Saturn Night Live

[Saturn revolves around the earth once every 29.46 Earth years. In astronomical terms, this means that Saturn Night Live airs reruns for 15 out of every 30 episodes. In practice, however, these reruns, rather than being clustered at the end of the year, are staggered: the reruns air when the sun passes between Earth and Saturn, which alignment renders a live broadcast problematic. The show always starts a few minutes late. Gravity on Saturn is 1.16 G, rendering certain comic pratfalls too dangerous too attempt. But the slapstick is maintained through jokes involving the dense atmosphere and the effect it has on interplanetary cosmopolitan life. The surface temperature is -80 degrees Celsius, which is good for a few laughs. Hydrogen jokes -- actors innocently lighting cigarettes and exploding -- are worked until they're thin. The day on Saturn is less then half the day on Earth, so rehearsals are short, but the cast gets more sleep and is thus less prone to drug addiction. Although admittedly drugs are harder to get out here then they are in New York.]

Hi, I'm a Newspoet. You may recognize me from such Newspoems as "Ode to News" and "Stopping by News on a Snowy Evening". Every Saturday I take a much-needed break from watching reruns of Saturday Night Live on Comedy Central and hop on the Newspoetry space shuttle which whisks me to a secret location. I'm usually the first to arrive, so I flip on SNBC and pop open a Diet Titan. As the other Newspoets filter in, we chat about HTML and CGI and wait for this week's rerun of Saturn Night Live.

     yeah--sure. I watch Saturn Night Live. It's ok I guess. But I always preferred it/s weekday counterpart, Tuesday Night Dead. Why did they cancel that, anyway?

     as my eyes tire of a cathode ray display about five times further away than I am used to, they begin to itch. Make no mistake, the show is funny, but when a land shark shows up at MY door, he usually leaves a business card and campaign promotion materials.

      We gather on Saturday Night
      The cathode ray tube set alight
      Tune in SNL and then laugh just like hell
      The community makes it alright

   Floating in boats
   Wearing old coats
   The formerly working poor
   Shuffle into Bush's bleak new world

It turned out

And then I remembered that

......

     I can but you wouldn't

!

And now, live from Hyperion, it's...

Saturn Night Live!