Alright, here’s the deal: Saturday Night Live gets dragged harder than an NPC in a bear market. People love saying it’s “not funny,” “too woke,” or “just mid” these days. And yeah, sometimes it’s like watching your dad try to dab at Thanksgiving—cringe. But let’s put some respect on Weekend Update’s name, because that segment? It’s basically the great-great-granddaddy of modern meme culture. No cap.

And if you think memes started with Reddit or 4chan, you need to wake up, sheeple. Memes are older than your grandma’s recipe for depression-era soup. They go all the way back to cave drawings. That’s right—our caveman ancestors were the OG memelords.

Caveman Memes: The Blueprint for Everything

Picture this: you’re chilling in a cave, trying not to get eaten by a saber-toothed tiger. What do you do to kill time? You grab some rocks, draw a thicc bison, and maybe add a little stick figure hunter for some LOLs. That’s a meme, bro. Cavemen weren’t just making art—they were slapping up inside jokes for their tribe, roasting their rival clans, and flexing their mammoth-hunting skills.

It’s all about recontextualization, taking something real and making it hit different. Those cave drawings were like the original “when you realize” memes, but with more woolly mammoths and less internet.

Fast-forward a few thousand years, and SNL’s Weekend Update shows up, taking that same energy and putting it on TV.

Weekend Update: Caveman Energy, Network TV Glow-Up

When SNL dropped in 1975, Weekend Update was an instant vibe. Chevy Chase rolled in with “I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not,” and the game changed forever. It wasn’t just about telling jokes—it was about flipping the news on its head, turning headlines into punchlines. And the way they paired those punchlines with absurd graphics? Straight-up proto-meme behavior.

The early days were wild. Jane Curtin kept the vibe sharp, Dennis Miller brought the intellectual sass, and Norm Macdonald? That dude was the god of roasting. He’d drop a joke so savage, it would leave the audience in stunned silence—and he didn’t care. That pause after a Norm joke? It’s the comedy version of a Pepe staring blankly into the void.

Those graphics, though. They’d take a random photo, slap it on screen, and roast it into oblivion. It was the same energy as putting “when you order it online vs. when it arrives” on a cursed Amazon product. If memes are about remixing reality to expose the absurd, Weekend Update was doing that before most people even had computers.

The Golden Years: When Weekend Update Was Straight Fire

For a while, Weekend Update was the king of cultural commentary. It didn’t just poke fun at the news—it made you question how dumb everything was. They took serious stories, flipped them sideways, and delivered punchlines that hit like a rogue BTC pump at 3 a.m.

Every host had their own sauce, but the vibe stayed consistent: chaotic, edgy, and a little reckless. Norm Macdonald roasting O.J. Simpson every week? Absolute meme-tier energy. Fey and Poehler’s tag-team takedowns? Iconic. They were remixing the headlines the same way we remix Wojak faces today, just without the captions.

The Sauce

Alright, let’s set the record straight. People have been clowning on Saturday Night Live for ages, especially Weekend Update. The hot take? “It’s mid now, not funny anymore, totally washed.”
But here’s the plot twist: The game just changed. What once lived on network TV with all its corporate strings attached has shifted to the wild west of the internet, where memes thrive without advertising execs breathing down their necks.

Why Memelords Owe SNL

Here’s the kicker: Weekend Update walked so memes could run. It took the caveman playbook—draw something dumb, make people laugh, remix it for the squad—and gave it a prime-time glow-up.

Every time you LOL at a cursed image on Instagram or lose it over a Wojak with laser eyes, you’re tapping into that same energy. Memes are all about reframing reality, and Weekend Update did that for decades before we all had Photoshop.

Cavemen had mammoths. SNL had goofy graphics. We’ve got Pepe and Doge. It’s all one big timeline of chaos and creativity.

Don’t Hate the Meme Hustle

So yeah, hate on SNL if you want. Say Weekend Update is mid now. Call it “boomer-core” or whatever. But don’t forget where it came from. Those early days were peak meme energy, and even if the segment isn’t as savage as it once was, its legacy is locked in.

Next time you laugh at a TikTok or spam a meme in the group chat, pour one out for the cavemen, the Weekend Update OGs, and everyone else who paved the way. Memes are forever, and SNL helped keep the flame alive.
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