TVSquad

Christmas is the easiest holiday to make fun of because it can be so hokey and jolly. It's like the office jolly holly -- someone who's always smiling, always bringing gooey sweet goodies to the office for no reason, always cackling at everyone's jokes, no matter how bad they are or what MadTV episode they were taken from.

But deep down, you know that anyone that happy has to be making up for something equivalently dark and sinister. They are hiding a dark secret, something they can't even admit to themselves. You just know that the rises in sick leave usage after she brings her secret recipe brownies aren't coincidences.

Christmas wears the same mask. All it takes is a little scratching to find something dark and funny behind its red and white veneer. SNL has had some great success taking pot shots at Christmas, even during the down times, for this very reason. It's hard not to find something funny about Christmas, but it's hard to keep finding something funny about it long after the turkey has been picked clean and the eggnog has left a thin layer of plaque on the inside of your small intestine. Here are the best of the best.

Let's face the brutal truth here for a moment: Saturday Night Live isn't really known for its live sketches anymore. I can't remember the last time I heard someone talk about how funny a sketch was on a past week's show. However, when it comes to their digital shorts, well, then they're the bomb (as the young generation is saying today). The trend began last year with the super-colossally popular Lazy Sunday short, followed weeks later by the semi-super-colossally popular Laser Cats. The digital short sensation continued this year with Dick in a Box and Peyton Manning for the United Way.

Thus, it comes as no surprise that NBC is trying to jump on the popularity of these shorts with a contest that will send one lucky participant to the season finale of SNL.

(Part 3 of 5) In our review of the top television stories of 2005 former TV Squad scribe Ryan J. Budke said this about TV on the Internet, "If you think that 2005 was big, wait 'til 2006 -- you ain't seen nothing yet." Boy howdy, was he correct! If 2005 was the year that TV came to the Internet, then 2006 was the year that it bought a home, settled in, and joined the local PTA. From pilots and first-run episodes to classic and canceled shows, television and the World Wide Web took one step closer to being officially married in 2006. And, we have one site on the Internet to thank for this explosion . . .

YouTube.

Okay, maybe YouTube isn't the only site we should be thanking. I mean, according to Ryan, the networks realized back in 2005 that this newfangled technology called the Internet wasn't going away any time soon, so they began to utilize it. However, it was the utterly huge popularity of YouTube that pushed the networks into getting their collective acts together to get their content onto the Web.

NBC and Saturday Night Live are on the naughty list of the Parents Television Council (known henceforth in this post as the PTC). The conservative watchdog organization of people who have nothing better to do are politely asking (OK, angrily demanding) that the network rethink its decision to air an uncensored version of the now famous 'Dick in a Box' skit on its own website as well as YouTube. In this particular skit, Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake liberally use Richard Nixon's nickname several times in a song about the perfect gift to give to your girlfriend.

When the skit originally aired on SNL the word was bleeped out a total of 16 times. However, since Scrooge the FCC has no jurisdiction over the Internet the network was able to leave the online clip uncensored. According to PTC blowhard president Brent Bozell NBC has hit a new low and will stop at nothing to find loopholes to have indecent programming to reach the public. In its defense the network has asked that unauthorized copies of the skit be yanked from sites like YouTube. The network's website airs both a censored and uncensored version of the skit and they have put up a warning saying that the uncensored version contains explicit lyrics.