A young friend at work told me there was this great SNL routine about a woman in charge of an emergency room, who keeps telling people with serious injuries to "simmer down now." She repeats this whenever they try to get attention. I get the idea how this could be funny, making fun of how irritating and perhaps stupid she is.
She sent me the video link. Perhaps the writers are basing this on an actual emergency room person they have encountered (in New York? Well, maybe). Scene up: Beehive hairdo. Woman speaks. Strong Southern accent.
And I thought This just never ends, does it? Everything is culture war, to let you know who you are supposed to dislike.
SNL comes to us from NYC, which is supposedly full of the smartest, intelligentest, and funniest people in the whole world. (Well, they think so.) A show that I stopped watching around '79-'80, because I didn't care for the cast or the writers for them.
ReplyDeleteIt's a takeoff on an older sketch featuring two flight attendants who have the same catchphrase. Sounds like they are just rehashing old material.
ReplyDeleteJust shorthand. Not trying to drive home a point, just using "what everybody knows" to make a quick sketch. It's not a stereotype if it's true, right?
ReplyDeleteHaving done some EMT work in the past and observing a lot of ER activity I can tell you that the bane of the ER is triage. Aside from opioid seekers, who are a total pain in the tushee, there are the whiners with nothing really wrong with then and the stoics who insist they're really okay while on the verge of collapse and everything in between. Sorting them all out on a busy shift can make you a bit testy.
ReplyDeleteSo, when it's busy, telling people to "simmer down now" is not really a bad thing. Those sketches, OTOH, are quite clearly making malicious fun of the few groups that it's okay to do so *and* that can't really fight back -- rural, uneducated hicks. I say this with love because those are my people even if I don't live there anymore.
But asked to whose tender mercies I would prefer to turn were I in serious distress of any kind, the hicks would win out over the NYC A-holes every single time. They are generally kind, perhaps because they need kindness themselves.
We've got a few people with ER knowledge on board here, so we get what you are saying. I'm not sure SNL gets how much those "simmer down now" people help them. Nurse Ratched is really a hero.
ReplyDeleteI think their devotion to making their target acceptable makes it less funny. Key and Peele would have made this awesome. I'm giggling just thinking about it.