SNL Has No Clue How to Handle This Political Moment

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https://slate.com/culture/2024/10/sn...-election.html

Saturday Night Live’s stale political impressions brush up against the limits of what the show can accomplish.

By Sam Adams
Oct 21, 20245:36 PM

In this fraught political moment, there are few things more jarring than the experience of watching Saturday Night Live in a swing state. In commercial breaks swollen with ominous attack ads, the country teeters on the brink: Liberal Kamala Harris lets killers go free, and Donald Trump is handing out tax breaks for his billionaire pals. But when the cameras go live in Studio 8H, the stakes plummet. We’re no longer facing the most consequential election of our lifetimes, a life-and-death battle where democracy and the country’s very existence hang in the balance. We’re watching a spectacle staged for our bemused enjoyment, a contest between faintly and not-so-faintly ridiculous figures in which the only real casualties are dignity and sense. It’s not a struggle. It’s a circus.

At its most powerful, SNL’s political comedy can define a public figure for the ages. Will Ferrell’s George W. Bush and Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin feel more present in some ways than their real-life analogues, who, despite what many might think, never actually said “strategery” or “I can see Russia from my house.” Chevy Chase’s pratfalls cemented the public idea of Gerald Ford as an affable bumbler, and the droning repetition of Darrell Hammond’s Al Gore exponentially amplified the vice president’s image as a humorless technocrat. The famous debate sketch, in which Hammond’s Gore endlessly repeats the word lockbox—which the presidential candidate did say, if not quite so often—may not, as former SNL writer Al Franken recently suggested, have been single-handedly responsible for Bush’s election, but it gave viewers permission to be bored by Gore’s virtuousness, just as Ferrell’s portrayal allowed them to embrace Bush as a well-meaning goofball.

If not precisely nonpartisan, SNL’s approach has always been to downplay political comedy in favor of the comedy of politics—the equivalent of political reporters who focus exclusively on the gamesmanship of the campaign trail, rather than the people whose lives and livelihoods are at stake. James Downey, the storied SNL writer who steered the show’s political coverage for decades, was a self-identified “conservative Democrat,” and while you’d be hard-pressed to watch recent seasons and think the staff was stocked with Trump voters, the show has been assiduously and sometimes maddeningly middle-of-the-road—a position that’s required more effort to maintain as the audience for broadcast television has grown both smaller and more polarized. In a 2022 interview, Lorne Michaels, who has steered SNL through most of its nearly 50 years on air, openly pined for a time when it was easier to avoid taking a side. “It’s much easier when everything is normal in politics,” he told the New York Times’ Dave Itzkoff, “and it’s just the two parties hate each other.”

SNL opened its 50th season this fall with its feet planted firmly on the median. In line with the show’s recent preference for stunt-casting its marquee impressions, Michaels had grabbed headlines in the offseason by securing the return of past cast members Maya Rudolph and Andy Samberg to play Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, taking the stump alongside James Austin Johnson’s Trump and Bowen Yang’s newly assigned J.D. Vance. Rudolph’s Harris impression was suitably tweaked since she first appeared on the show in 2019 as USA’s “fun aunt,” but the writing underlying it was flaccid and shapeless, treating Harris more like a quirky celebrity than someone vying for the nation’s highest office. With a passel of new and returning impressions to introduce—Samberg’s submissive Emhoff; Jim Gaffigan’s Tim Walz, a hyperactive golden retriever of a prospective VP; and Dana Carvey’s addled Joe Biden—Rudolph ended up playing the straight woman instead of holding the spotlight, an island of competence in a sea of instability. As with Barack Obama, Harris’ stoicism and equanimity resist easy mockery. (As Downey once said of Obama, “There’s not a single thing to grab onto—certainly not a flaw or hook that you can caricature.”) The result often has the effect of grasping at straws, the show’s writers making a meal of minor foibles or just lazily recycling the opposition’s attack lines. When Rudolph’s Harris avowed that her campaign was as substance-free as Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso”—“the lyrics are vague, but the vibe slaps”—it sounded like the work of a high school debater assigned to a proposition they don’t endorse.

