Fallon and Fey (as they're billed, like an old vaudeville team) have turned a dead-air segment of "SNL" into don't-touch-that-remote television. In Fallon and Fey's hands, "Weekend Update" surges with fearless topical satire. It reverberates with the sweet thwack of jokes hit out of the park. After the long bathroom break that was the Colin Quinn/Norm Macdonald era, "Weekend Update" is funny again. I think this may be one of the portents of the Apocalypse.

Fallon and Fey (oh, how I love to say those names) don't try to spoof serious newscasters, like Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin did in their classic stint on "Weekend Update," nor do they show off how smart they are (and we're not), like former "Weekend Update" anchor Dennis Miller. Instead, watching Fallon and Fey is like hanging out in a cafe, perusing the New York Times with two intelligent, funny people who find the news as maddening and absurd as you do.

The 30-year-old Fey, who became the show's first female head writer in 1999, has a sparkly-smart, appealingly unaffected manner. Fey's delivery is both bright and sly; when a joke is particularly savage, she might put a hand over her mouth in a mock, girly "Oops!" pantomime. With her delicate features, black-rimmed glasses and pert, flippy hairdo, she reminds you of Marlo Thomas in "That Girl" -- if That Girl had been a heat-seeking missile of verbal comic destruction.

A Fey joke is a thing of beauty -- precisely worded, lethally barbed, deliciously silly. Here are some of her best:

"Gale Norton, President Bush's controversial nominee for secretary of the interior, told a Senate committee this week, 'I intend to make the conservation of America's national treasures my highest priority.' At the top of her list is the American Bald Oil Magnate."

"Despite explosive violence in the West Bank this week, negotiators remain hopeful that a U.S.-sponsored summit could end the conflict. Israeli and Palestinian officials say they are eager to sign an agreement so they can dip it in gasoline, light it on fire and throw it at each other."

	"Saturday Night Live" (11:30 p.m. Saturdays, NBC) Print story E-mail story

"O.J. Simpson is once again facing criminal charges for a road rage incident in which Simpson violently ripped the glasses off a man's head. On a positive note, this time he left the head."

"In Washington last week, officials from the National Rifle Association met with a group of 200 high school students. There were no survivors."

The pairing of Fey with the boyish Fallon was inspired; in newscaster mode, wearing a jacket and tie with his hair gelled into semiruly spikes, Fallon looks like a teenager putting on a show with his big sister. Fallon has a light, deadpan touch with the mock news. But he's at his best elsewhere on the show, when he's not constricted by a desk.

Now playing: Read all the recent movie reviews by Salon's critics