In this troubling political moment, there is nothing more jarring than the experience of watching Saturday Night Live in a swing state. In between commercials filled with creepy attack ads, the country teeters on the brink. Liberal Kamala Harris is freeing a murderer and Donald Trump is giving tax cuts to his billionaire friends. But once the camera is up and running in Studio 8H, the stakes plummet. We no longer face the most consequential election of our lifetimes, a life-or-death battle in which the very survival of our democracy and our nation is at stake. We are watching a spectacle staged for bewildered amusement, a competition between characters who are faintly ridiculous and those who are not at all ridiculous, where the only real casualty is dignity and decency. . It’s not a struggle. It’s a circus.
The most powerful SNL political comedy can define a celebrity for the ages. George W. Bush, played by Will Ferrell, and Sarah Palin, played by Tina Fey, actually do things like “strategy” and “I can see Russia from my house,” despite what many might think. In some ways, it feels more present than its real-life counterpart, who never spoke of it. Chevy Chase’s name-calling cemented the public image of Gerald Ford as an affable bumbling boy, and Darrell Hammond’s Al Gore’s repetitive monotony cemented the vice president’s image as a humorless technocrat. dramatically amplified. The famous debate sketch in which Hammond’s Gore endlessly repeats the word “lockbox” (the presidential candidate certainly said it, if not all that often) was created by former SNL writer Al Franken. He may not have been solely responsible for Bush’s election, as he has recently suggested. But it gives viewers permission to be bored by Gore’s nobility, just as Ferrell’s portrayal allows them to accept Bush as a well-meaning goofball.
While not exactly nonpartisan, SNL’s approach has always been to downplay political comedy in favor of political comedy. This is the equivalent of a political reporter who only focuses on campaign tactics rather than the people whose lives and livelihoods are at stake. James Downey, the acclaimed SNL writer who led the show’s political coverage for decades, was a self-described “conservative Democrat.” You’d be hard-pressed to watch recent seasons and think the staff is full of Trump supporters, but the show has positioned itself fervently, and sometimes maddeningly, in the middle. As broadcast television audiences shrink and become more polarized, more efforts are needed to maintain this position. In a 2022 interview, Lorne Michaels, who has helmed SNL for most of its nearly 50 years on the air, spoke openly about a time when it was easier to avoid taking sides. “It would be much easier if everything was normal in politics,” he told Dave Itzkoff of the New York Times. “And it’s just that both parties hate each other.”
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SNL opened its 50th season this fall with its feet firmly planted in the median. In keeping with the show’s recent trend of stunt casting popular impressions, Michaels had past cast members Maya Rudolph and Andy Samberg return to the role of Kamala Harris in the offseason, as well as her husband Doug Emhoff. He solidified his support and became a hot topic. James Austin Johnson’s Trump and Bowen Yang’s newly appointed J.D. Vance. Rudolph’s impression of Harris has been fine-tuned since she first appeared on the show as America’s “fun aunt” in 2019, but the underlying writing is slow and formless. They treated Harris more like an eccentric celebrity than a contender for the nation’s highest office. Here are some new and returning impressions. Samberg’s obedient Emhoff. Tim Walz, played by Jim Gaffigan, is a hyperactive golden retriever who is running for vice president. And the turmoil of Dana Carvey’s Joe Biden — Rudolph, instead of seizing the spotlight as a talented island in a sea of instability, ends up playing a straight woman. Like Barack Obama, Harris’ asceticism and equanimity resist easy ridicule. (As Downey once said of Obama, “There’s nothing to grab onto — certainly no flaws or hooks to caricature.”) The results are often clutching at straws; The show’s writers end up downplaying minor issues. Exploiting weaknesses or just lazily recycling the opponent’s offensive line. When Harris, who plays Rudolph, proclaims that his campaign is as hollow as Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” — “The lyrics are vague, but the vibe is slap” — they’re not sure what they’re supporting. It sounded like the job of a high school debater who was given an impossible proposition.
