'SNL' Trashes Staten Island: Why Leftists Hate the Borough

Every once in a while, I’ll get sent a clip of a Saturday Night Live segment that someone finds amusing but it’s been years since I’ve watched the show because it’s simply not that funny anymore. Most of the humor now is snide and while some conservatives like the anti-Obama pieces, I find them more daring than genuinely funny.

The latest clip sent to me was “Gossip Girl-Staten Island” and was a send up of the smallest NYC borough depicting the residents as “guidos” and loudmouth big-haired, spikes wearing women. There is also a reality show called “Jersey Shore” which has these prototypes being as obnoxious as possible for the small screen.

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I was born in Manhattan and knew little of the outer boroughs and was perfectly content with the daily newspapers ignoring them as well. The only television reference about the “forgotten” borough was usually on a comedy cop show like “Barney Miller” when a police officer was threatened with being stationed in the boondocks of S.I.

I moved to Staten Island in 1978 right after I had my third child and had outgrown our two bedroom apartment. We bought an inexpensive twelve room Victorian in the soon-to-be gentrified neighborhood of Stapleton Heights. In all the years I’ve lived here I have never met the likes of the characters parodied on SNL or any other reality show. Perhaps that’s because I live on the North Shore which has a more urban environment where many artists and musicians gravitated to from Manhattan.

The funniest line in the SNL skit is uttered by a “guido” telling his girl that he’s going to take her out for dinner at “some place romantic, someplace tropical, yes, Rainforest café.” Sophisticated New Yorkers may not even know what that is but it’s a franchise of family restaurants with a jungle motif. Note to SNL writers: Staten Island doesn’t have one but Jersey has a few.

The native Staten Islanders I’ve met do not speak with the Brooklynese accents in the SNL skits. Yes, there are many Italian families here but there are also many Africans, Pakistani, Russian, Polish, German, Asian, Irish and many Hispanics from Central and South America. There are also many pizzerias and many are run and operated by Albanians. So basically, Staten Island is your typical New York City borough or is it and why do the liberal elite find it such an easy target to mock?

Staten Island is probably the most politically conservative of all five counties that make up the Big Apple. It was the only NYC borough that went for McCain last year and it is more akin to the Midwest politically. Its population has the highest median income in NYC and is 77% white.

The view of S.I. from my home.

Although I’ve claimed to have never met the Staten Islanders ridiculed on SNL, my children tell me that the caricatures are dead on. But the big hair, loud mouthed, gold-chained hairy chest Italians were portrayed in “Saturday Night Fever” and those characters lived in Brooklyn. Why pick on Staten Island, you may ask.

Staten Island is heavily Roman Catholic and very family oriented. After receiving so many glaring stares from storekeepers in Manhattan at my expanding brood, it was a relief to find that Staten Island welcomed and accommodated large families.

In 2004, Amy Richards wrote an essay for the New York Times Lives section in which she recounted the dilemma of discovering she was pregnant with triplets. She wrote, “It’s not the back of a pickup at 16, but now I’m going to have to move to Staten Island. I’ll never leave my house because I’ll have to care for these children. I’ll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise.” I’m assuming the reason she aborted two of her babies was so she could still live in Manhattan. Therein lies the liberal contempt for a borough that cherishes and respects family values and human lives.

Well this native Manhattanite loves Staten Island. It is the most beautiful and greenest of all the boroughs. According to the Princeton review, the most beautiful campus is right here in Staten Island. Wagner College has a million dollar view of the skyline of New York City, the Statue of Liberty and New York Harbor as do most of the palatial homes on Grymes Hill.

So if the untalented writers at SNL want to continue mocking Staten Island, so be it. I would like to remind them however that this is also the borough that suffered the greatest personal losses in the 9/11 attack. The residents have shown great resilience and courage since then and will surely weather their puny attempt at humor as well.