In the days since the first presidential debate, a surreal calamity in which the whole world learned that America’s geriatric leader can barely speak after sundown, a familiar election presence has been missing.
There’s been no “Saturday Night Live.”
That’s because the CNN train wreck that pitted a befuddled and beady-eyed President Joe Biden against former President Donald Trump was the earliest televised head-to-head ever.
In the past, the three general election matchups have come in the fall after the candidates were formally nominated at their parties’ conventions.
But this bout aired in late June, and NBC’s long-running sketch comedy show is on hiatus until August.
So, Jim Carrey has not returned to yuk it up as the now-81-year-old Biden — the role he played in 2020 — and there’s been no vicious send-up of the biggest political headline in four years: that our president is losing it.
All of this is to say that Lorne Michaels is the luckiest man alive.
Had his show been airing when Biden’s glaring infirmity was so frighteningly and publicly exposed, how the hell could the cast wring laughs out of it?
That jaw-dropping night and the ensuing pathetic, near-conspiratorial effort by the White House to chalk up the prez’s nonsensical rambles to jet lag while he clings to the dangerous delusion that he can manage another four years in the Oval Office is hardly hilarious.
Mortifying, sad, deceitful, infuriating, unbelievable, yes.
Funny, no.
Those poor writers would’ve been banging their heads against their desks as they wrestled with how to address the rapidly slipping faculties of the planet’s most powerful octogenarian.
And, believe me, they would be forced to deal with it.
Post-debate cold opens are reliably some of “SNL’s” best sketches — and highest-rated episodes — that often wind up defining politicians’ historical reputation.
The show has performed them during every election cycle for nearly 50 years, starting in 1976 when Chevy Chase played falling Gerald Ford and Dan Aykroyd took on Jimmy Carter.
Later on came Dana Carvey’s George H.W. Bush giving the kooky “on track, stay the course, a thousand points of light” speech, to which Jon Lovitz’s incredulous Michael Dukakis famously replied, “I can’t believe I’m losin’ to this guy.”
More recently, Tina Fey’s “I can see Russia from my house” Sarah Palin impersonation became a part of the former governor of Alaska’s identity, much to the VP candidate’s chagrin.
But my all-time favorite is Will Ferrell’s George W. Bush against Darrell Hammond’s incredible, droopy dog Al Gore. “Lockbox,” Gore kept replying to the moderators’ questions.
Asked to sum up his platform, Bush said only, “Strategery.”
Those bits are timeless classics because they ingeniously distilled the comedic essence of the debates and the long-winded pols.
What’s the essence of Joe Biden?
That the president of the United States is out of his mind during two consequential international wars and myriad domestic crises?
That his ruthless family is insisting that their feeble patriarch who needs regular naps and boasts that he “beat Medicare” stubbornly keeps running in spite of what his party and polls are loudly telling him?
That the man with the nuclear codes might not make it to his second term should he miraculously get reelected to one?
No punch lines in there, only disturbing realities.
If Biden doesn’t drop out, the show will have its hands full in a month. Four years ago, Carrey’s Biden was a loud, blustering, swaggering fighter.
They would have to recast. Carrey is much too loud and outsized an actor for a president who, nearing the end of his second term, speaks in incomprehensible whispers and shuffles when he walks.
How could the Not Ready for Prime-Time Players get us to howl at the Not Fit for a Second Term President?
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