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    Saturday Night Live: Jon Hamm excels as Trump heads to The White Lotus

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    Ahead of Easter, Saturday Night Live looks back at Jesus’s cleansing of the temple. He vows to ride the holy area of money, which brings out president Donald “Jesus” Trump (James Austin Johnson), who once again compares himself to the son of God: “Many people are even calling me the Messiah because of the mess I-a made out of the economy.”Trump brags about his “beautiful” tariffs, which were “working so well I had to stop them … now everything is back exactly how it was minus a few trillion dollars.”As he’s done in the past, Trump breaks the fourth wall to make fun of the cast frozen behind him – he signals out Ego Nwodim for her big hit performance last week – before tying things back to the upcoming holiday: “We love Easter, we love bunny, we love hunting for eggs just like everyone’s doing in the grocery store right now, because they cost a billion, trillion dollars.”This was one of the better cold opens in a while, mostly because, for as much as Johnson’s Trump rambled, it homed in on one topic: his insane bungling of the economy.Show favorite Jon Hamm hosts for the fourth time. Although his last go-round as host was 10 years ago, he has been on the show a lot since then, having racked up 14 cameos. He extolls the virtues of cameos, which can help take “a medium sketch to a marginally better than a medium sketch, or when a monologue is feeling aimless, and it needs a jolt of energy”. Right on cue, out comes Oscar winner Kieran Culkin to prove his point. The two bicker over their respective awards, penis sizes, and which of their acclaimed cable dramas was better. Hamm is right at home on the SNL main stage.Check-to-Check Business News Channel offers “financial new to regular folk living paycheck to paycheck”. Whereas the S&P means nothing to the hosts or their audience, other signs – such as “candy bars are up from ‘sure, baby,’ to ‘put that back’,” are dire signs. Meanwhile, healthcare spending remains at zero, while millions of Americans are investing in healthcare alternatives such as “just lay down, take an Advil, or just pray it goes away”.Another financial expert advises Americans to prepare for tariff price increases by switching from name brand products such as Perrier, Cap’n Crunch, and DiGiorno to knock-off brands: Uncle Bubble (“made from pure Tennessee tap water”), Sergent Munch (“lower rank, lower price, flavor bad”), and DeVonte (“it’s not delivery, it’s DeVonty”).This is one of SNL’s sharpest pieces of political comedy in a long time, managing to make light of America’s increasingly grim financial predicament in a way that average people will actually relate to. Also, the moment where Hamm and Nwodim’s news anchors laugh off the idea of ever repaying their student loans and start singing the chorus to En Vogue’s 1992 hit single, My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It), is a season highlight. They have great chemistry with each other.A new Please Don’t Destroy sees the guys playing investigators in a police procedural. The grim search for a councilman’s abducted niece is interrupted by Hamm’s detective, who gets way too excited over the prospect of ordering pizza for the long work night ahead. Chastised by the other cops, he turns into a little kid, crying about how “maybe I’ll have a soda and that’s all I’ll have from the pizza party!” When the lead detective casually mentions that he’s already ordered three cheese, three Hawaiian pizzas, the rest of the squad also freak out. Hamm is at his goofy best here, as is everyone else. Indeed, this might be the funniest PDD to date.On the boringly titled game show Guess the Correct Answer, Hamm’s contestant is terrified he will do something embarrassing that will go viral and ruin his life. His fears immediately come to pass when he bungles simple answers and ends up divulging deeply personal secrets about his racism, small penis and “unstoppable, unceasing” lust for his daughter’s friends. Simplistic and kind of lazy as written, but Hamm’s gung-ho delivery keep the laughs coming.HBO’s The White Potus sees Trump attempt to unwind at an exotic vacation resort, only to fall into a suicidal funk. Elsewhere on the island, heretofore absent Ivanka (Scarlett Johansson) immediately bails on her newfound Buddhism, commerce secretary