the appropriation of AAVE by white people is gross, the mislabeling of AAVE as a "Gen Z phenomenon" is also gross, but on top of that, the SNL skit reads like they just pulled a list of terms from UrbanDictionary and sprinkled them in, not caring that AAVE has a defined grammar! https://twitter.com/nbcsnl/status/1391243431377264641

AAVE is a defined dialect which, yes, has its own grammatical rules. You can’t just stick random words together and call it AAVE!

As is often the case with languages in general, people who speak the language oftentimes don't know the grammatical rules that they're instinctively following.

That doesn't mean the rules don't exist; it just means native speakers have internalized them.

Native speakers usually don't know the grammatical rules they already use. Most native English speakers will be confused by this chart! But at the same time, they'll all agree that

"old red leather biker jacket"

sounds more "correct" than

"leather biker red old jacket"

some apologists are claiming that this appropriation of AAVE by Gen Z is the point of the joke, but in doing so, they're actually endorsing the racism that underlies the whole joke: this "joke" is only "funny" due to the perceived otherness of AAVE in the first place

if your goal is to critique the way Gen Z people appropriate AAVE, you could maybe structure that as a skit in which white Gen Z people try to speak AAVE to a Black person who can't understand them because their AAVE is so grammatically nonsensical

(I'm not saying that would be a *good* skit, and it would be problematic in other ways, but at least it would be a coherent act of satire, instead of... whatever this SNL skit was)

I actually DID see a TikTok that does this well, where a Korean girl makes fun of xiaomanyc by trying to order food in Korean from a waitress who just says "actually can we just speak English? It's hard to understand what you're saying"

and see, that's actually FUNNY

if anyone knows or can find this TikTok, let me know - I've liked 1000 videos since then so it's impossible to find in my history

tfw an @nbcsnl skit is just a worse version of an existing TikTok, and the TikTok is both funny *and* educational, whereas SNL is neither

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeb9xu4m/ 

for everyone saying "that's the joke": yes, we get the "joke"... you're just not as funny and clever as you think you are