'SNL' cranks up political humor mill
Reprinted from late editions of yesterday's Globe.
If the presidential race has been unequivocally good for anyone, it's "Saturday Night Live." The rhetoric is so angry, the news so bad, that the public has been begging for comedic catharsis. This fall, "SNL" has delivered, and ratings have soared.
So the idea of a prime-time spinoff, leading up to the election, is greedy but still makes sense - especially on a week like this, when the Saturday night show will be a rerun. NBC's first of three "Weekend Update Thursday" specials was a welcome fix for anyone who needed to run Tuesday's dull town hall debate through a humor filter.
It also proved - as "SNL" often does - that comedy is hard, and that everything depends on the source material.
Though Thursday night's show was largely an extended version of the "Weekend Update" faux-news show, it opened with a spoof of the Nashville debate - a forum so widely watched that the "SNL" writers had the freedom to riff, on and on, about moderator Tom Brokaw's obsession with the clock. The sketch also referenced John McCain's penchant for referring to audience members by name (here, he got every name wrong) and the moment he referred to Barack Obama as "that one." The funniest parts were the shots of Darrell Hammond - as McCain - wandering aimlessly around the stage.
Visiting alumnus Chris Parnell was decent as Brokaw. Bill Murray, in a cameo, proved that he can be hilarious without moving a single facial muscle. But the sketch still missed a certain spark. Whether out of deference, caution, or lack of imagination, "SNL" has only managed to spoof Obama and McCain so much. As well as Fred Armisen captures Obama's cadence, as skillful an impressionist as Hammond is, they're no match for Tina Fey's pitch-perfect, viral-video-driving Sarah Palin interpretation.
That's a credit to Fey, but also to Palin, who has turned out to be a rare comic gift - a swashbuckling, headline-grabbing political character without precedent. Sometimes, all "SNL" has to do is repeat her words verbatim. Or lift an image straight off YouTube, as Fey did last week, mimicking Palin playing the flute at a beauty pageant.
Maybe if this episode had included more Palin, it would have deserved more buzz. But Fey has a day job, Palin's name barely came up, and the fake news show quickly meandered from politics to other matters, from a warning about salmonella in frozen chicken dinners to a woman who spent $17,000 on medical treatments for her cat. ("The cat showed its gratitude by briefly holding eye contact," co-anchor Seth Meyers said. Cat jokes seldom fail.)
Things perked up during a passage about Wall Street excess, as Meyers and co-anchor Amy Poehler gave the only rational reaction - disbelief - to news of AIG's costly post-bailout junket. A segment that started as "REALLY!?! With Seth and Amy" morphed into "OH MY GOD, ARE YOU SERIOUS!?!" The sarcasm worked, but Jon Stewart regularly manages, with a single raise of the eyebrows, to accomplish what Poehler and Myers did in several minutes of TV.
Indeed, what "Weekend Update Thursday" proved, above all, was the amazing speed and skill of the "Daily Show" and "Colbert Report" writers on Comedy Central - and the daunting task facing any staff of a late-night comic show. Politics can be very funny business. But a great joke, like a great candidate, is still hard to find.
Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. For more on TV, go to www.viewerdiscretion.net 