The things you see as the years pass. There’s a sketch on Saturday Night Live that’s like a public service announcement for drug-taking. The idea behind the sketch isn’t that drugs are exciting, adventurous or a breakthrough to something. The idea simply is that you have to be a dork, a loser, to be against taking them. I should specify that the drug in question is a microdose of mushrooms. Maybe the writers would say it’s all they had in mind, not drugs in general. I’m still bemused by five minutes of network airtime on the dangers of not taking a recreational drug. It seems like a new chapter.
Mid-afternoon at sunny UC Irvine. A college kid (Andrew Dismukes) tells his buddies that he’s feeling good because he just microdosed. “Oh, nice!” exclaims a pal. But wait, two of the kids (Mikey Day, Ayo Edeberi) freak out. They can’t believe he’s taking drugs! The two anti-mushroom kids carry on and carry on, yelling and going over the top. The arc of the sketch—the points that get made so that then the thing can end—may be read as follows: everyone thinks the anti-mushroom kids are acting weird; everyone wants some of the dose kid’s mushrooms; everyone’s going to go laugh at the anti-mushroom kids. Along the way Bowen Yang’s character turns down a high-five from Mikey Day. A passing cool-guy adult authority figure delivers a high-five to the drug-taker.
The psychology seems to be the same as a “pot is for losers” Afterschool Special. There’s something you want everybody to dislike? Find some losers and stick them next to it. On the Afterschool Special, the hated thing was pot. Here it’s the saying of bad stuff about mushroom micro-dosing. Because only losers talk that way, so keep it to yourself. If you don’t, the group punishes you for being a weirdo and a drag.
I’m not for or against mushrooms, microdosed or however. But to find these buttons being pressed is a bit remarkable. The sex-and-drugs SNL of the beginning years had a sketch that was similar but different. A nice young couple’s been studying hard (medical school) and now they share a joint. Two rogue ex-cops burst in and kill them. “Another marijuana-related death,” Dan Aykroyd grits (or that’s my memory). There, as in the mushroom sketch, you have overkill and weirdness posed against innocent, harming-no-one blandness and routineness. But you don’t have anyone being held up for shunning. With the new sketch you do. It shows you who, among your friends and acquaintances, you ought to laugh at and snub. It shows you what happens if you take the wrong line, namely that you act like a fool and everyone notices. Which again seems like an anti-pot Afterschool Special. So do the blandness and perkiness put out by the cast, costumes, setting, and so forth. But this time officialdom has a new message for us.
Shaming rankles me, and I object to it here, but mainly I just marvel. Maybe the writers room feels very, very strongly about various younger brothers and sisters who’ve been talking up straight edge. Maybe backdoor money found its way from agribusiness to Lorne Michaels and now he’s getting the public behind Big Psilocybin. I don’t know. The unexpected message, the baldness of the execution, the collective age of the “college kids” (200 years, for an average of 33 years and four months)—all of it adds up to a mystery. It adds up to the times I live in.