 The television show Bart watches , Tuesday Night Live , is a parody of NBC 's Saturday Night Live . Krusty appears in a sketch called " The Big Ear Family " , and says that the sketch goes on for twelve more minutes , even though the joke 's punchline has already been established . That was Jon Vitti 's way of criticizing Saturday Night Live for having overlong sketches with thin joke premises . The sequence originally had a longer version of the Tuesday Night Live band playing into the commercial break , but it was cut because Vitti , who was a writer on Saturday Night Live during the 1985 – 86 season along with fellow The Simpsons writers , George Meyer and John Swartzwelder , did not want to come off as being bitter . 
