I can’t stand Amy Poehler on SNL

You know how it is where you have that one person that pops up in your life and they have that ability to send that feeling of nails on a chalkboard down your spine? That’s what Amy Poehler[wiki] does to me. Sure, as a person who isn’t trying so desperately on camera to get you to laugh while on camera, I bet you that she’s a really nice person. On the set of SNL, she doesn’t work for me.

Every time she pops up on a SNL sketch, which seems to be every single one, I’m already not liking what I’m seeing. I really, really try to keep an open mind and give her, or whatever she is in, a chance, but it always ends up being the same. It’s Amy Poehler, no matter who it is that she is trying to mimic. It’s the same thing that happened with Cheri Oteri and Jimmy Fallon. They could have been funny, it should have been funny, but they weren’t. At least not to me.

I think where it really gets me is the Weekend Update. There was a time where it was done with the premise of being a real news show but with total satire on recent events in pop culture. It had a sense of dead pan that made the jokes all the more hilarious. I would even go as far to say that things just seemed to have been written better. In fact, it was just better. Better to the point where I had trouble breathing because I was laughing so hard.

When you see Amy Poehler do the news on SNL, it’s like listening to a bad knock-knock joke. That other guy is guilty of it as well, but Poehler is worse by far. Smug face, a look-at-me-I’m-funny look, the setup, punch line, and even a badda bing follow-up where she rehashes the punchline to squeeze out those few extra chuckles from the live studio audience. Painful. And even more so, she’s not much different in any of the other sketches that she pops up in. She’s all the same to me, and it’s just not that entertaining.