Dud From New York, It's Saturday Night!

The once great Washington Post's Bezos Bugle's media critic Hank Stuever has a great postmortem on the recent "Saturday Night Live" appearance of Donald "Rump" Trump, and what it says about the intersection of politics and entertainment, worthy of an extended excerpt:

Once upon a time, not so long ago, there might have been a lesson to learn from Saturday’s boring and misspent episode — but that world no longer exists, certainly not where politics and TV intersect. Everything is turned upside down. Bring back the old America, I say, the one where our preeminent vehicle for topical satire would have ably skewered a hateful, nonsensical, vainglorious presidential candidate rather than invite him into the club and give him more of the empty-calorie media attention he seeks.

Having Trump host SNL is a tacit nod of approval — of his message, his antics and, yes, his campaign to be the Republican presidential nominee. Worst of all, it provided Trump with more dubious evidence of his own preeminence. [snip]

It’s entirely possible that the current crew at SNL — onstage and in the writers’ room — just isn’t cut out for the heavy comedic lifting that the 2016 election will require. The stakes are higher than they used to be when it comes to political comedy. This gang occasionally excels at making fun of celebrities (and themselves) and inventing strange characters, but they just aren’t ready for an election cycle that has so far proved to be more bizarre than past SNL casts ever had to handle.

That weakness can easily express itself as desperation — and desperation may be the reason SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels invited Trump to host a full show, rather than use him in a more traditional cameo.  [snip]

From there, it was one dud after another — some of it featuring Trump, much of it not: Variety magazine clocked Trump’s total air time at 12 minutes. The show slowed to a crawl. A sketch set in 2018, in a wildly successful Trump White House, fell apart quickly. “Weekend Update” did a fair job of playing a little offense. (Co-anchor Michael Che, in reference to the title of Trump’s new book, “Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again”: “Whenever old white dudes start talking about the good ol’ days, my Negro senses start tingling.”)

The “Update” segment also made good use of Bobby Moynihan’s “Drunk Uncle” character — turns out he’s the ideal demographic for the Trump message. “Finally someone is saying the things that I have been thinking — as well as saying,” Drunk Uncle muttered. “It’s like I’m running for president.”

In that one little riff, there was a reminder of what SNL is really for — to make fun of people running for president, not to buddy up to them.  (our emphasis)

While the evening has also been judged by other critics as a dud, the biggest duds in this fiasco are NBC and SNL's executive producer and man with a tin ear head Lorne Michaels, both of whom badly misjudged the impact of having Rump host the program.  In the process of looking only at the ratings side of the ledger (which were higher than normal), NBC shed whatever integrity they'd garnered by severing business ties with Rump in June over his racist remarks about Mexican immigrants.  And the Michaels- led SNL, long in decline as a vehicle of  political satire (much smarter political satire is done by John Oliver, Larry Wilmore, Steven Colbert and every other late night t.v. host),  may have learned too late that "racism isn't funny."  Too bad it was after the fact.