Why did SNL pull its punches on Biden?
The past decade has been a low point for political comedy, especially in light of the two decades that came before.
One of Michaels’ rules was, no groveling to the audience either in the studio or at home. In those first five years especially, SNL writers were not pleased when a studio audience applauded some social sentiment or political opinion in a sketch or “Weekend Update” item. The writers wanted laughs, not consensus.
— Live from New York authors on the ethos of the first few years of SNL
The jokes are tired references to current events that never build on one another. Instead, they are limply tossed out as obvious applause lines to an anti-Trump crowd.
—Vice Magazine, 2018
George W. Bush never used the word “strategery.” Sarah Palin never said “I can see Russia from my house.” But these moments are part of the collective memory of presidents and running mates thanks to Saturday Night Live. In my previous post about “Live from New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests.,” which covered SNL from its beginnings in 1975 up to 1999, I focused on the wide range of cast and characters who walked through Studio 8H during the show’s first 25 years. In this second part, covering 2000 up to the present, I’d like to focus on the political satire of this era.
I’ve also got some hot takes about how chasing “clapter” instead of comedy impacted political satire during the past decade, especially in the most recent presidential election. You can skip to that part if you just want the hot takes (2016-present), but I hope reading about the past 25 years will put the current moment in a fuller context.
2000-2007
SNL’s satire of the first presidential debate in 2000 was so impactful that Al Gore’s debate prep team had him watch a video to learn from his mistakes: the sighing, the monotone, the tendency to get mired in the policy weeds. As Gore admits:
I didn’t ask to see it or consciously use it as a tool—but somebody brought it in and said, “You should watch this.” And I think it was a way of that person, I can’t remember who it was, making a point that the first debate gave grist to the mill for lampooning the sighing and so forth, and that sort of critique that came after the first debate. I think it did have an effect, yes. And I thought it was very funny.
Darrell Hammond played an exasperated Gore against Will Ferrell’s cheerful yet clueless Bush. James Downey—who worked on 27 of the show’s first 32 seasons—is often credited with writing the political cold opens in election years. He sought to avoid the obvious jokes: “We don’t like to think we’re getting laughs by just saying, ‘George W. Bush is an idiot.’ There has to be more to it than that.”
According to Steve Higgins, writer/producer on the show since the late 90s, the James Downey years were noted for taking shots at both parties:
When its the political stuff, the best is when somebody who’s a Democrat goes, “Oh you really gave it to Bush,” and somebody who’s a Republican will go, “Oh, you really laid into Gore.” That’s the reaction we should be getting.
Unsurprisingly, Alec Baldwin disagreed:
I would say the show’s less politically wicked than it used to be. Now they make fun of people, but they don’t make fun of people and make a political statement at the same time. It doesn’t seem as biting satirically as it was before. They should be having a field day with those two huge oil whores that we have in their now, Cheney and Bush. God, you could be just cooking them and eating them every week.
Baldwin would get his chance to make the satire more biting during the next Republican administration. In 2013, James Downey retired from SNL and the show would take a much more one-sided approach to political comedy in the years that followed.
The terror attacks of 9/11 were acutely felt by the cast of SNL, who lived and worked within sight of the Twin Towers. While reeling from the events of that day, the cast and crew had to reckon with whether the show must—or could—go on. Amy Poehler was a brand-new cast member on 9/11—she hadn’t even appeared in her first sketch:
I was home in the East Village on 9/11. I could see the towers out of my window. All of us who were working on the show at the time called each other to see if everybody was OK, and then after all that died down the next question was, What are we going to do? Do we even have a job? I was thinking they might postpone the show.
But the show would go on. Then NYC Mayor Rudy Guiliani urged Lorne Michaels to go ahead with the show, even appearing on SNL for the show’s season premiere on Sept. 29, 2001, mere weeks after the attack. Paul Simon played “The Boxer” while NYC fireman and policeman stoically appeared onstage.
After the music ended, Michaels joked with Guiliani if it was alright for SNL to be “funny.” Guiliani smiled and said, “Why start now?” before waiting a beat to announce, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”
Even in tragedy, there could still be comedy.
A longtime staple of SNL was the pre-recorded videos produced by longtime writer Robert Smigel. One piece he wrote in the days after the 2004 Election tried to get at the sensibilities of the liberal audience members, but with a twist:
One cartoon I liked, because you didn’t see where it was going, was a stop-motion one called “Santa and the States.” It was written after Bush beat Kerry on the back of polarizing issues like gay marriage, and the country felt very divided. So Santa is skipping the red states, which, on the map he shows to Rudolph, are labeled “Dumbfuckistan.” He makes crude jokes about trailer park yahoos and this is absolutely killing with the New York audience. But then the cartoon starts to turn. You see Santa hanging out with Natalie Merchant and Moby making increasingly smug comments, and finally a blue-state child lectures him on being bigoted for labeling and dismissing red staters as ignorant for “caring about God.” I had supported Kerry but this kind of snobbism had creeped me out so it felt good to write about it.
[The NBC SNL website is so terrible but I think I found the original video]
While the 2004 Election was less dramatic than four years before, the following election season would be among the most electric and satire-worthy seasons in SNL history.
2008-2015
The 2008 Election Season had already been a goldmine for political satire during the primaries. SNL cold opens included a sketch where Hillary Clinton condescends to her primary opponents for engaging in a futile race, a debate sketch where moderators fawn over Obama and ask biased questions of Hillary, and a sketch where Hillary reveals just how low she’ll go to get the nomination.
