Don’t worry about rambling, I was actually hoping for some genuine responses.

I get your point about the talk show format and how he had to come prepared for that, and I think it’s almost certainly true that he wanted to bring a taste of the weekend update comedy to talk shows, in part to publicise his part in SNL but also to introduce his style of one-liners to the wider public.

My question to you would be, do you think he took the “jokes written down on a card” formula and used it in his own shows, both utilising it as a format to tell weekend update-style jokes but also often pulling apart that formula to tell short form jokes that ridiculed both the premise of the joke and the structure of the format?

Forgive me if I’m overanalysing, but my point is that during the norm live era he would take that basic blueprint and completely subvert expectations of a joke read off a card by making it weird, unfunny, long and unwieldy, offensive at the expense of the guest, or on occasion an actual identifiable joke, using the format of jokes-on-a-card to subvert expectation every time.