Howard Lutnick (Jon Gries) pervs out on the idea of “America get bent over and railed by other countries,” RFK Jr (Hamm) rambles about fluoride in water to his confused, buck-toothed girlfriend (Sarah Sherman) before darting off to kill and eat a monkey, Marco Rubio (Marcello Hernández) is ditched by his mean girls Pam Bondi (Ashley Padilla) and Kristi Noem (Heidi Gardner) only to be seduced by Vladimir Putin (a returning Beck Bennett), Eric Trump (a returning Alex Moffat) is his usual dumb self, while Don Jr (Mikey Day) has a sex dream about his ex-wife’s current beau, Tiger Woods (Kenan Thompson).This is a welcome return not only of some former cast members, but also the blending of hot button political and pop culture topics that used to be a regular fixture on SNL, but which has, for whatever reason, mostly been absent for the past few seasons. But good as it is, the fact that it didn’t have Don Jr and Eric engage in any brotherly love, a la this season of The White Lotus, feels like a cop out.Musical guest Lizzo performs her first set of the night. Bleating out eye-rolling, self-affirming platitudes while wearing a shirt that reads “Tariffied”, her performance plays like a liberal version of Morgan Wallen’s from two weeks ago: all unconvincing cultural signaling set to rote pop tunes.On Weekend Update, Colin Jost picks up where the cold open and previous sketch left off, noting that the president’s 90-day tariffs pause “may not seem like a long time, but remember, Trump has only been president 82 days and it already feels like a goddamn decade.”Michael Che invites Chinese trade minister Chen Biao (Bowen Yang) on to discuss Trump’s trade war with China. Chen could care less about Trump’s 145% tariff on Chinese goods, asking “which side is more willing to endure hardship for the glory of their nation: the one that’s been around for thousands of years, or the one sending Katy Perry to space?” He also takes a quick dig at JD Vance by hawking his own memoir, Peasant Elegy. There are some good lines here, but Yang’s snotty schtick gets in the way.Later, Jost brings on cast member Emil Wakim to give his thoughts about what it means to be an American these days. He comes out waving flags just to buy some goodwill, before admitting that he’s conflicted: “I know we’re bad, because my life is so good there’s just no way it’s cruelty-free.” He has some decent material about ordering from Uber Eats and hipster anti-capitalist hypocrisy, which is sure to go over poorly online.Wakim’s segment feels abrupt, probably because this week’s Update includes a rare third guest spot. Sarah Sherman plays Jost’s stressed-out accountant Dawn who, between pulling out her own hair and driving her head through the set, takes shots at him over his various sexual and criminal improprieties. It’s a credit to Sherman that this regularly recurring bit hasn’t yet worn out its welcome.A gay couple (Yang and Hamm) get angrily defensive when their confused friends ask where and how they got their newly adopted (or rather, clearly stolen) baby. This attempt to send up progressive identity politics might felt relevant a couple of years ago, but the culture has shifted enough that it no longer does.Scenes of interracial young people partaking in “active fun in slow motion” are revealed to be the number one indicator of herpes. Other signs include “dancing in an outdoor beer garden with strings lights”, “winning a carnival game on the first try” or “hanging out with exactly one white person, one Black person, one Asian person, and one Latin person.” A solid sendup of medication ad tropes.The show wraps up in a corporate office during a new employee orientation ice breaker. The new hires take turns sharing a fun personal fact about themselves. Hamm’s employee, Greg, brings things to a screeching halt when he introduces himself by revealing: “My mom killed my dad naked on TV.” More bits of information come out over the course of the conversation: the show was Jackass; it was funny and sad; and a party donkey, Port-a-potty, and Raven Simone were involved. The initial gag is funny, but the rest of the sketch loses the thread.While there were a few low points to tonight’s episode – the baby sketch, Lizzo’s first song – this was one of the stronger episodes of the season. The focus on Trump’s disastrous economic policy gave it a strong through-line, the guest appearances made for some fun surprises, and Hamm was expectedly great. More

