But First

It’s easy (and hackneyed) to say SNL characters have gone soft. Comedy is always changing, getting both more and less sensitive: Some things that were once edgy, like making fun of the president, no longer raise an eyebrow. And some jokes, like broad stereotypes, get less funny when you meet more of the people being mocked, instead of seeing them as some distant, foreign “other.”

But SNL characters have also changed in part because the ways of complaining about them have changed. For the first three or four decades of Saturday Night Live, viewer complaints about SNL characters or sketches were mostly relegated to NBC switchboards and letters that the general public didn’t read.

Now, complaints fly across social media, people tag advertisers, and there’s a snowball effect that many comedians — especially those on large corporate shows — would just as soon avoid. That’s why the following SNL characters probably wouldn’t fly today. Even if some of them are funny.