Is SNL equipped to parody the disastrous first Trump-Biden debate?

Mic

Throughout Tuesday's debate, Twitter users predicted that Saturday Night Live would have a field day with the first debate when it returns this week for Season 46, featuring the return of Alec Baldwin as President Trump and Jim Carrey's debut as Joe Biden. As Shawn Cooke notes, however, Saturday Night Live has struggled to parody the chaos and cruelty of Trump for the past 5+ years. "Although major media outlets tried to reduce the debate to a both-sidesy stew of sparring, barbs, and insults — which wasn’t completely untrue, with Biden calling Trump a 'clown,' the 'worst president in American history,' and 'Putin’s puppy' — it rather deliberately misses the forest for the trees," says Cooke. "Rudeness and leaky-brained crosstalk are considerably different from empowering white supremacist militia groups, but a media apparatus so tailored to presenting a view from nowhere that alienates no one couldn’t acknowledge this. Despite its caricatured, squinty, purse-lipped portrayal of the president, SNL is in no better position to reckon with this distinction. The Proud Boys heard the president’s message to 'stand back and standby' loud and clear, lending the group a marketable slogan and making them an immediate household name if they weren’t already. Trump was given an opportunity to further spread mail-in voting conspiracies, which he ably ran with, and tacitly called on his militia boys to keep an eye on the polls in November. Where’s the punchline in all of this, exactly?...SNL’s been especially unequipped to confront tangible fascist threats in the past five years, by more or less reenacting the news with slight exaggerations. This is really all that can be expected of a major network sketch comedy series that infamously brought then-candidate Trump onboard to host in 2015, and has always been the playbook even before Trump. Its gaze is channeled directly through cheeto man bad liberalism as much as middle-ground political tourists, but it’s uniformly after a viewership that’s isolated from the most harmful elements of the administration."

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• Chris Rock says he watched the debate with Jim Carrey as they prepared for SNL: "I hadn’t spent that much time with Jim in like 20 years,” Rock told Ellen DeGeneres. “And he is Jim Carrey. He is the most energetic, funniest guy probably we’ve ever seen. To watch him watch Joe Biden, and then do Joe Biden, and then maybe do a little Trump and then do a little Clint Eastwood, and he’s very political at the same time. It was a ride just watching the debates with Jim Carrey.”
• Colin Jost says Donald Trump was "way into" doing his 2015 SNL porn star sketch: "I think the last sketch of the show ends with Cecily and Vanessa as porn stars endorsing Donald Trump for president and then Donald Trump turns to Cecily who’s blonde and says, 'Didn’t you used to be a brunette?'" Jost said on The Deciding Decade With Pete Buttigieg podcast. "And I’m pretty sure that's the last line of the show. Watching it again in retrospect is so complicated to look at given everything that’s happened."
• Maya Rudolph hopes Kamala Harris is around for a long time: “I got to meet her, and she is so fantastic. She is so incredible, she is so energizing and I just feel so good to be associated with someone so positive,” says Rudolph. “I just want to do her proud — just do a good job, no pressure!”
• Chloe Fineman doesn't think of herself as primarily an impressionist: "No, I think that’s a more recent realization that I could do that," Fineman says of her many dead-on impressions. "I probably started doing them four years ago. And definitely in quarantine I feel like I’ve leaned into impressions. But when I’m doing an impression I’m trying to turn that person into a character, if that makes any sense."
• Bowen Yang says he was stunned by the diversity behind the scenes at SNL: "Everyone's being very honest, I think, and transparent about how things work there, which I think is great. I mean, I was kind of surprised to go into SNL and sort of be just genuinely surprised and comforted by - internally, like, just going in and seeing like, oh, there are Asians in every department," he says. "There are people of color in every department. We've had this, like, legacy of queer writers who've been at the show since its beginning."
• Chris Redd talks conspiracy theories, Halloween costumes and why he'd love to live in London
• Friends keep texting Alex Moffat photos of Eric Trump