Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, 14th December, 2024
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In September this year, Saturday
Night Live began its 50 season on the air. The show is an American
institution, one fifth as old as the USA itself. Like America, SNL has
had its ups and downs. Like America, it has always pulled through, at least so
far.
Just six weeks into SNL’s birthday season, reality spoilt the party. Donald Trump won the presidential election. On the first show back after his victory, the tone of the opening sketch was sombre, even funereal.
The cast, one by one, delivered
a stony-faced speech to camera. “To many people watching this show,” they said,
Trump’s victory was “shocking, and even horrifying. Donald Trump, who tried to
forcibly overturn the results of the last election, was returned to office by
an overwhelming majority.”
After about a minute of
such grim stuff, SNL’s longest-serving cast member, Kenan Thompson, cracked
the show’s first joke of the second Trump era. Given Trump’s propensity to
punish his enemies, Thompson wanted to clarify something. “We at SNL would
like to say to Donald Trump … We have been with you all along.”
The joke, of course, was
that SNL had strenuously opposed Trump’s return. Kamala Harris herself
had made a cameo appearance on the last episode before the election. The studio
audience gave her a rapturous ovation. SNL had done its best to stop
Trump, but its best hadn’t been good enough.
Hence the mood of despair
on that first post-election show. This mood was widespread among America’s TV comedians.
On Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Kimmel cried during his monologue. On The
Daily Show, Jon Stewart got angry. “This is not the end,” he insisted.
We can only hope he’s
right. But one thing that’s surely finished is the idea that American comedy
can still make a political difference. Here was an election that America’s entire
entertainment community, minus a few pro wrestlers, had ardently wanted Trump
to lose. America’s sharpest minds threw their best stuff at him. And it bounced
right off.
What will this do to the
self-confidence of American comedy? At the age of 50, SNL may be plunged
into a mid-life crisis. If it can’t take down a barn-sized target like Trump,
what is the point of it? What place is left for satire, in a country where
Linda McMahon will be Secretary of Education?
Jason Reitman’s movie Saturday
Night, currently playing in cinemas, offers a reminder of the crackling sense
of self-belief that fuelled SNL at its birth. Set backstage on the night
of the show’s debut, the film captures the boundless cockiness of that first group
of SNL writers and performers. The show was live. Network TV was central
to the culture. America was watching. Anything could happen.
In SNL’s early
days, the political satire was broad. During the show’s first season, the
bumbling Gerald Ford was president. Chevy Chase, who looked nothing like him, became
the show’s resident Ford impersonator. He didn’t wear any special makeup or
anything. He just fell over a lot.
When Jimmy Carter succeeded
Ford as president, Dan Ackroyd portrayed Carter without even shaving off his
moustache. In later years, SNL got more serious about its political impersonations.
Dana Carvey, wearing all the appropriate prosthetics, did a bang-on George Bush
Sr. Darrell Hammond did a candidly libidinous Bill Clinton. Will Ferrell played
Bush Jr as a gibbering ninny. Tina Fey did a withering Sarah Palin.
In 1976, the real Gerald
Ford made a cameo appearance on the show, inaugurating a tradition of comity
between SNL and the politicians it pilloried. Bush Sr invited Dana Carvey
to the White House, and the two became close friends. Bush Jr claimed to enjoy Ferrell’s
mockery of his verbal misadventures. Brutal as Tina Fey’s impression of her was,
Sarah Palin was gutsy enough to appear on the show and face the music in
person.
This was all very
civilised: it showed that America’s politicians were on the same page as its
comedians. They had the same basic values, the same innate commitment to
democracy. “The fact that we can laugh at each other,” said Bush Sr, “is a very
fundamental thing.”
All this changed during
Trump’s first term. Before becoming president, Trump hosted SNL twice. Once
he was in power, relations between him and the show curdled. When Alec Baldwin
played him on the show, Trump rancorously denounced him, via Twitter, as an unfunny
hack with a “mediocre dieing (sic) career.”
In reply, Baldwin vowed
to keep playing Trump until the job was done. “I’d like to hang in there for
the impeachment hearings,” he tweeted, “the resignation speech, the farewell
helicopter ride to Mar-a-Lago. You know. The good stuff. That we’ve all been
waiting for.”
Many American norms were eroded
or upended during the first Trump administration. Certainly the norms at SNL
changed. The show had always gone after American politicians. But never before had
it suggested that one of them posed an existential threat to democracy. With Trump,
the gloves came off.
Baldwin played Trump 46
times on SNL between 2016 and 2020. Halfway through that stint, he was
already wondering if there was something counter-productive about his Trump
impression. “I think I’m going to do some [more] of it, but not a whole lot,”
he said in 2018. “There is a lot of fatigue here.”
Fatigue was right. Half
the people in America didn’t need Baldwin to keep reminding them that Trump was
absurd. They could see it with their own eyes. The rest of America either didn’t
agree, or didn’t think absurdity was an undesirable trait in a president. 46 impressions
of Trump was both too much and not enough. There was something about the man that
defied or defeated satire.
“Ours is a useful trade,”
Mark Twain wrote in 1888, speaking on behalf of America’s humorists. “With all
its lightness and frivolity it has one serious purpose … the deriding of shams,
the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out
of existence.”
Hard as America’s
satirists tried to laugh Trump off the scene, the underlying logic of their trade
no longer seemed to apply in the Trump era. The exposure of pretentious
falsities? If you were listing Trump’s flaws, pretentiousness wouldn’t make the
top fifty.
Previous American
politicians had always at least pretended to have qualities –
intelligence, decency, integrity – that everybody agreed were virtues. But Trump
was cheating the satirists. He wasn’t playing by the old rules. You can’t be
false to an ideal if you don’t even acknowledge that the ideal exists.
With Trump, there was
nothing for the satirists to expose that hadn’t been grotesquely visible for
years. The problem isn’t that his faults remain hidden. It’s that not enough
people consider them to be faults.
In 2021, the all-star disaster
movie Don’t Look Up took satirical aim at Trump. A giant comet was heading
towards Earth. Doom was inevitable unless the world, led by America, could get
its act together.
But the American
President, played by Meryl Streep, was a female Trump – an unserious oaf with a
dangerously short attention span. Instead of blowing the comet out of the sky,
she urged her base to chant the reality-denying slogan “Don’t look up.”
Meanwhile Leonardo
DiCaprio, playing an exasperated astrophysicist, vainly tried to make his
fellow Americans see sense.
“If we can’t all agree at
a bare minimum that a giant comet the size of Mount Everest hurtling toward
planet Earth is not a f—ing good thing,” he said, “then what the hell happened
to us? What have we done to ourselves?”
Don’t Look Up failed
to avert Trump’s second coming. But at least it succeeded in diagnosing the
underlying problem. Nowadays, there is no bare-minimum proposition, no matter
how flagrantly true it would seem to be, that all Americans can agree on. That
makes it hard for satire to function. But forget about satire. Democracy itself
is in trouble, when people stop believing in a common reality.
On the last SNL before
the election, the show’s current version of Trump, played by James Austin Johnson,
addressed a rally. “I’m out of gas,” he said. “I’m exhausted … Make it stop … Who
cares? Nobody cares.”
That sounded more like
the writers talking than Trump. Trump never runs out of gas. It was everybody
else who did: the fact-checkers, the satirists, the voices of reason. Trump was
indefatigable. The comet hit the Earth.
Were the satirists right
to fear that its arrival will end American democracy? It’s too early to know. When
the dinosaurs died, it wasn’t the asteroid’s impact that killed them. It was all
the poisons it released into the atmosphere.