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      Saturday Night Live: Jack Black returns for a stellar episode

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      Saturday Night Live opens with Donald Trump’s (James Austin Johnson’s) “liberation day” speech, where he rolled out his disastrous tariff plan, which he calls Magda: “Make America Great Depression again.” Trump notes that no country is safe from his tariffs, including what he mistakenly thinks is a place called McDonald’s Island (“Get me to God’s country,” he exclaims in the first of two digs at last week’s musical guest, Morgan Wallen, which gets a huge pop from the crowd), as well as South Africa.The mention of the latter nation brings out Elon Musk (Mike Myers), who glitches out before whining about how poorly Tesla is doing. To combat this, he introduces a new, fully self-vandalizing model, which comes complete with AI-powered graffiti. Choice includes penises, swastikas, and his favorite: “Swastikas made out of penises.” Before he can complain about how dumb the tariffs are, Trump pushes him out of the way and wraps things up.This is a thoroughly fine send-up of this week’s big news story. Johnson is on point as ever, Myers’s Musk remains solid and appropriately mean-spirited, and the jokes about the tariffs basically write themselves.Jack Black hosts for the fourth time, but the first time in 20 years. The pressure is too much, so he decides to quit on the spot, until he’s brought back around by the band rocking out. He performs a self-referential version of Steve Winwood’s Back in the Highlife Again, taking it into the crowd before introducing a marching band for the big finish. It is a characteristically electric performance, but one that some of Black’s fans might find hard to fully enjoy in the wake of his throwing longtime friend and Tenacious D bandmate Kyle Gass under the bus this past summer after an on-stage Trump joke led to rightwing backlash.Love Match is a game show where a single gal picks from three available bachelors, none of whom she can see. The contestants include a nerdy nice guy, a baby-faced playboy, and Black’s Gene, an emotionally intuitive man cosplaying as Indiana Jones. When Gene starts to win the girl over, the host intercedes to let her know he’s dressed like the iconic adventurer, which leads to an argument about whether he has ever heard of the character. This is in line with a certain modern-day SNL sketches based entirely around the minutia of a pop culture institution; see the Matt Damon Weezer sketch from a few years back or the Chris Rock Simpsons one from earlier this season. These are usually fun, but this one doesn’t push the premise or specificity far enough.Then, Black teams up with Cheetos mascot Chester Cheetah to pitch Flamin’ Hot Preparation H Brief and disposable, but the visual of Black bent over a chair, pants and underwear down around his ankles, applying the burning cream to his hind parts as his CGI pal watches in horror, is good for a laugh.A dinner between college friends turns into a game of liberal one-upmanship, as each of them brag about how they have given up social media and alcohol, only read physical books, shop at thrift stores, watch foreign films with no subtitles, teach Spanish to special needs kids, and swim exclusively at black-owned pools. A solid fart joke can’t save this one from the fourth wall breaking mugging.We travel back in times to Athens, circa 500 BC, to witness the first performance of the first ever play. The audience, not understanding what they’re watching, continually interrupt the performance, accusing the actors of lying and tricking them–at least until they’re promised nudity. This is better in concept than execution.Kenan Thompson and Ego Nwodim perform a Jamaican reggae song about miserable goth kids dragged to the sunny island on family vacations. Black jumps in as said goth kid all grown up, singing to the tune of My Chemical Romance’s Welcome to the Black Parade. That unexpected moment, along with Michael Longfellow’s very convincing goth brat, make this a winner.Elton John and Brandi Carlile are the night’s musical guests. They play the rollicking honky-tonk song Little Richard’s Bible. This is a breath of fresh air after last week’s miserable turn.Speaking of, Colin Jost kicks off Weekend Update by reporting: “Money is leaving the stock market faster than Morgan Wallen at good night.”A little later, he brings back previous Update guests Grant and Alyssa (Marcello Hernández and Jane Wickline), the couple you can’t believe are together, to talk about spring romance. The boorish bro and nerdy wallflower explain that their dynamic works because they have ground rules: he does the dishes (“Because I like playing in the water”), she cooks (“Because I’m not allowed to touch the stove”), and finally, per her: “Don’t wear those little shorts around unless you’re trying to drop them.” The characters are clearly heightened versions of the performers, which is a big reason why they land.Jost reports on Russell Brand being charged for rape, before wincingly rolling a clip of Brand as SNL host, introducing musical guest Chris Brown.Then, in response to the White House correspondents’ dinner’s announcement that they will no longer feature a comedian at their yearly celebration out of deference to Trump, Nwodim comes out to make the case for herself hosting. She promises not to talk politics and instead only do material about the actual diner. Taking up Def Jam-inspired persona she performs a tight 3, getting the audience to shout out ‘SHIT!’ at one point. A great turn from Nwodim, whose fake material is funnier than most jokes on SNL these days.Black and Sarah Sherman play a new couple who decide to take things to the next level by sleeping together. This leads to a sensual ballad (which they perform while floating above the bedroom set on wires). But, as described in their song, the lackluster sex (“First we do things to me for a while, then we do things to you not that long”) and dirty talk (“You’ve been so bad I’m gonna … kill you”), lead them to bring in a third (Bowen Yang) and even a fourth (Carlile). Kudos to Carlile for making her comedy debut via literal high-wire act.Next, Black fronts a jam band, inviting musicians in the crowd to jump on stage and get in on their cover of Tom Petty’s Free Fallin’. But everyone who joins in – a couple of long-haired hippies, a busty wet T-shirt contestant, a crackhead, even a dog – only plays the bass. Like the musicians in the sketch, this is one-note.John and Carlile perform their second set, then the show wraps up with a black-and-white sketch set on VJ Day. We see the events surrounding the famous photo taken of a returning sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square. The nurse’s actual boyfriend, a hot-dog scarfing doofus who spent the war stateside drawing racist (even for the time) propaganda cartoons, watches in shock and dismay as she makes out with half a dozen returning troops. There’s not much meat on this bone, but the cast is having fun with their old-timey accents. It beats most of the recent episode enders.Following a quick tribute to the late, great Val Kilmer, we get the curtain call, with everyone sticking around this time. This episode was a big improvement over last week’s, thanks to them knowing how to use the host, two excellent performances from real-deal star musicians, and a show-stealing turn from Nwodim. More

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      FCC regulator claims Harris appearance on SNL violates ‘equal time’ rule

