Attacking SNL, BigHollywood writer pens worst invocation of 9-11 EVER
December 11, 2009 9:38 pm ET by Brian Frederick
Over at Breitbart's BigHollywood.com (the fun crazy one) writer Alicia Colon was not happy about Saturday Night Live's sketch Gossip Girl: Staten Island last week. It turns out she has many warm memories of living in Staten Island and the people she knew were nothing like how they were portrayed by the unfunny SNL cast. So she wrote up a post titled "'SNL' Trashes Staten Island: Why Leftists Hate the Borough." Oh boy.
Colon writes:
The native Staten Islanders I've met do not speak with the Brooklynese accents in the SNL skits. Yes, there are many Italian families here but there are also many Africans, Pakistani, Russian, Polish, German, Asian, Irish and many Hispanics from Central and South America. There are also many pizzerias and many are run and operated by Albanians. So basically, Staten Island is your typical New York City borough or is it and why do the liberal elite find it such an easy target to mock?
(Good luck making sense of that last sentence.)
Last I checked, Saturday Night Live mocked everything it could about the people living in New York City. From the China Club in Manhattan to the "Bronx Beat" to the "Beating of the Week" on "Good Morning, Brooklyn!" to my favorite, the "Bensonhurst Dating Game."
But apparently her own children informing her that SNL was not off the mark was not enough to deter her ridiculous blog post: "Although I've claimed to have never met the Staten Islanders ridiculed on SNL, my children tell me that the caricatures are dead on."
Colon plows ahead and gets even more ridiculous, digging up a 2004 essay from the New York Times "Lives" section in which the author explains her decision to abort two of the triplets she was expecting. The author mentioned that she thought if she had triplets she might have to move to Staten Island." Colon responds thusly:
I'm assuming the reason she aborted two of her babies was so she could still live in Manhattan. Therein lies the liberal contempt for a borough that cherishes and respects family values and human lives.
So there you have it - an SNL sketch (the first one?) spoofing Staten Island and an old essay about one woman's abortion. That's her proof that "leftists hate" Staten Island.
Well, such an absurd conclusion calls for an even more absurd browbeating. And Colon doesn't disappoint, penning possibly the lamest invocation of 9-11 ever written:
So if the untalented writers at SNL want to continue mocking Staten Island, so be it. I would like to remind them however that this is also the borough that suffered the greatest personal losses in the 9/11 attack. The residents have shown great resilience and courage since then and will surely weather their puny attempt at humor as well.
Words fail me.
I'm a lifelong New Yorker, and a gay progressive. Never lived on SI but have been welcomed there by Italian American families wholeheartedly with my boyfriend. I thought the SNL sketch was crude and dehumanizing, coming from 30 Rock. Yes, it really was rather elitist and shallow and a cheap ethnic joke.
I won't address her abortion angle- yikes- but why do "words fail you" about that last bit? SI did indeed suffer disproportionate losses borough-wise in NYC on 9/11. I don't see the need to mock that. I'm a big supporter of MMA but this subject of your post has some legitimate issues with that skit. She frames it quite differently than I would, through her (righty?) political lens. But I found it a haughty ethnic smear by Manhattanites for laughs too, mocking working class Staten Island. No real New Yorker thinks that way. And yes, six-figure comedy writers at 30 Rockefeller Plaza are sort of "elite " in the scheme of things. More dumb Ivy League frat elite than "liberal" though.
I like that the writer (using the term loosely) drags out the old "liberal elite" theme, but still rejects her childrens' assertion that the caricatures are accurate. I'd imagine the kids are more likely to be seeing the real thing around them. Younger people probably tend to mingle around the neighborhood more than the sheltered elite.
How about this:
Invoking 9/11 this way? Good lord, if a liberal were to ever invoke 9/11 in such a way you can bet your booty that the fake outrage would last at least three 24 hour cycles on Cluster Fox and at least a weeks worth of spittle from Rush and at least one column from Charlie Krauthammer.
As for Mrs. Colon, I have never even heard of this crazy lady until now and I'm not so sure I'm happy that I finally have...?
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