This Is Probably The Most Honest "Saturday Night Live" Will Be This Election Season
As mainstream American politics remains strained as best and completely divided at worst, the average viewer looks to non-traditional outlets for guidance, information and relief. Many believe that shows like Saturday Night Live can provide these three things, and with good reason. Historically, humorists and comedians were some of the best truth-tellers in society.
Saturday Night Live has a long history of distilling political figures into their most base form; pretty much every American views Gerald Ford as clumsy and accident prone because of how he was portrayed on SNL. Over the years, other comedy outlets (In Living Color, Mad TV, Chappelle's Show, the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, Patriot Act, etc.) followed suit with varying success (though admittedly more biting than SNL).
Well, one thing that they all lacked was longevity and a constant. For SNL, Lorne Michaels is latter and as such has contributed to the former. The others, while definitely more edgy at times, only lasted as long as the star or brain trust could (or in the example of Patriot Act, until they picked the "wrong topic" to cover. To that end, SNL is a good barometer as to what casual voters who still believe in the two-party system think.
Watching this season-opening cold open, I get the impression that at least the current SNL writers understand something: neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump are perfect, ideal or even substantive choices, but because we've been told to ignore other options, we have to accept them.
I was surprised to hear the light chuckles and applause as "Kamala" admitted her purposely vague approach to campaigning as well as "Trump" lamenting about Biden no longer being an opponent, and "Biden" revealing the "secret sauce" on the Harris-Biden connection was as close to blink-and-you-missed-it as television can be.
In short: everyone's in on the joke; they just aren't allowed to explain it.
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