Whether in the explicit pronouncements of pop culture commentators or in a cursory cruise of off-network, late-night television, there is ample evidence that young men remain both the primary producers and targeted consumers of much mainstream comedic content.  In the two years since the above-mentioned pieces, however, a number of incidents have invigorated offscreen debate about comedy and gender: among them, David Letterman firing his booker for sexist practices and remarks; Daniel Tosh shouting down a female heckler with a rape joke; Seth MacFarlane’s embarrassing song-and-dance at the 2013 Oscars; Jerry Seinfeld’s curiously tone-deaf take on diversity in comedy; and, perhaps most notoriously, Saturday Night Live’s clumsily PR-controlled search for and eventual hiring of African-American female cast member Sasheer Zamata.

Although it may be optimistic to suggest a correlation between those conversations and the recent programming decisions of comedy outlets, such dialogue does affect the discursive context in which we watch and talk about their shows.  In this light, the seemingly necessary belongingness between men and comedy dissipates a bit when considering the representational politics of Comedy Central’s spring lineup–namely, Kroll Show, Broad City, and the soon-to-return Inside Amy Schumer.  It isn’t just that comediennes star and/or figure prominently in the programs’ sketchy stories, something into which the network has put perfunctory effort in the past with The Sarah Silverman Program and Strangers with Candy.  Discourses of gender and sexuality additionally provide a generative grammar for the shows, imbuing their comedic portrayals of race, class, and homosocial bonding with the kind of polysemy customarily ascribed to Comedy Central’s much-lauded news satires.

The most simultaneously silly and insightful segment of Inside Amy Schumer’s first season, for instance, was a recurring bit called “Amy Goes Deep” which had the host interviewing, among others, a well-endowed man and a female dominatrix.  To be sure, the segments (like most sketches on Inside) use sexuality as a way to provoke and titillate viewers initially.  As the interviews progress, however, Schumer refrains from the sort of moralizing too-often implicit in portrayals of sexual taboos and instead gestures toward broader discourses about the ways in which we talk about those taboos.

Although nominally starring a male comedian and trafficking in the gendered caricatures so common among male-targeted comedies, Kroll Show is actually a “full-frontal assault on dude culture and the ideologies that support it, but in dickfest drag.”  It’s also the most cuttingly satirical sketch comedy show about television since Mr. Show.  Kroll’s favorite targets are the vapid fame-mongers, low-rent aesthetics, and crass commercialism of reality television.  Instead of merely reproducing and displaying televisual conventions with the lazy referentiality of an after-“Update” SNL-segment, though, recurring sketches like “PubLIZity” and “Rich Dicks” consistently ask viewers to consider the cultural and industrial discourses that construct and make commonsensical certain gendered representations of reality.

Of course, there exists real danger in the potential that viewers will decode the superficially heterosexist humor in these programs with the same unblinking acceptance as they do a show like Tosh.0.  It certainly doesn’t help, either, that Comedy Central has a tired habit of promoting its shows with the most memorable, “I’m Rick James, bitch!”-iest of sound bites.  Nevertheless, the infinitely mutable nature of comedy (and of the media infrastructures increasingly invested in it) means that no matter how loudly any one voice shouts, there are always plenty of hecklers.

To be sure, Kristen Wiig, Andy Samberg, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney are not (all?) “Gangnam Style”-irrelevant over a year later, but few could have predicted how much more turbulent the new 2013 season would be for the show. In addition to the above-mentioned, gone are reliable everymen Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, and Jason Sudeikis. And when “Weekend Update” co-anchor Seth Meyers takes over Late Night early next year, as Splitsider notes, the remaining cast members will all have been born after SNL’s halcyon premiere year of 1975.

But you know the old saying: the more things change, the more they ObamacareshutdownDrunkUncleMileytwerk. Few television shows are as simultaneously resistant to and reliant upon rapid changes in casting, news cycles, and zeitgeists as Saturday Night Live, an ontological ebb and flow that owes largely to its liveness.  The first two episodes of the show’s new season capture this dynamic perfectly.

The season premiere began with a cold open addressing the political theme of the week, a routine the program began at roughly the same time Jon Stewart proved the demographic utility of mixing comedy and news.  Host Tina Fey’s subsequent monologue lightly hazed the five new cast members in order to set up that most SNL-iest of sketches, the gameshow whose premise wears thin right after its title card.  “New Cast Member or Arcade Fire?,” however, seemed less about further embarrassing freshmen cast members than it was about reminding them (and viewers) of the show’s proud place in the American television heritage.

