Seth Rogen knows how to make people laugh. Whether it be as an actor, writer, producer or all of the above, he has been a key contributor to many of the funniest movies and TV shows of the 21st century. But knowing how to make people laugh also means that he has a full understanding of the extreme challenge of comedy – and it’s that understanding that is at the heart of his deep appreciation for Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night.
This being the end of the year, everybody in the film world is looking back at 2024 and highlighting their favorite features of the last 12 months, and in a recent list published by Variety, Seth Rogen uses 413 words to express a lot of love for the new film about the launch of Saturday Night Live. The multi-hyphenate begins by acknowledging and appreciating the challenge Jason Reitman took on in the making of the comedy:
Being funny in a movie is hard, but PORTRAYING people being funny in a movie might be one of the hardest things there is. Because … as the audience, you know they’re TRYING to be funny — and nothing makes something less funny than that. In ‘Saturday Night’ you KNOW you’re watching a movie about funny people. Not just any funny people — some of the most iconic funny people in history.
Those funny people, of course, are the members of the original Saturday Night Live cast – and the performances by the ensemble cast including Ella Hunt as Gilda Radner, Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase, and Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd has been praised since the film first premiered.
Seth Rogen goes on to call Saturday Night “nothing short of miraculous” in the way in which it adapts the special skill of comedians. The filmmaker explains that it’s not just that the film is funny, but that it accentuates the importance of the artform and its valuable longevity. Rogen continues,
It’s a film that reveres comedy and those who bring it to life — a film that asserts comedy as not only something relevant, it’s something that prevails. The same ideology that brought this film to life is the one that brought ‘SNL’ to life 50 years ago — comedy IS important — it is worth fighting for and worth bending over backwards to achieve — and if you do, it could create something that lasts forever.
The short-form review concludes with Seth Rogen explaining how Saturday Night‘s thesis is best expressed in the film’s climax. It appears as though the experimental television comedy may be doomed, as nobody has faith in it beyond the creatives involved… but then Nicholas Braun’s Andy Kaufman steps into the spotlight to properly save the day with his iconic Mighty Mouse bit. As Rogen notes, everyone in the room in that moment understands that funny is funny, and that’s a pretty special thing to portray in a film.
If you’re now feeling the itch to watch/rewatch Saturday Night (which made it on to CinemaBlend’s list of 2024’s best movies), the bad news is that it is not available on any subscription services, but it is available for digital rental and/or purchase from online retailers including Prime Video, Apple, Fandango At Home and Google Play.