On last night’s Saturday Night Live, we learned that time stops for nothing—not people and not language. Marcello Hernández, the cast member perhaps most likely to become SNL’s next breakout star, dropped by the “Weekend Update” desk to inform the Millennial co-anchor Colin Jost—and, by proxy, many Millennial audience members—of the slang terms favored by Gen Z. Hernández kicked off the segment by explaining the term chopped to “older folks” such as Jost. If you, like Jost, thought it was a reference to a cooking-competition show, then it might be time to look into retinol. In fact, chopped means “visually unappealing”—a connotation the young star illustrated with a photo of Jost in middle school.
Hernández, always a sweetheart beneath the bluster, eased up by complimenting Jost on his “glo-up”—going from “‘busted’ to ‘Hear me out, though’” as he progressed into adulthood. When Jost wondered why his co-anchor, Michael Che, wasn’t getting this lesson, Hernández explained that Che already knew all this because “Gen Z slang is African American slang. Basically, Black people start saying something, then young people think it’s cool so they start saying it, then white people say it, and then once Elon Musk says it, it’s over.” Jost, always game to play a befuddled white man in dangerous cultural waters, suggested this might be “cap” (a lie). Sadly, but inevitably, Hernández had to declare that, after passing through the lips of this “Boomer,” cap had “officially passed away.” (The bit cut to a headstone, scored by a flourish of “Taps,” reading Cap: ??-2026.)
SNL was making a pretty sharp point. Slang has originated in the Black community for decades, though etymologies are inherently elusive. Unless a slang term emerges from a popular movie, pinpointing an exact date of birth is difficult (hence the question marks on the tombstone). Cap, more frequently invoked in its negative, no cap, achieved new levels of prominence after the Atlanta rappers Future and Young Thug immortalized it in song. Of course, slang can come from other subcultures. The recently departed SNL cast member Bowen Yang, for example, got a lot of comedic mileage out of gay memes and references; blame him if you’ve recently had to explain to your parents what “poppers” are.
Still, as in the best SNL skits, Hernández poked fun at something broadly true: Slang used by young people often pulls from small circles before going mainstream and being appropriated by elders—resulting in its demise. And one element of SNL’s success, especially in recent years, is its ability to facilitate and benefit from that cultural cycle. This is part of the cruel paradox that Hernández highlighted: The show invokes slang terms to seem hip—and, in doing so, uses up the last of the terms’ currency.
[Read: How Colin Jost became a joke]
Jost, 43, played his part in this. He asked Hernández to explain slang in a context he would understand: the history of World War II. (The trope of elder fascination with World War II is itself a little long in the tooth.) Hernández said that Hitler came to power after Germany’s economy was “in its flop era,” allowing the historical monster to seize control, only to prove himself a “certified crash out.” “The world’s op” became “high-key overstimulated,” Hernández continued—and so Hitler “low-key unalived himself and then everybody was like ‘Fahhhhh!’”
“I guess you could say that Hitler was chopped,” Jost surmised—thus killing the term—and then laid waste to lots of other Gen Z terminology: “Stop playing in my face, okay, be so for real. You come to my desk, trying to drag me, when you’re the one sipping the dumb bitch juice? Okay, you must be delulu, boo-boo, because I’m about to crash out right now, fahhhh!”
Hernández regretfully informed Jost that he had just unalived seven more slang terms (which appeared on one last, very wordy tombstone). Depending on your age and pop-culture savvy, this entire endeavor was enlightening, hilarious, or utterly cringe. That’s not an accident; this ambiguity is essential to how SNL now operates.
More than any other popular media institution, the show must constantly reinvent itself to keep a young audience keyed in. Sometimes its evolution is gradual, but then there are seasons like this one, when multiple cast members leave and the transition to a new era accelerates. As new performers and writers join, the pop-culture references will change, and so will the prevailing comedic sensibilities. In the 1990s, the show was often fratty and boorish; in the aughts, it leaned wry and hipsterish; in the 2010s, it was a bit too addicted to social media for its own good; right now it’s still figuring out its next iteration.
[Read: SNL aces the “Heated Rivalry” meme]
This perpetual motion helps the long-running series stay fresh, but it also leads to second-guessing and nostalgia, usually from audience members who feel they are getting aged out of the demo against their will—and who wonder whether terms such as delulu are real or are jokes designed to confuse those who can legally drink.
But don’t blame Saturday Night Live for the march of time; judge the show by how it adapts. The challenge for the writers is to find the right balance between seeming hip and coming off as a try-hard (to use a slang term that was mercifully spared last night). This task might seem impossible to get just right; what’s cringe is always in the eye of the beholder. But as Jost proved, sometimes it’s funnier to admit that you’ve passed your pop-culture sell-by date, even as the world, and your show, low-key moves on.
The post No Cap: SNL Just Killed Gen Z Slang appeared first on The Atlantic.
