President Biden has been "impregnable" for SNL and comedians to parody because he's so "pleasantly boring"

The Washington Post

Fox News and other conservative outlets like to rail at Saturday Night Live for failing to do a Biden sketch, but even the Republican party is having trouble mocking the president, which is why there has so much coverage of the Dr. Seuss controversy. But as Richard Zoglin argues, a president should be parodied. "Biden, so far, has been impregnable," says Zoglin. "The voice is too bland and devoid of obvious quirks, and beyond the occasional 'C’mon, man,' his conversational manner too muted and self-effacing, to give the parodists much to work with. Trump supporters and Fox News pundits would undoubtedly attribute this to the media’s liberal bias. And to be sure, Trump was viewed by the (mostly liberal) satirists not just as an irresistible comic target but also as a dire threat to the nation. Biden’s pleasantly boring presidency has been a welcome return to normality — but hardly great material for parody. Let’s hope that changes. Can we really survive four years with a president who doesn’t have a vivid enough profile to make the cold open of Saturday Night Live? Can’t Joe Biden, in between planning for immigration reform and an infrastructure bill, offer a new conversational tic or catchphrase? 'Malarkey' went out with the debate season. A verbal gaffe would be helpful, but Biden has set a modern record for getting this far into his presidency without holding a press briefing. Impressionists need something to latch onto." As Zoglin points out, the presidential impression is a relatively recent phenomenon that made its breakthrough when standup comic named Vaughn Meader created a bestselling impression of John F. Kennedy. "After that, presidents were fair game: Lyndon Johnson, with his syrupy Texas drawl; Richard Nixon, with his hunched, scowling mien," says Zoglin. "Gerald Ford was a tougher assignment, one Chevy Chase solved by simply falling down. But nearly all the presidents since have had their TV doppelgangers, from President George H.W. Bush, whose clipped, preppy speech patterns were memorialized by Dana Carvey, to Barack Obama’s studied, stop-and-start cadences — which, by the end of his presidency, had become part of nearly every late-night comic’s repertoire."