A fervent or sympathetic quality in words or tone caused by or causing deep emotion
If I remember correctly it was not “Saturday Night Live” but a relatively short-lived and mostly forgotten late night show called “Fridays” where I saw a comedy sketch that made a lasting impression on me.
The sketch was about tabloid journalism, and the techniques tabloid journalists use to draw emotional reactions from their interviewees.
Like a lot of comedy from that period of my life I failed to see any humor in it. That’s not to say I saw the dark side of it — I was too young to understand that most comedy has a darkness behind it — it was just that I did not get the joke and so I thought this was a serious piece of television journalism or documentary. I had similar reactions to some “SNL” sketches.
In the “Fridays” sketch a television reporter interviews a subject in dire straits. I don’t remember the context but it might have been that the subject’s house had just burned down and they had lost everything. The reporter, seizing the opportunity to have a bawling, wailing face on his nightly news segment, mines the person for depths of despair beyond the obvious, leading the person to suicide. In another incident the reporter sits down for a seemingly innocuous interview with a charming, upbeat subject who is quickly reduced to despair by the reporter’s sophisticated line of tabloid questioning. The subject had started out happy but ended up in tears. With this the reporter turns to the camera and smiles, a satisfied, cynical grin of tabloid exploitation. The reporter got his payoff, and left his subject there to discover miseries she never knew existed inside of her.
I think of that sketch most times when I see or hear television or radio reports from the scene of a disaster. Invariably the reporters seek out the most despondent person in the crowd, the one most overcome by emotion and heartbreak, the one whose infant son or 12 year old daughter had likely perished in a blaze or whose entire family had been killed. On television the camera locks in on this individual until they get the money shot of tears pouring from the face. On radio the speakers fill with sounds of one inarticulate, sorrowful voice declaiming the inhumanity of the circumstance and perhaps how the victim was “the best kid in the world” or “a gentle soul who never hurt anybody.”
I can not remember with certainty whether that comedy sketch was on “SNL” or “Fridays.” I was in the 7th and 8th grade, and even at the time I got the two shows mixed up on Mondays, when we would talk at school about the previous weekend’s television.
