Saoirse Ronan discusses SNL – Aer Lingus sketch controversy (video)
If you missed the sketch last week, the Lady Bird actress stars as a flight attendant for the Irish airlines as they try to prepare for the flight — but along the way there turns out to be a number of problems. For one, there are apparently dogs everywhere; also, potatoes are apparently the one thing on the in-flight menu. The sketch has been criticized after the fact for being offensive to Irish people and Ronan is now speaking up about it after the fact.
While appearing on the Irish Late Late Show this week (see the video below) Ronan said that the intention for the sketch was just for it to be silly fun — she wanted to have an opportunity to use her natural voice on the show and that was one of the things she discussed with the team. (She also claimed that she flies Aer Lingus all the time and wasn’t trying to bash them.)
Anyone who watches SNL knows that they do have a tendency to get controversial/offensive here and there and there’s a pretty common rule of thumb with it: If you’re going to get controversial or play up a stereotype, you better be doing it because you’ve got a hilarious idea. If a sketch or a joke is funny enough it often stops criticism and backlash in advance. We like to think that most people on some level want to laugh, at least provided that the joke isn’t causing them personal harm. Where the SNL Aer Lingus sketch faltered was that it relied on lowest-common-denominator stereotypes and also wasn’t particularly funny. The whole bit about the dogs is something that doesn’t even make sense to us — we’ve never associated that with Ireland before.
If they were going to do Irish humor SNL should have went so much harder and tried to go fro big laughs — the sort you get at a celebrity roast where you know you’re not supposed to laugh but do so anyway. In the sketch’s current form, it’s just not funny enough to distract you from the fact that it’s lazy humor at the expense of a country’s people. We don’t think it was made to hurt anyone, but that doesn’t stop people from being understandably marginalized by it.
There is a new episode of SNL coming on tonight hosted by James Franco — if you want to preview it more you can do so by heading over to this link.
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