Saturday Night Live recently added two more female cast members but they are STILL going to have to rely on guest stars to play Michelle Obama. While the lack of minorities on the NBC late night show is nothing new, it's really starting to look worse and worse now that we have an African-American president and nary an African-American who can play him on the NBC staple.

But as I said, this is hardly a new predicament. SNL has rarely had standout minority talent. Have they had a breakout non-white star since Eddie Murphy? You can't really count Damon Wayans since he was only a featured performer and was fired. All of those years on SNL and Tim Meadows can't even get his own throwaway Happy Madison feature. But you can't really blame the actors asa cast members from the early days have commented that a lot of Garrett Morris' material didn't make it because it didn't fit..

It's hard to figure out why this is happening and why it hasn't changed. Part of me thinking that the key issue is where SNL looks for talent. I went through the Groundlings' alumni photos and a quick glance found two African-Americans in some 34 pages of pictures. I've been to Upright Citizens Brigade in LA and I can't recall seeing a single minority performer (and there aren't many in the audience either). So is Improv a white person's game? Does the need for some shared experiences to make the ability to improv with one another draw a diving line between races or economic backgrounds? Or is there something with the way that these troupes are set up that they don't reach many minorities?

I don't know what the answer is but you'd think that, in this day and age, someone would have told Lorne Michaels that he might want to switch up his approach. It's not like the series is hitting home runs. There are still some great sketches but the show seems incapable of churning out two good shows in a row and Kristen Wiig can only appear in so many sketches.