I watch SNL on my DVR Sunday mornings, which permits me the luxury of not suffering through interminable bad sketches. Wiig’s characters are so often terrible that my Television Scheduler and I coined a term for fast-forwarding through a bad sketch: “wiiging” — as in, “Crap, we wiiged through half the episode.”

Two of her stock sketches in particular — Gilly and Secret Word — are instant wiigings, except that last night’s Secret Word was actually reasonably funny for Mick Jagger’s character. Target Lady usually gets wiiged, Shanna usually gets wiiged, the woman who can’t handle surprises usually gets wiiged. There’s a reason it’s called wiiging — they’re all her characters. Add in crap musical acts, Fred Armisen, and repeat commercial parodies: some mornings, SNL is just a 30-minute show punctuated by extended blurs of fast forward.

One might hope that Wiig would leave quietly, but last night’s episode was constructed as a farewell, including some of her stock characters. The ‘cold open’ featured Wiig in a spoof Lawrence Welk Show.  Wiig’s character is called Doonese, which Wiig plays with a prosthetic forehead and plastic baby arms. Get it? She has congenital defects, so she’s gross, thus hilarious!

I have always particularly disliked the Doonese character. She is insulting, demeaning, and tediously unfunny. Last night’s was the only remotely enjoyable iteration of that sketch, and for two reasons: Jon f-ing Hamm and the peeing statue. Otherwise, the whole premise of the sketch is that people with birth defects are repulsive and we can laugh at them. Setting the sketch in the 1950s or whenever doesn’t make it funny, either. This is 2012 — we’re better than this.

I have long wondered what power Wiig holds over the producers and writers of the show. The problem may be that she is acting for the studio, not the screen — which means her gestures are over-exaggerated and clownish. Part of what makes her good in the movies is her deadpan and subtlety, which is entirely absent in SNL. What might play well to the back row of studio 8H looks corny and clumsy on HDTV. It even occurs to me that the writers are producing deliberately weak characters for her, so that she has to flail and twist to try to make them funny. Whatever the problem, be it of her or through her, it is now blissfully gone.

The only possible downside from Wiig leaving is that we might not be able to wiig through significant portions of the show. Now we have to budget an hour or more for watching it. From our point of view, that might be a bad thing: we could put the extra time to good use. For the producers, it should be a good thing. They should have dumped her years ago.

Before I get to that, I want to clear my tabs in this last post of the year. First, you should read Bob Herbert’s op-ed about the Senate’s plan to fund health care by taxing “Cadillac” insurance plans. I was indifferent to this proposal, but Herbert makes a very good case for why it is wrong, and so I am now against it. We can only hope the mechanism is abandoned in the reconciliation process.

Next, this article from Tony Judt, about what it’s like to live with ALS is striking and moving – and especially resonates when he says, “it is hard to resist the thought that even the best-meaning and most generously thoughtful friend or relative cannot hope to understand the sense of isolation and imprisonment that this disease imposes upon its victims.” I have often thought the same of Crohn’s, and I am sure it’s true of a great many other illnesses.

Lastly, back to Alien: I happened on Dan O’Bannon’s obituary in the NY Times over the holiday. O’Bannon wrote the screenplay for Alien, as well as several other horror and science fiction films. O’Bannon also had Crohn’s disease – in fact, the obit quotes him as saying, “the idead for the the monster in ‘Alien’ originally came from a stomachache I had.” I’ve seen Alien a half-dozen times, and now it makes perfect sense: how I’ve wished the monster gnawing at my guts would just kill me and/or scamper away.

Of course, most doctors will tell you that Crohn’s is incurable but not terminal – so it’s notable that the obit states, “the cause [of death] was Crohn’s disease.” That could mean any number of things, from surgical complications to sepsis to self-assisted euthanasia – there are a lot of ways to die from Crohn’s disease. But the fact that you might identify a proximate cause of death in no way changes the underlying cause of death; so when doctors say Crohn’s isn’t terminal, what they mean is that in theory you could live a normal lifespan, if you can just avoid all the different ways people with Crohn’s disease die prematurely. Props to whomever named Mr. O’Bannon’s cause of death for what it was.

Sad though Mr. O’Bannon’s passing is, I am at least grateful I can finally claim a movie for my disease. People with AIDS have Philadelphia, and people with ALD have Lorenzo’s Oil – but those of us with Crohn’s? We have frickin’ Alien – and that’s a pretty badass movie to have.

That’s it for 2009. See you in the new year.