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      A US government communications regulator has claimed that Vice-President Kamala Harris’s surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live violates “equal time” rules that govern political programming.Brendan Carr, a commissioner with the federal communications commission (FCC), claimed on the social platform X that Harris’s appearance on the show “is a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule”.Carr made the claim in response to an Associated Press alert to Harris being on the show that night.“The purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct – a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election. Unless the broadcaster offered Equal Time to other qualifying campaigns,” said Carr, who was nominated by both Trump and Biden and confirmed unanimously by the Senate three times.FCC guidelines state: “Equal opportunities generally means providing comparable time and placement to opposing candidates; it does not require a station to provide opposing candidates with programs identical to the initiating candidate.”A spokesperson for the FCC issued a statement: “The FCC has not made any determination regarding political programming rules, nor have we received a complaint from any interested parties.”Harris joined comedian Maya Rudolph at the start of the show in a sketch that skewered Donald Trump for his recent rally speeches, including wearing an orange and yellow safety jacket, a riff on the ongoing garbage controversy, and pretending to fellate a broken microphone.Harris began her “mirror image” sketch opposite Rudolph, the SNL cast member selected to impersonate her, on the other side of a mirror.“I’m just here to remind you, you got this, because you can do something your opponent can’t do – you can open doors,” Harris told Rudolph, seemingly referring to a video from earlier in the week in which Trump had struggled to reach the handle of a garbage truck he briefly rode in to a Wisconsin rally.That came after a comedian at a Trump rally in New York made a joke about Puerto Rico being a “floating island of garbage” that was widely deemed racist. Trump disavowed the comedian but did not apologize.On a video call to Latino voters, President Biden appeared to call Trump supporters garbage. The White House later denied he had and released a transcript with “supporters” altered to “supporter’s”, changing the meaning. White House stenographers appealed against the alteration.“The American people want to stop the chaos,” Rudolph said in the SNL sketch, with Harris adding, “And end the drama-la.”“With a cool new step mom-ala. Get back in our pajama-las. And watch a rom-com-ala,” Rudolph said, with the two later touting their “belief in the promise of America”.Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of SNL, which is celebrating its 50th season NBC, told the Hollywood Reporter in September that neither Harris or Trump would themselves appear on the show.“You can’t bring the actual people who are running on because of election laws and the equal time provisions,” Michaels told the outlet.“You can’t have the main candidates without having all the candidates, and there are lots of minor candidates that are only on the ballot in, like, three states and that becomes really complicated.”In the interview, Michaels said Republicans were easier to characterize than Democrats who have been offended by certain skits.“It’s not personal in the sense of an attack, it’s just, you did say that and you did do that, so were you thinking it would be rude for us to comment on it? That’s what we do, and we’re going to do it again,” he said.The Trump campaign complained about Harris’s appearance, saying Harris “has nothing substantive to offer the American people, so that’s why she’s living out her warped fantasy cosplaying with her elitist friends on Saturday Night Leftists as her campaign spirals down the drain into obscurity”, spokesperson Steven Cheung told Fox News Digital.Some viewers also noted that Harris’s “mirror image” comedy sketch was conceptually identical to a sketch Trump featured in with ex-SNL comedian Jimmy Fallon on Fallon’s the Tonight Show in 2015. “I knew that SNL sketch with Kamala Harris looked familiar…” radio host Ari Hoffman said in an Instagram post linking to the Fallon-Trump skit. More

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      Saturday Night Live: Regé-Jean Page hosts, cast use Cruz news for boos