If SNL’s season premiere re-asserted its right to self-importantly navel gaze, last week’s Miley Cyrus-hosted follow up found the show manically reaching outside its comfort zone for relevance.  With more familiar faces behind the impersonations, sketches like the “50 Shades of Grey Auditions” or the Piers Morgan Live parody might have felt a little less slapdash. Instead, the episode struggled to turn its instantly dated cultural references into a proper showcase for both the veteran and new performers.

Certainly, given the dearth of competition at the timeslot combined with the growing size of its cultural footprint, SNL isn’t going anywhere despite a pretty forgettable start to the season.  What is clear from the early returns, though, is that this season marks one of those once-a-decade changings of the guard.  The show will additionally have to find an original way to engage with digital media culture, and it cannot continue to ignore its absurdly high quotient of white dude-ness.  Yet for all these changes, SNL will return this weekend, putting forth an effort very different from, and yet somehow fundamentally similar to, what it has offered for almost 40 years.  Doing so–even in today’s time-shifted, cross-platform, demo-obsessed media milieu–continues to make it a key case for understanding American television culture.

Tonight, the always-awesome Betty White hosts Saturday Night Live. White’s role is in large part thanks to the Facebook group “Betty White to Host SNL (please?)!” which at last count had 507,998 fans. In other words, she’s not there because NBC and SNL decided on their own volition that it would be great to have a host who is 5.5 times as old as Justin Bieber. But why not? What’s wrong with having old people on network television?

It’s a question which White’s Boston Legal character Catherine Piper asked in the Season 5 episode, “Juiced,” in which she aims to sue the TV networks for not programming for senior citizens. The episode came after it was well-known that Boston Legal would not return for another year, and it self-referentially mourned its imminent passing as the only network show with multiple central cast members over 50. As Piper complains:

We’re just shoved aside as a nuisance. I can’t even watch television shows, for God’s sake, because the networks consider me irrelevant. You’d think they don’t program for anybody over 50. Is it any wonder I’m out knocking over convenience stores?

Of course, she’s right (what, you doubted Betty White?!). The Nielsen demo that matters most to network TV is 18-49. Let’s put that into context, courtesy of the Census’ 2010 Statistical Abstract, which tells us that in 2008, 73.9 Million Americans were under 18, while 94 Million were 50 and over. In other words, the demo that matters to the networks represents only 45% of the population, while the one that they really don’t give a damn about represents almost a third of the population.

Why? In part because the market in audiences pays top dollar for harder-to-get audiences (i.e.: young men), in part because of an antiquated notion that old people don’t have much expendable income and can’t be moved by ads to change their long-held brand loyalties. I’ve yet to read anywhere that the latter has been proven since Betty White was my age, and instead it seems to be yet another example of what Timothy Havens calls “industry lore,” assumed yet baseless truths that calcify over years in Hollywood.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. I invite anyone who thinks otherwise to take a trip to England. I once bet my father that you couldn’t go a day without seeing something nostalgic on one of the UK’s five terrestrial channels about World War II, clearly aimed at an audience who had been alive and well back then; he took me up on the bet, and proved me wrong … but only after three and a half weeks. Gardening programs make it into prime time, shows about antiques, and shows with old people in love. The visibility of senior citizens on Brit TV isn’t simply limited to sixty year-old guys with twenty year-old girlfriends, either: there are older women, and entire communities of old people. Brit TV looks like another planet for many Americans as a result.

Last of the Summer Wine: not American network TV

So I’m excited to see Betty White, but disheartened that she’s almost in a category of her own. It’s also not surprising to hear that a whole slate of other guests may crowd her out (as Myles McNutt discusses here). Ours is a television system that is so hostile to the notion of being responsive to older people beyond playing older shows in syndication. Even the soaps are abandoning older viewers.

On one hand, I want to cynically note that White’s only got this hosting gig in the first place because a bunch of 18-49 year-olds demanded it. But on the other hand, I wish Hollywood would note that even that/my age group can get behind 88 year-olds. One of the White/SNL promos sees her seemingly joking about wanting to host the Academy Awards, but how about we go one better and demand she gets her own TV show (and not just a talk show), 61 years after The Betty White Show first premiered?