It was the cringe felt around the world.
This past weekend, the cold-open sketch of “Saturday Night Live” tackled the sensational congressional hearings of December 5, when New York’s Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik grilled the presidents of MIT, Harvard and UPenn — who all refused to condemn students calling for the genocide of Jews on their campuses.
A worthy topic, but a disastrous, embarrassing rendering: “SNL” came out swinging — on the side of antisemitism.
The sketch’s target wasn’t the university presidents, who failed so spectacularly at the Capitol Building that Liz Magill of UPenn has already quit and critics are clamoring for Harvard’s Claudine Gay and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth to tender their own resignations.
Instead, “SNL” writers turned their poison pens on Stefanik, who actually trounced the three in a public beating like we haven’t seen since Ivan Drago killed Apollo Creed onscreen back in ’85.
Chloe Troast played Stefanik as a vain, shrieking attention whore hellbent on scoring political points, while the academics — painted as too smart for the little people — outfoxed her with their rhetorical prowess and stonewalling.
“I’m going to start screaming questions at these women like I’m Billy Eichner,” Troast hollered, in case you didn’t get the message: Republicans are dumb, y’all.
Worst of all, it was comically unfunny, doling out only second-hand embarrassment for those brave enough to sit through the entire thing. Not one yuk to be had, the sketch limping along like a sick old dog that needs to be put down.
And maybe the same can be said for “SNL,” a once beloved cultural institution. Its relevance has been diluted by edgier comedians optimizing the internet and making comedy for the masses — not just five progressives in a Brooklyn bubble.
“Our job is, whoever is in power, we’re opposed,” “SNL” chief Lorne Michaels told The New York Times in 2008. That may be the job, but their passion has been pleasuring the left regardless of who is in charge.
The show’s once sharp political imitators — think Darrell Hammond as Bill Clinton, Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, Will Ferrell as George W. Bush — became sycophantic once Barack Obama arrived.
Obama was, according to former show writer James Downey, too perfect for jabs.
“It’s like being a rock climber looking up at a thousand-foot-high face of solid obsidian, polished and oiled,” Downey said in a 2014 update of “Live From New York,” an oral history of the show. “There’s not a single thing to grab onto — certainly not a flaw or hook that you can caricature.”
Yikes. Like the rest of our dominant cultural outposts, “SNL” has developed sacred cows — comedy kryptonite.
Around 2012, the show got caught up in a push to cast more diverse players. A New York Times piece with the headline “For ‘SNL’ Cast, Being Diverse May Be Better Than Being ‘Ready’” was meant to be a reckoning, but should have been the canary in the coal mine.
(The headline was slightly racist, considering the predominantly black sketch show “In Living Color” was far funnier and edgier than “SNL” ever was.)
Then came Shane Gillis — hired and fired before he even started after a clip of him using an Asian slur on an old podcast resurfaced. “SNL” wasn’t standing for it, saying, “language he used is offensive, hurtful and unacceptable.”
But, like American universities — which have long tolerated canceling people over micro-aggressions — the show didn’t think calling for Jews to be killed warranted a critical skewering.
Gillis, who refreshingly speaks like he’s never taken an HR course on DEI, had the last laugh. He independently plugged away, creating sketches and specials for his Gilly and Keeves YouTube channel. This past September, he released a Netflix special that manages to both skewer and appeal to conservatives.
Gillis’ success is also emblematic of the changing landscape. Thanks to YouTube, social media, podcasts and streaming services, “Saturday Night Live” is no longer the singular kingmaker it once was.
It’s been bypassed by intrepid comedians armed with, in some cases, little more than a camera and WiFi.
Funnymen like Ryan Long and Danny Polishchuk regularly give us searing online sketches attacking the many absurdities of our current moment. In their best known, they play a racist and a woke person who realize they believe exactly the same things.
During the 2020 riots, Long and Polishchuk portrayed guys who are window repairmen by day and window-breaking Antifa rioters by night. In one recent sketch, Long plays an actor agonizing over who he should publicly support: Israel or Palestine.
If you want to see something truly funny, there are also unflinching comics like Tim Dillon, Yannis Pappis, Andrew Schulz and Mark Normand. All share a mandate to punch left, right and center — a responsibility “SNL” has abdicated.
It’s why Bill Maher, an avowed liberal, now appeals to people on the right as he fires within his own tent. He didn’t change, the left flank did. And the world has evolved, too.
One doesn’t need big network budgets to make incredible comedy and biting social commentary. They just need a YouTube channel and cojones — which “SNL” seems to be lacking these days.
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