A few months ago on Netflix, I rewatched a group of "Saturday Night Live" episodes from two decades back. It was an odd experience. The jokes were still cleverly constructed, but with Dan Quayle's tongue slips and Bill Clinton's scandals now distant memories, I found myself nodding with recognition rather than laughing out loud.
"Satire," playwright George S. Kaufman famously said, "is what closes on Saturday night."
Lagunatics, the annual song and dance revue parodying life around Laguna Beach, faced this quandary when its 2013 show "Gagtime," originally slated for October, got pushed back to January because of a mold problem at the Forum Theater. At least two numbers portrayed issues that had changed or passed by the introduction of the new year, and even the others had three more months of distance from their original inspiration.
Maybe it was inevitable, then, that the moment when I laughed hardest Saturday night (Saturday night, how about that?) came when Bill Harris, who played a radio announcer at various points throughout the show, told the audience that he had "just lost my last job as life coach for Justin Bieber."
