“It’s the hardest thing for me to explain to this generation that the show is nonpartisan,” Michaels said two weeks before Trump was elected the first time, according to the book. “We have our biases, we have our people we like better than others, but you can’t be Samantha Bee.” (Morrison adds that he “meant one-sided and strident.”)
How dare you Lorne. Bee’s Full Frontal was the best of the wave of Daily Show-influenced infotainment shows that launched right around the same time a Trump presidency started to feel more like a waking nightmare and less like the kind you wake up from. The show ran until 2022 and managed to be funny, smart, and guided by fearlessness. It didn’t save the world, but it didn’t shy away from pointing a megaphone at the people who were wrecking the joint.
Also, one time, Sam Bee and I talked for five minutes about the importance of hydration during an interview–she is a perfect person, is what I’m saying. Keep her name out of your fucking mouth, Lorne Michaels!
My other thought has more to do with the state of SNL during this little slip into authoritarianism: Why can’t the show be more like Samantha Bee, at least in terms of comedic courage?
SNL started as a middle finger and a counter to conservative cultural norms, not a tug job parlor for right-wing billionaires like Trump and 2021 host Elon Musk (who is currently rummaging through the guts of the U.S. treasury like an ass gerbil on a vision quest). Something happened along the way. The idea of nonpartisanship and absent bias from a show built partly on satirizing the world (and world leaders) feels like a dereliction and a dodge by something now too big and flammable to start fires. It’s more troubling than apathy, especially when it comes to comedy. It’s fake, and worse, it’s careful.
The “nonpartisan” approach suggests equal force behind jokes and sketches aimed at the left and the right, but they usually lack any force at all. And I bet that’s because the second you connect with anything more than a playful jab (which is where a large percentage of SNL’s Trump-era material lands no matter the thin-skinned reception of it by Trump), the gossamer shell of nonpartisanship shatters, and one side is left pointing a finger. This is why SNL often says something and nothing all at once.
Being a fan of SNL since the ‘90s has been a bit of a ride. The more you reminisce about it and stand in awe of its longevity, impact, and process, the more your pupils turn into hearts. But if you pull back, the glamour breaks and you’re better able to see the ways it’s deficient and the whys of that. And then you backslide. Again and again.
Next week, during SNL’s 50th anniversary primetime special, Lorne Michaels will get all his flowers from his famous friends and all the comedy icons who owe their careers to him. There will also be clips that demonstrate the expanse of SNL’s commentary across a half-century. Most of these clips will be very good and pretty old. It’s not that SNL can’t be great anymore or that there aren’t ample moments when it still is, just not when it’s being political. Because, for years now, Lorne Michaels has been too tired, comfortable, or out of touch to pick a fight, a side, or realize that being political whitebread is a glitch, not a feature to his thinking about the show.
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