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      We open on a Las Vegas talk show, Oops, You Did it Again. Hosted by Britney Spears (Chloe Fineman), who we all know from her “upbeat Instagram videos and the word ‘conservatorship’”, the show is a forum for public apologies.After a much-deserved potshot at Justin Timberlake, Spears welcomes her first guest: Ted Cruz (Aidy Bryant). Sporting cornrows and drinking a piña colada, the Texas senator, who this week got caught vacationing in Cancún amid his state’s energy crisis – and who blamed the whole thing on his young daughters – admits “I’m in a little bit of hot water, which is something I’m told people in Texas don’t have.”Next, Spears welcomes New York governor Andrew Cuomo (Pete Davidson), begrudgingly apologizing for “the nursing home stuff”. It pains him to eat crow, and he reaches breaking point after learning that “bird bitch” Mayor Bill DeBlasio thinks he should be investigated. Still, at least Cuomo’s not as pathetic as Cruz, whose sympathy he harshly rebuffs: “Do not. Associate yourself. With Me. I am a man. You are a clown. If you mess with me, I will send you to a clown hospital. And when you die, I will not count your body.”Last up is Mandalorian actor Gina Carano (Cecily Strong), let go from the Disney show for, among other things, comparing criticism of conservatives to Nazi persecution. She huffs and puffs about cancel culture and asks why Disney has the right to take the moral high ground: “Have you heard Brer Rabbit’s accent on the Splash Mountain ride?” This is a fair point, but having it come from Carano feels way off. Regardless, even she wants nothing to do with Cruz, telling him, “Do not. Associate yourself. With me.”The show gets points for going with an original setup for the cold open, as well as its mercilessness towards Cruz. That said, the cast constantly breaking hampers things. Nothing is that funny.Our host is Bridgerton actor Regé-Jean Page. After a quick Ray Jay Johnson reference that I assume went over his fans’ heads, he fends off the female cast. They’re all obsessed with the sexual dynamo he plays on the hit Netflix costume drama, although Aidy Bryant assures him, “We definitely have other sketch ideas where you aren’t just being an extremely hot sex man.” SNL has shown a tendency to over-rely on hosts’ hotness – see the recent Jason Momoa and Jennifer Lopez episodes, both dire.On Actor’s Spotlight, two black British actors – Kingsley Ben-Adir (Page) and Daniel Kaluuya (Chris Redd) – join Ice Cube (Kenan Thompson) to discuss their new movies. Cube tries to get in on the critical love by pretending he’s British too, claiming, “Me name’s not Ice Cube in Britain, it’s Coldy Squares.” No one buys it until Hugh Grant (Alex Moffat) shows up and recognizes him from the old neighborhood.After a short rap from Ego Nwodim, Davidson and musical guest Bad Bunny about going crazy during quarantine, a barroom game of pool is interrupted when a player puts on Olivia Rodrigo’s Driver’s License. The dudes all make fun of the song, but eventually reveal they’re huge fans. In-depth discussions of the convoluted backstory and reminiscences of their own heartbreak lead to the male cast joining for “the bridge of our lives”.Next, Page interviews for a job at an ad company that works on spec, creating slogans for brands that didn’t ask. Disastrous examples include “Charmin – Use after you poop!”, “Legos – Bet you can’t eat just one and!” and “Netflix – We have porn now!”. Funny as the ads are, and good as the interaction between Page and Beck Bennett’s aloof boss is, the funniest bit is a recurring gag in which Bowen Yang’s harried assistant hands the two strange notes which read “We’re losing millions”, “They have your daughter”, “Your mom is topless in the lobby” and, simply, “Hi”. A bit overstuffed, this zany pre-filmed segment is still one of the best of the season.Bad Bunny takes the stage alongside Rosalía for a steamy duet on La Noche de Anoche. On Weekend Update, Colin Jost kicks things off by hammering Cruz, noting “if you hate Ted Cruz, this is a pretty fun week … and if you like Ted Cruz, well, you’re probably Ted Cruz.” Michael Che notes that the winter storm brought “the most snow seen in Texas since Michael Irvine’s Super Bowl party”.Jost welcomes “relationship expert” Davidson to discuss the “first and hopefully last” Valentine’s Day of the pandemic. Davidson recounts spending the holiday watching the Britney Spears doc with his mom, which convinced him to finally move out and get his own place.“My mom is a lot like this show,” he explains. “No matter what I do, I’m never asked to leave.”After taking a few more digs at Cruz and Cuomo (as well as making a joke about Israel only vaccinating its Jewish populace that’s sure to generate backlash), Che welcomes Jessie Rauch (Heidi Gardner), a community activist who wants to discuss food insecurity. She doesn’t get the chance, as Che can’t get over the fact she’s dressed like Freddy Krueger. I’m not sure what the point or punchline of this was, but Gardner’s silly charm keeps it from totally tanking.A History Channel show looks at sea shanties. A whaling crew sings one, quickly revealing no one knows what they’re doing and they’re all doomed: “Yoho, we’ll never go home/ We’re stuck out here and we’re all alone!” The funniest bit is a brief aside wherein the crew describe to a new sailor their various “sea wives” – a whale’s blowhole, a blanket stuffed into a barrel, two jellyfish tied together, and their hands.A get together between new neighboring families, one white, the other black, sees them engage in a grace-off, trying to one-up each other through gospel. You keep waiting for things to take a dark or awkward turn but everything stays surprisingly sweet. Kudos to Bennett, who shows off some seriously impressive dancing.On the set of Bridgerton, Page and a costar are set to film a sex scene but the intimacy coordinator is out sick. Her replacements are two dirtbags (Davidson and Mikey Day) who have no idea what they’re doing or even what the show is about – they seem to think it involves incest. The set up promises something edgy or risqué, but unfortunately it just meanders.Bad Bunny returns and performs Te Deseo Lo Mejor. Wrestling fans will get a kick out of him proudly sporting the WWE 24/7 Championship belt, which he recently won. I imagine non-wrestling fans will just be confused.The last sketch of the night is a music video set in a grocery store, in which a dopey trio of ironic white rappers keeps getting interrupted and shamed for not wearing masks. It ends with them tasered and tackled by the manager.There was a noticeable patchwork quality to most of the sketches tonight, but that wasn’t always a bad thing. In fact, it led to a lot of unexpectedly funny moments. It also made excellent use of Page’s musical abilities and Bad Bunny’s decent comic chops, the end result a lively, enjoyable episode. More

