Saturday Night Live is enjoying its highest ratings in over 20 years, despite lending absolutely no credence to the argument that comedy might improve under the Trump administration. The Verge reports.
Of course SNL always feels most relevant when political stakes are high, but the buzz around the show has reached a new pitch in recent months because of how directly it affects our thin-skinned new president. He spent some of the first weeks of his time as president-elect tweeting about Alec Baldwin’s “unwatchable” impression of him and referring to the whole cast as “terrible” and “not funny.” Though it is probably always the case that politicians will tune into SNL to see how they’re being ridiculed, Trump is the first to complain about it week after week, letting us know that he can’t stop watching and that it really, truly bothers him. (The VoteVets PAC even purchased ad time this week in hopes that it would help them get the president’s attention.)
Yet the writers of Saturday Night Live don’t seem to have it in them to confront the horrors of Trump’s first few weeks in office with any sort of weight or edge. Melissa McCarthy’s blustery, hyper-masculine Sean Spicer impression is funny only because she’s one of the best physical comedians alive, not because anyone wrote her any great material for it. The rest of last night’s mostly political episode was a series of riffs on the easiest possible joke you could make about anything Trump does: he’s stupid and he’s sad and he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Michael Che takes a full minute out of Weekend Update to announce that he feels sort of bad for Trump, who clearly doesn’t want to be president and made a mistake choosing to spend “the last two years” of his life this way. “Just quit,” he suggests, which is of course what most of the GOP and his heinous Vice President (who has somehow avoided all mention on the nation’s most popular comedy show) would love.