By this past weekend’s cold open, which was based around Harris’ contentious interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, the show had at least grown some baby teeth. Sparring with Alec Baldwin’s eerily shapeless Baier, Rudolph managed to rattle off a list of Harris’ genuine accomplishments despite being interrupted at nearly every word. (“Will you stop?” Rudolph, playing an exasperated Harris, asked him, to which Baldwin’s Baier responded, “Maybe when I go to bed.”) Meanwhile, a cutaway to one of Trump’s rallies, framed as a clip for Harris to respond to, allowed him to ramble unchecked, proclaiming the Jan. 6 insurrection a love-in on the order of Woodstock—repeating an Obama attack line from the previous day—and promising, “I would never threaten anything … except perhaps violence.”

Like the moment in the season’s opening sketch when the bulletproof barrier shielding Trump from an assassin’s bullet is wheeled away to leave a nonplussed Vance standing alone and exposed on the stage, the casual ease with which Johnson’s Trump slides from reassurance to open threat gets at something deeper and more troubling. But it also brushes up against the limits of what SNL can accomplish. In an earlier era, or with a different candidate, that characterization might have stuck the way Ferrell’s or Fey’s did. But Trump is already his own knowing caricature—the Woodstock jab is barely a gloss on the words he actually used—and it would take a sustained assault outside the boundaries of a six-minute sketch to explore the dark underside of his appeal. (During a Weekend Update segment later in the broadcast, all Colin Jost could do was assure viewers that the footage of Trump swaying to a song from Cats was the real thing.) Instead, the sketch flicks at Harris’ attempts to milk a “viral moment” from the interview, putting her in a vertical TikTok frame in hopes of generating one of SNL’s own. Very mindful, very demure.

More than 30 years after it first aired, I’m still haunted by a line from Saturday Night Live’s 1988 debate between Carvey’s George H.W. Bush and Jon Lovitz’s Michael Dukakis, who responds to a rambling, incoherent Bush answer with a baffled, “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.” But it’s less because of what it says about Dukakis than about his party, and the baffled incomprehension with which failed Democratic candidates have treated the past few decades of ascendant Republicans. (Hillary Clinton, too, could not believe she was losing to this guy.) In that time, SNL has lost sight of the idea that its impressions should do more than imitate—Chevy Chase, after all, made no attempt to look or sound like the real Ford—and that politics isn’t solely a matter of what happens on the campaign trail.

In “Washington’s Dream,” a sketch from this season’s second episode, host Nate Bargatze’s George Washington stands regally in a boat filled with rapt Revolutionary soldiers, laying out his vision of the proud nation to come. But that vision is filled with contradiction and outright absurdity. Much of the Founding Father’s inexplicable dreams are based around quirks of the English language. (Why, for example, do we call the meat from cows “beef” and the meat from pigs “pork,” but chicken remains simply “chicken”?) But he also proclaims the lofty ideals of freedom and democracy, which makes the boat’s sole Black soldier, played by Kenan Thompson, jump at the suggestion that those ideals might apply to him, too. Naturally, Washington simply stares blankly ahead and then abruptly changes the subject to hot dogs, forecasting the centuries in which white Americans denied others the rights proscribed in the nation’s founding documents by simply ignoring that there was any contradiction at all.

“Washington’s Dream” isn’t topical or edgy; it’s the kind of thing you can imagine Bob Newhart doing. But it sticks in a way the show’s more desperately of-the-moment bits don’t. So does the moment last Saturday when, after several minutes of material on Trump and Harris’ campaigns, Jost ceded the Weekend Updatedesk to featured cast member Emil Wakim. In a bulky sweater, Wakim spoke for several minutes about how it confuses people to learn that he’s both Lebanese and Christian, and about being the son of an immigrant father so successful that “he’s Republican now”—a nod to a demographic that still eludes some political strategists. He even said “Free Palestine,” if only in quotes. Wakim’s monologue wasn’t especially confrontational, although a joke about how ordinary Arabs get turned into extremists by repeated bombing fell so flat that he facetiously blamed Jost for writing it. But it gave voice to a point of view that’s rarely heard, and not just on late-night comedy shows. Most of SNL’s segments are forgotten as soon as they air, but that one was built to last.