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      Saturday Night Live seeks fresh Biden as political comedy faces new era

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      The US presidential election may be over but another keenly watched contest is just beginning. Who should play Joe Biden on Saturday Night Live?Jim Carrey quit the role last Saturday after poor reviews. Alex Moffat, a regular cast member, stepped in for that night’s episode. But it still remains uncertain which actor will portray Biden on a show that helps define each American presidency in the popular imagination.It is just one example of the new challenges facing political satire as Donald Trump leaves the presidential stage. The 45th president offered endless material for late-night TV hosts, standup comedians and cartoonists. His Democratic successor appears to be a less obvious target.“There is about a two-minute hole in every late-night monologue beginning on January 20,” observed Bill Whalen, a former media consultant for the ex-California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. “Two minutes every night reserved to Trump jokes and Trump bashing: that ends as soon as Biden takes office. So how do you fill the void?”Based in New York, SNL started on the NBC network in 1975 and has been more or less nailing presidents ever since. Chevy Chase played Gerald Ford as bumbling and accident-prone. Dana Carvey was so spot-on as George HW Bush that he earned an invitation to the White House.Will Ferrell captured George W Bush’s word-mangling incoherence. Jay Pharoah was praised for his Barack Obama impression but left the show prematurely. Whalen added: “Obama they had a hard time mocking because Obama was Mr Cool, and how do you make fun of Mr Cool? So I think comedy took a bit of a time out during the Obama years and came roaring back with Trump.”Alec Baldwin’s devastating rendition of Trump as an ignorant idiot, complete with pursed lips and blond wig, frequently went viral and earned the president’s wrath. Melissa McCarthy’s fast and furious take on his first press secretary, Sean Spicer, also struck comedy gold.On one level it is entertainment, but SNL’s cultural significance should not be underestimated, argues Michael Cornfield, a political scientist at George Washington University in Washington. “The central angle of approach to a president’s character is through the Saturday Night Live caricature,” he said.SNL has already found its Kamala Harris in Maya Rudolph, but Biden is proving a tougher nut to crack. He has been played by cast members and guest stars including Jason Sudeikis, Woody Harrelson and John Mulaney. Carrey signed on for this year’s election campaign but his manic performances arguably missed the mark.“Jim Carrey was doing Jim Carrey,” Cornfield observed. “He didn’t communicate Biden.”So Moffat, who has previously played Trump’s son Eric, took over as Biden for an opening sketch in which the vice-president, Mike Pence (Beck Bennett), received a Covid-19 vaccine. But Moffat is only 38, less than half Biden’s age, leaving next year’s all-important casting an open question, along with broader questions of where to find humour in the coming presidency.Cornfield commented: “To me, the comedy of the administration shapes up as one of these workplace sitcoms where the central character, Biden, has to be carrying on gamely while everything around him is going nuts.“Biden’s personality is tough because you don’t want to make fun of his stuttering. You don’t want to make fun of his tragedies. What you want to make fun of is he’s going to pretend that everything is right: ‘Oh sure, I’ll negotiate with the Republicans. No problem. Oh sure, I’ll make the federal government work. No problem.’ That’s his pretence and that’s up for lampooning because it won’t.“Now having said that, I don’t think it will be what we’ve lived through the last four years. We don’t need [Armando] Iannucci-level viciousness because I don’t think that’s called for. But there is a need to make fun of the president. That’s very American.”Cornfield has a suggestion for the role: Ted Danson, who turns 73 next week and appeared with Harrelson in the long-running sitcom Cheers. “He’s got that big smile and that cocky how-you-doin’ demeanor and he knows how to react to people who are just not doing the job or are completely nuts. There’s great comedy to be had when somebody is trying to pretend that everything is is going smoothly when it’s not.”Even so, just as cable news is reportedly bracing for a loss of viewers after the “Trump bump”, political satirists could be forgiven for thinking that a golden age is coming to an end.Trump’s crass remarks, badly spelled tweets and bizarre behaviour – from gazing up at a solar eclipse to slow-walking down a ramp – have been the gift that keeps on giving. It is safe to assume that Biden will not suggest bleach as a coronavirus cure.The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver are among the TV programmes that have thrived on dark humour in the Trump years, making sense of the chaos for viewers, channeling their anger and fear and conveying a pointed message.Colbert now draws far more viewers than his late-night rivals Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel, neither of whom targeted Trump so directly. He also had a hand in Our Cartoon President, a barbed animated series about Trump and his entourage.Stephen Farnsworth, co-author of Late Night with Trump: Political Humor and the American Presidency, said in an email: “From President Trump’s angry, blustery falsehoods to his clown car entourage, Saturday Night Live and late night comedy have never had it so good. When America has an over-the-top president, one who needs to be in the public eye 24/7, the jokes practically write themselves.“That ends in January. When compared to the current president, Joe Biden is a far less compelling character for humor and doesn’t display the same neediness for public attention. What’s more, Trump’s exaggerated physical mannerisms and speech patterns, captured so effectively by Alec Baldwin, made him easier to imitate than many political figures.”Farnsworth, political science professor at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, added: “Biden is much more measured in what he says and does than is Trump, and that’s not good for comedy. Biden used to be known for a malapropism or two, but his 2020 campaign was a highly controlled exercise, particularly compared to Biden’s time as vice-president or as a senator.”Trump’s departure, however, is also coming as a relief to comedy performers and writing. There are have been moments when he can seem beyond satire and when it is easier to cry than laugh. A novelist might find him frustratingly two-dimensional.Steve Bodow, a former head writer and executive producer of The Daily Show, told the Washington Post last month: “I feel confident saying most writers of late night will not only be politically and patriotically happier, but they’ll be comedically happier. The thing about Trump is there’s nothing new there; there’s just not that much to chew off the bone. It can be utterly exhausting.”Trump was a Falstaffian figure but the consequences of his actions, especially during the deadly coronavirus pandemic, were anything but funny. Biden’s own life has been scarred by personal loss and he inherits a country facing multiple crises – and where Trump is likely to remain a political player.Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, said: “The larger-than-life element about Biden is tragedy. Making fun of his speech is making fun of someone who through immense willpower overcame the disability of stuttering.”He added: “The one person who gets Biden best is Stephen Colbert, who, like Biden, is a deeply rooted liberal Catholic.“The fundamental problem is that we have yet to reckon with the immensity of the mourning and grief of what will likely be a half-million dead, which should have been largely preventable by the clownish sadist who provided so much fun before he ushered in a reign of death.” More

