“Saturday Night Live” is, in its forty-second season, more essential to the culture than ever, not because it is necessarily funnier than during its best seasons (though it has been very funny) but because it has had the rapt attention of an American President. Donald Trump has been tweeting bitterly about the show for months, and, last week, Politico reported that his Administration had been “rattled” by Melissa McCarthy’s devastating impersonation of Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, with the President himself angry that Spicer had been so aptly skewered by a woman.
The show has seen a spike in ratings—but, while all viewers are equal, some viewers are more equal than others. The show’s urgency relies on Trump and his Administration, not only to provide the astounding real-life premises for the jokes but to respond with regular and ridiculous wounded intensity to those jokes, reminding us all that they are watching. Alec Baldwin, who has played Trump this season, and who, last night, hosted for a record seventeenth time, said in an interview last week, “What’s weird about the stuff we’re doing—we’re just repeating back what he says.” The result is a call-and-response between the executive branch and the show. Trump doesn’t like women in drag? This week, “S.N.L.” brought McCarthy back to play Spicer again, and had the uncannily versatile Kate McKinnon play Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Then, later on, Leslie Jones dressed up as Trump himself. (Though, unfortunately, Rosie O’Donnell did not make a cameo as Steve Bannon, as fans had demanded all week on Twitter.)
There was, on Saturday and into Sunday morning, a feeling that this all couldn’t go on much longer. It’s not that the performers and writers are running out of ideas—Melissa McCarthy’s Spicer impression was still wildly funny (this time in high heels!), and a recorded sketch in which the White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway (McKinnon, brilliant again) and the CNN host Jake Tapper (Beck Bennett, with an unkind hairline) are trapped in a “Fatal Attraction”-style relationship of violent attraction and revulsion was a risky, frankly terrifying bit of comedy that also dramatized Trumpism’s sickening allure.
Instead, the weariness coming from the show seems to be more emotional and civic-minded—an expression of shared uncertainty, a common lament about the absurd pace of the new Administration’s outrages and follies. Michael Che, during a “Weekend Update” segment that again savaged Trump, said, “I’m starting to feel bad for Donald Trump . . . I hope he quits. Donald, is this really how you want to spend the last two years of your life?” (The segment also obliquely referred to the show’s own guilt in this relationship of co-dependency, and its original sin of having Trump host, in 2015.) In a “People’s Court” sketch, Cecily Strong, playing a judge, says to Trump, “You’re doing too much, O.K.? I want one day without a CNN alert that scares the hell out of me.” And in another video short, this one imagining Jones’s quest to portray Trump on the show, she says to a fellow cast member, of Baldwin, “Do you really think he’s going to do this for the next four years? Doesn’t he have other stuff to do?” Jones could also have been talking about Trump, and his habit of watching “S.N.L.” through his fingers and then tweeting about it.
If, in the past, “Saturday Night Live” had been goading Trump to lash out, now it seemed that the show, like the rest of us, was asking him to cut it out. From Trump’s critics, anger at his policies continues to be mixed with a persistent bewilderment at his psychology: Why would a man who was just elected President still feel the need to argue about the scope of his electoral victory, the size of the crowd at his Inauguration, or the jokes that a variety show was making at his expense? As with so many of Trump’s battles, simply disengaging from the argument would seem to be his best chance at winning. And yet, like the scorpion, he is a slave to his nature. This weekend, Trump was busy doing Presidential-esque things, hosting Shinzo Abe, the Prime Minister of Japan, at Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Florida. Perhaps, finally, he had found something better to do. On Sunday morning, there was not yet a sign that Trump had watched the latest episode of “S.N.L.”—or, at least, he had not been moved to complain about it. Instead, Trump had more important proclamations to issue: about CNN being fake news, and about his ongoing feud with Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks. The day was young.
