a holiday song, I think the most natural lines to obscure, regardless of content, would probably be the 2nd and 4th lines of a 4-line verse and the ultimate line of the chorus.
So if they had picked "Angels We Have Heard on High," for example, the parts that got left out would be "sweetly singing o'er the plains" and "echoing their joyous strains," which are pretty innocuous, and "in Excelsis Deo," which a lot of people don't understand anyway because it's in Latin.
So in addition to the interpretation that the writers were consciously writing Christ out of Christmas and the interpretation that they were offering a subtle critique of popular culture's deliberate offensiveness, there are at least two additional possible interpretations:
1) that the writers are so thoroughly secularized (and/or dense) that they didn't even notice that the omitted words lined up precisely with the theological content of the song, or
2) that the writers are so deviously sneaky that they carefully selected a song with the major theological content spaced just so, so that they could then obscure it without drawing attention to the fact that they were doing so.
And I am starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist, so perhaps it's time for me to stop analyzing late night television sketches featuring adults dressed as puppets.
Post a Comment