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      in US Politics

      Can late-night comedy recover from the Trump presidency?

      by

      As the results trickled in on election night 2016, Stephen Colbert, host of The Late Show on CBS, processed Donald Trump’s victory live, before a shocked audience. He lamented America’s partisan divide (“how did our politics get so poisonous?”), professed belief in the utility of comedy (“in the face of something that might strike you as horrible, I think laughter is the best medicine. You cannot laugh and be afraid at the same time”) and offhandedly prefigured the identity crisis to come for late-night television: “I’m not sure it’s a comedy show any more.”
      Colbert performed the role of late-night host nimbly, even if the genre of an election night comedy hour was poorly suited for the victory of a candidacy that had been viewed by many as a joke. Trump, as the TV critic Emily Nussbaum argued in January 2017, had long performed, and audience-tested in rallies, the role of a boozy, heckling, aggrieved standup comic, one who shrugged off countless taboos as “sarcastic” jokes, one with an endless appetite for attention.
      Nussbaum’s essay, published in the first week of Trump’s presidency, evinced the trap facing liberal political comedians: “How do you fight an enemy who’s just kidding?” How do you skewer a performer who never made any attempt at sincerity? How could network and cable comedy, overwhelmingly delivered by straight white men, effectively lampoon a self-evidently ridiculous social media troll whose only currency was attention? Trump may have seemed at the outset like a boon to jokesters, but his presidency – the flat denials, the destabilizing cascade of crises and a fractured, contemptuous media landscape – has killed political comedy.
      Where does late-night go from here? Regardless of whether or not Trump is re-elected, his presidency has altered the genre in form and function. For four years, political comedy, and in particular late-night television, has lurched through a cyclical Trump attention loop: hosts mock the president, Trump continues with the next galling lie or lashes out on Twitter (or both), hosts mock Trump again, attention paid and courted and repaid. In the 2010s, as the lines in American cultural commentary blurred – political propaganda, social life and memes blended in a gorging timeline of content – Trump jokes became the default late-night currency. Even Jimmy Fallon, the affable Saturday Night Live (SNL) alum who infamously tousled Trump’s hair in 2015, was forced by a ratings war into more political monologues.
      In the Trump era, the genre has morphed to shoulder two burdens: to metabolize liberal outrage through short-circuited Trump jabs (Seth Meyers’ Closer Look segments, SNL’s too-numerous cold opens, whose main insight seems to be the sight of various celebrities game for impersonation); and to process the torrent of headlines in our confounding, infuriating, oversaturated reality.

