Will SNL's lazy approach to mocking Trump ever change?

Vox

"If you want to make fun of the president, it’s not that hard," says Emily VanDerWerff. "Just have a famous actor — Alec Baldwin, let’s say — pop up on TV and repeat some of the things the president has said in a big, brash New York accent, then have him pout a little bit as the audience roars its approval. But this approach is also incredibly lazy, and it turns Trump into something vaguely approachable, a video game boss who can be defeated if we can just string together the magic combination of words that will cause him to explode in fury. The 'let’s make Trump angry!' mode of comedy isn’t exclusive to SNL. It is present, to some degree, in the late-night monologues of Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, and Seth Meyers — and it’s all over social media, perhaps most famously in a wildly popular series of Trump lip sync videos by comedian Sarah Cooper. Reimagining Trump as a goon to be stomped on and defeated has its value. He is, after all, just a man. He won’t be the president forever, and will perhaps leave office as soon as January if enough people vote for former Vice President Joe Biden in November’s election. But that 'perhaps' underlines just how complicated making fun of Trump really is — because if you don’t find a way to satirize not just Trump but Trumpism, you run the risk of normalizing what the man stands for while trying desperately to trigger him." VanDerWerff adds: "SNL, especially in the Trump era, has consistently mistaken flashy but over-obvious satire — satire that will win it plaudits among the pundit class for its bravery in taking on Trump by making fun of the most buffoonish things about him — for anything meaningful. It’s possible I’m being unfair to a show that, by its very nature, is uneven, thanks to having exactly one week to pull each episode together. But the show is capable of incisive political satire. As overhyped as it was in terms of tanking Sarah Palin’s image with voters, Tina Fey’s portrayal of Palin was devastating at digging into just how oblivious she was...But the Trump administration is so obviously cartoonish, while also working to achieve such obviously horrific ends, that it becomes all but impossible to make fun of via SNL’s usual techniques of ridiculousness and over-the-top impersonations."

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• SNL needs to ditch celebrity cameos and trust its cast to play prominent politicians: "SNL has gotten the most mileage from enlisting famous people to make splashy cameos that drown out half the comedy with delighted audience applause," says Caroline Framke. "So by the time the show cast Jim Carrey to play Biden for this final stretch of the presidential election, it wasn’t a surprise. But for a show that has such a wide reach and direct line to the White House’s own television screens, it’s disappointing, frustrating and deeply unimaginative. On the most superficial level, casting the most plum roles on the show outside its own cast just isn’t a smart way to develop the promising talent it already has...If SNL just wants to grab the most attention possible, well, mission accomplished. But if it wants to be as piercing, relevant and unsparing as it could be, it needs to ditch the cheap plays for instinctive applause and go back to its own basics."
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