Anal Probing in Popular Culture, or How To Write Comedy

I just watched last weekend's Saturday Night Live. It was an undistinguished episode hosted by Johnny Knoxville.

In writing a joke, or a sketch, an important rule is economy. You don't add extraneous details--everything should be moving, one way or another, towards a punchline. Now let me describe one of their sketches to you. It's about an earthling captured by aliens. The aliens are friendly and he asks them a few questions about the pyramids and crop circles. Then he wants to know why he was anally probed. It turns out that just one of the aliens (Knoxville) did it, and it was for personal enjoyment, not part of any plan. Busted.

Okay, fine, so SNL has wrought yet another comic variation on the alien abduction/anal probe joke. But here's what got to me. The sketch was introduced as part of a "Channel 5 Late Night Movie." This adds NOTHING to the humor. There's no particular parody of sci-fi films (which rarely deal with anal probes--comic sketches and jokes do), or the cheapness of late night TV, or anything else I can think of.

An SNL sketch such as, say, "Wayne's World," is (or started out as) a parody of the cheapness of cable access, so that framing device makes sense. But apparently the writers at SNL do so many TV and show biz parodies that it's simply become their default position, regardless of the content. In fact, the framing device here makes things less funny, since it only confuses the issue as to what the joke is about. An alien caught anally probing an abductee against the rules is funnier if it's "real," rather than what amounts to a plot device within a movie. It's odd that no one in the entire process caught that.