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      The latter is not an insignificant function, given the time and sanity-erasing blankness of constant disruption and, say, a global pandemic. During the nationwide protests against anti-black police brutality this summer, late-night shows helped keep people tethered to, rather than escape from, the feverish timeline of deeply unfunny police crackdowns and ongoing pandemic surges. Many people got the gist of impeachment, the Mueller report, the Russia investigation, Trump corruption and justice department manipulations through late-night comedy shows. (The leading program, Colbert’s Late Show, averaged 3.45m viewers in 2019-2020; Saturday Night Live drew 8.24m viewers for its 46th season premiere last month, its highest audience since 2016.)
      There’s certainly a democratic function to that processing; when everything is politicized and the news landscape is calcified either in bad faith propaganda (Fox News) or norms of impartial politeness (the Sunday talkshows), late-night “comedy” – a pastiche of recaps, clips and jokes delivered by a host allowed to call bullshit – becomes a manageable way to keep up with things. But that doesn’t mean it was necessarily funny or sustainable or, to quote Colbert on election night, really a comedy show any more. Kimmel and Fallon seem to view jokes as a formality before the more entertaining work of interviewing celebrities; Late Night’s Seth Meyers has almost dispensed with jokes entirely in his outrage-laden, indignant Closer Look warnings on America’s descent into authoritarianism.

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      Late-night political comedy, following the model of The Daily Show, built a common language through the George W Bush and Barack Obama years: point out bad faith and dishonesty through videos stitched with hard news reports, then voice collective outrage at the con. But the past four years have undermined the belief that comedy could serve as an effective weapon against an administration whose reality show is outdone by its horrifying, very real “accomplishments”. The late-night shows once seemed to get under Trump’s skin, but to what effect? He might call the hosts “very weak and untalented” on Twitter, or continue his longstanding feud with SNL (and especially his impersonator, Alec Baldwin, although his attention for late-night shows appears to have waned this year). But in a polarized, post-hypocrisy world, jokes don’t so much thwart the hypocrite as draw viewers back into the reactive loop.
      The host perhaps most successful at navigating the Trump years, and the most critically acclaimed, is John Oliver, whose unsparing, morally clear, melodically ranting explainers on HBO’s Last Week Tonight focus on the rot around or tangential to Trump, rather than the man himself. Full Frontal’s Samantha Bee similarly works in allusive jokes around issues-driven monologues, as one of the few female hosts and a rare success in the 2010s boom and bust of liberal news comedy shows which evince the struggle to break fresh ground in the Trump era. The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore, Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj, The Opposition With Jordan Klepper, Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas, The Jim Jefferies Show and The Break With Michelle Wolf all premiered after January 2015, and have all since been cancelled.
      Sharp-toothed political comedy, meanwhile, has shifted to the masses on social media, and in particular TikTok. Political accounts run by Zoomers, which overlay pop music on bespoke factchecking, dances, healthcare advocacy and nihilistic memes, have become “cable news for young people”. Sarah Cooper’s lip-syncing Trump impressions blew up on TikTok and Twitter, leading to a guest-host gig on Jimmy Kimmel Live!. But her Netflix comedy special, Everything’s Fine, slams into the wall of Trump-centric satire and exemplifies the dilemma of traditional comedic forms; absent the fundamental insight of her impressions – that nothing satirizes Trump more than his own words – comedy rooted in the destabilizing chaos of the current moment sprouts starchy, disposable bits, jokes that strain when they should zing.
      What, then, can late-night comedy do? The shows do, after all, retain huge audiences, with institutional legitimacy and social media platforms that reach millions. Their guest slots can and have elevated diverse and “radical” perspectives, such as prison abolition advocates and Black Lives Matter activists. In 2020, late-night TV has gained the most cultural cachet when it embraces not redundant Trump jokes but the flexibility of the format – performing the duties television journalists refuse to do, for example, such as Colbert’s grilling the motives of the former Trump adviser John Bolton.

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      Ironically, it’s perhaps most relevant when it’s serious, self-aware, stripped down. In June, Trevor Noah released a quarantine-filmed video in reaction to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, in which he spoke plainly to white audiences as a person of color, a child of apartheid South Africa who understood state violence. “That unease that you felt watching that Target being looted, try to imagine how it must feel for black Americans when they watch themselves being looted every single day,” he said. “Because that’s fundamentally what’s happening in America: police in America are looting black bodies.”
      Noah’s video was shared widely on social media and cited by activist Kimberly Jones in Minneapolis, whose words were then incorporated in an episode of Last Week Tonight. More recently, Colbert has straight-up implored people to vote out the president; “We have two weeks to decide what kind of country this is gonna be,” he said last week, in reaction to news that the administration still had not reunited 545 children, separated from their families at the border, with their parents.
      There’s no laughter in such statements, no finding humor as an antidote. Earnestness – anathema to internet humor – is an awkward spot for late-night comedy to find itself in. But it’s cutting through bullshit, the leg work of sorting context and promoting inquiry, where late-night comedy can still find wiggle room, fresh territory with or without Trump. It’s not so much telling jokes as telling it straight – humor as a prerequisite but not the punch. More