Saturday Night Live

The 48th season of Saturday Night Live premieres tomorrow, and this one should be its last. The show has never felt more out of touch — a stale, punch-pulling iteration marked by a dim vision of what comedy can achieve in a politically and socially divisive moment. This is a target-rich environment, but SNL seems firmly of the opinion that taking shots against our current feckless leadership class is verboten. At a time when online comedy is exploding and hilarious sketches and specials abound on YouTube, SNL operates as if they have no competition. This offseason saw the show's biggest staff turnover in almost thirty years. This might have been an opportunity: if Saturday Night Live wanted to be relevant, the talent is obviously out there.

The Kids in the Hall was the best sketch comedy group of the early 1990s. Sure, Saturday Night Live had Phil Hartman, Chris Farley, Norm Macdonald, and Janeane Garofalo — and sketches like Celebrity Jeopardy!, Phil Hartman’s Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer and Motivational Speaker Matt Foley. But there were plenty of duds, too, like The Rickmeister and the ESPYs. The Kids in the Hall was less loud and more intelligent than SNL. They took more risks with sketches like the prescient Politically Correct Art Class, and no one skewered corporate culture better than the Kids (see Not Working Out and Can I Keep Him?). There were absurd characters like the Chicken Lady and the Sizzler Sisters, but their best sketches were the ones they played straight, like Parenting and Salty Ham.

Norm Macdonald claimed to have coined the phrase ‘fake news’ two decades before Donald Trump brought it into the political lexicon. That’s just one of dozens of examples of how the late Canadian-born comic left a mark on American culture. As host of Saturday Night Live’s long-running ‘Weekend Update’ segment during the mid-1990s, Macdonald often used the term when welcoming audiences. ‘I’m Norm Macdonald,’ he would begin, ‘and now, the fake news.’ What followed, however, almost always jumped the rails of what could reasonably be described as news satire.

When my editor asked me to watch Elon Musk on Saturday Night Live, I desperately wondered how to refuse. 'Actually, I’m busy on Saturday night.' Useless. There are a million ways to watch live television after the event. 'I’m a bit sick right now.' Too sick to watch TV and write about it? 'I can’t hear Pete Davidson’s voice without wanting to punch a hole in wall.' True, but not the sort of thing you want to admit in public. Damn it, I agreed. Journalists are asked to visit Syria and Afghanistan, after all, so I can hardly complain about having to watch Saturday Night Live. As The Spectator’s unofficial comedy critic, moreover, I have had to experience everything from Sarah Cooper’s mirthless Netflix special to Charlie Kirk’s bewildering satire on right-wing punditry.

My secret hope is that Elon Musk uses his Saturday Night Live platform this weekend to launch a comedic assault on political correctness so brutal it is seared forever onto the collective retina of the biggest audience the show has had in decades. Provided he used SNL to tear with equal vigor into each faction of the intersectional oppression spectrum — ethnic minorities, LGBTQIAA+ folk, fat activists, the blue-haired and non-binary, flat-earthers and feminists — and managed while doing so to be undeniably funny, I believe Musk could get away with it. He could also create a cultural moment the value of which as a non-fungible token would be more than perhaps even he could afford.

The trouble with Trumpworld is it’s so often beyond parody. How could a comedian ratchet up the president ordering Big Macs for a visiting championship football team to make the moment funnier than it already is? It’s a problem which has plunged late-night comedy writing into an identity crisis, one that has blighted America’s flagship sketch show Saturday Night Live. The Trump era has seen SNL bag Emmys and reach record audiences. But it’s achieved this through polarization: hitting the same tired Trump tropes each week and playing to their coastal-elite base. Its viewers have noticed: 39 percent of them surveyed by The Hollywood Reporter said the show had become too political.

For the first time in what seems like decades, Saturday Night Live turned their sights on the Democrats – and delivered what Cockburn considers one of their best sketches of the season. ‘State Meeting’ takes place in the Virginia State Capitol, where an African American ethics committee chief (Kenan Thompson) addresses a room of mostly white colleagues to check whether they have ever worn blackface. Unsurprisingly, many of them have – and they ask whether their excuses for doing so are good enough. ‘I have a question,’ asks Beck Bennett’s state senator. ‘What if your blackface was just part of your costume as a black person?’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrpQVSVa2QI ‘Does it count if you did it all the way back in the Eighties?

Cockburn never wants to criticize people for trying to be funny, even if they fail. He’s fallen flat on his own comedic face more than once so he knows the pain. But last night’s Saturday Night Live spoof on Fox News’s Tucker Carlson show missed the mark in several unfortunate and interesting ways. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sld27PfAF3M&list=PLS_gQd8UB-hISSFxFTxdheRfIDH-XKBCi Let’s begin with what worked. Alex Moffat’s impersonation wasn’t too bad — his impression of Carlson’s ‘listening face’ was amusing, certainly. Moffat was also helped by Kate McKinnon, who did a brilliant and hilarious Wilbur Ross routine, and Cecily Strong did a pitch perfect Judge Jeanine. But the conceit was wrong.

For those desperately awaiting the Trump presidency’s spectacular collapse, Robert Mueller has acquired an almost mythic status – forever looming in the background with astonishing ‘bombshells’ that could drop at any moment. Mueller himself never speaks, except through terse court filings, which lends his aura a mystical quality. His newfound fans have been known to light votive candles in his honor, wear apparel sporting his heroic visage, and spend day after day speculating on the internet about the time, date, and profundity of his next miraculous intervention. https://twitter.