By last weekend’s cold open, which was based on Harris’ controversial interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, the show had at least developed baby teeth. Sparring with Alec Baldwin’s eerily intangible Baier, Rudolph manages to rattle off a list of Harris’s true accomplishments, even though he’s interrupted almost every word. (“Will you stop?” asks Rudolph, who plays an enraged Harris, to which Baldwin’s Baier replies, “Maybe it’s time to go to bed.”) Meanwhile, a clipping from one of Trump’s rallies shows Harris saying: It was framed as an appealing clip. Declaring the Jan. 6 riot a favor ordered by Woodstock, he reiterated Obama’s line of attack the day before, promising, “I will not threaten anything…except maybe violence.”
Like the moment in the season-opening sketch when the bulletproof barrier that protects Trump from the assassin’s bullets is pushed aside and the unconcerned Vance is exposed on stage alone, Johnson’s Trump casually slides from reassurance to outright intimidation. There is something to grasp at the peace that is missing. Something deeper and more troubling. But it also pushes the limits of what SNL can accomplish. In an earlier era, or with a different candidate, that characterization might have stuck in the same vein as Ferrell and Fey. But while Trump is already a knowledgeable caricature of himself, and the Woodstock jab barely represents the words he actually used, exploring the dark underside of his appeal requires six minutes of Continuous attacks are required outside the scope of the sketch. (In a Weekend Update segment later in the broadcast, all Colin Jost could do was assure viewers that the footage of Trump swaying to the song “Cats” was real.) ) Instead, the sketch repels Harris’ attempt to exploit “viral buzz.” “That Moment” was excerpted from the interview and placed her in a vertical TikTok frame in hopes of generating SNL’s own unique frame. Very thoughtful, very modest.
More than 30 years after it first aired, I still remember the lines from the 1988 Saturday Night Live debate between Carvey’s George H.W. Bush and Jon Lovitz’s Michael Dukakis. I can’t get it out of my head. Bush’s rambling and incoherent answers prompted him to respond, confused: I can’t believe I lost to this guy. ” But that’s less because of what has been written about Dukakis than about his party and the baffling incomprehension with which failed Democratic candidates have treated dominant Republicans over the past few decades. (Hillary Clinton couldn’t believe she’d lose to this guy, either.) Meanwhile, SNL had lost sight of the idea that its impressions should be more than imitations—Chevy Chase, after all. didn’t try to look or sound anything. Like the real Ford, that politics isn’t just about what happens on the campaign trail.
In this season’s second sketch, “Washington’s Dream,” George Washington, played by host Nate Bargatze, stands proudly on a boat full of enamored Revolutionary soldiers, waiting to see what’s coming. Describe the vision of the nation. But that vision is full of contradictions and sheer absurdity. Many of the founding fathers’ inexplicable dreams are based on quirks of the English language. (For example, why do we call the meat of cows “beef” and the meat of pigs “pork,” but chicken remains just “chicken”?) But he also spoke about freedom and democracy. It proclaims a noble ideal, and this enhances the ship’s appeal. Kenan Thompson, the lone black soldier, jumps at the suggestion that the ideal might apply to him. Unsurprisingly, Washington just stared blankly ahead, then suddenly changed the subject to hot dogs, completely denying that for centuries white Americans had rights denied to them in our founding documents. It predicted a time when people would ignore it and deny it to others.
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“Washington Dream” is not about something topical or edgy. It’s the kind of thing you could imagine Bob Newhart doing. But it sticks in a way that some of the show’s more poignant moments don’t. Such was the moment last Saturday, when Jost handed over the Weekend Update desk to featured performer Emir Wakim after a few minutes of material about the Trump and Harris campaigns. Wearing a thick sweater, Wakim talks about how it confuses people to know he’s Lebanese and a Christian, and the son of an immigrant father who is so successful that “he’s a Republican now.” We talked for a few minutes about being a great son. Some political strategists. He even said, “Liberate Palestine,” albeit in quotation marks. Mr. Wakim’s monologue was not particularly confrontational, but his joke about ordinary Arabs being turned into extremists by repeated bombings was so far off the mark that he jokingly accused Mr. Jost of writing it. did. But it wasn’t just about late-night comedy shows, it was giving voice to a perspective that’s rarely heard. Most segments on SNL are forgotten as soon as they air, but that’s what that segment was created to do. last.