But when John McCain announced his running mate, Sarah Palin, who looked strikingly like Tina Fey, it was like manna from heaven. As Fey remembers:
It was August of 2008, and I was on Fire Island with my husband, Jeff, and it was funny because he had the cover of the Times that said “McCain picks running mate,” and he said he thought there was a resemblance. I said, “I don’t think so. It’s just brown hair and glasses.” But when we got back to the city, some cousins and old classmates were all saying, “That lady looks like you.”
Fey’s impression of Palin over several sketches formed an image of the Alaska Governor as naive, uninformed and out of her depth (because she was naive, uninformed and out of her depth). John McCain, who had appeared on the show multiple times—and even hosted—begrudgingly admitted the impact of Fey’s impression:
Very honestly, the portrayal of her was not fair, but it was certainly well done, and certainly probably the single most watched aspect of the political campaign over any other.
SNL cast members and writers naturally want to believe their sketches help define presidential elections. Because of this, Horatio Sanz felt SNL had gone too soft on Bush but helped end Palin’s political moment:
You know, if Will hadn’t done that impression [of Bush] or at least made him likable, it may have tipped the other way. I honestly think so. We made up for it. I think Tina’s impression basically killed Sarah Palin. I think that helped get rid of Sarah Palin.
Jay Pharoah joined the cast and quickly took to his impression of President Obama, even performing for the president at a fundraiser:
It was at Harvey Weinstein’s house—very nice, I’d never been there. His house is georgeous. I thought, “Oh wow, if I can get this someday. It was just an opportunity. I was trying to take my makeup off because I was him for him at this event and he stood right there watching me do it, he was laughing. It was so petrifying. And I heard from his administration he loves the impression. He thinks its great.
[This anecdote was shared during a previous era when Harvey Weinstein— credibly accused of rape and sexual assault by more than 80 women over several decades—was considered On the Right Side of History.]
The 2012 Election paled in comparison to the satirical goldmine of 2008 (does anyone remember that Jason Sudeikis played Mitt Romney?). However, that would all change with the 2016 election season, which would reveal just how much political satire had changed over the years.
2016-Present
On November 12, 2016, days after Donald Trump won the 2016 election, SNL began with a cold open of Kate McKinnon playing Hillary Clinton playing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” It was maudlin, self-serious and devoid of humor.
The cold open after 9/11 at least had a joke.
Former SNL cast member Rob Schneider recalls his reaction to the cold open:
[W]hen Kate McKinnon went out there on ‘Saturday Night Live’ in the cold opening and all that, and she started dressed as Hillary Clinton, and she started playing ‘Hallelujah,’ I literally prayed. ‘Please have a joke at the end.’…Don’t do this. Please don’t go down there.’ And there was no joke at the end, and I went, ‘It’s over. It’s over. It’s not gonna come back.’
This would set a tone for many of the cold openings to come. Even Vice, not known for being friendly to Trump, took notice of this phenomenon in a piece titled, “‘SNL’ Cold Opens Are Unfunny, Elitist Pieces of Liberal Propaganda,”:
[T]he jokes are tired references to current events that never build on one another. Instead, they are limply tossed out as obvious applause lines to an anti-Trump crowd… Everyone thinks that Trump is a narcissistic moron, so the joke is… Trump is actually a narcissistic moron! Hilarious!
But Trump is a genuinely unique threat! Yes, agreed, but is there a comedy angle more elevated than what I might overhear in a freshmen dorm at UC Berkeley? It’s not that SNL shouldn’t have gone after Trump. It’s not that they shouldn’t have gone after him harder than his opponents. It’s that the jokes were lazy. It was just pandering. It wasn’t comedy.
Pandering to a particular audience at the expense of actual comedy was not limited to SNL. It permeated all of late night, which now existed to soothe and affirm liberals in their righteousness. Late night and sketch comedy had become self-righteous, self-aggrandizing and—most importantly—self-defeating. As Caitlin Flanagan argued in her article for The Atlantic, “How Late Night Comedy Fueled the Rise of Trump”:
Though aimed at blue-state sophisticates, these shows are an unintended but powerful form of propaganda for conservatives. When Republicans see these harsh jokes—which echo down through the morning news shows and the chattering day’s worth of viral clips, along with those of Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and Seth Meyers—they don’t just see a handful of comics mocking them. They see HBO, Comedy Central, TBS, ABC, CBS, and NBC. In other words, they see exactly what Donald Trump has taught them: that the entire media landscape loathes them, their values, their family, and their religion.
The poster child of the scolding tone of late night was Jon Oliver, the Walter Cronkite of Smugness. Jeff Maurer, who for several years wrote for Last Week Tonight, shares why political satire became more about "clapter" than comedy:
“Giving an opinion is easier than writing a joke… The splintering of media, along with the tribalization of American politics, has led to ideologically homogeneous crowds, which, in turn, has made “clapter”—making the audience clap instead of laugh—a potent force in comedy.”
Clapter is the opposite of SNL’s early ethos. SNL was countercultural. It was rebellious. The aim wasn’t to pander to a particular audience but to jolt the audience with an unexpected joke:
One of [Lorne] Michaels’ rules was, no groveling to the audience either in the studio or at home. In those first five years especially, SNL writers were not pleased when a studio audience applauded some social sentiment or political opinion in a sketch or “Weekend Update” item. The writers wanted laughs, not consensus.
Not only did comedy suffer due to the pursuit of clapter in the Trump era, but SNL and others were clearly pulling punches when it came to Biden.
Dana Carvey’s impression of Biden is as funny as it is savage—but where was this impression during the first 3.5 years of Biden’s term? Only after Biden selflessly stepped down as nominee to preserve The Soul of the Nation (he was pushed out after showing a galling level of hubris and narcissism) was it OK to make the obvious jokes about his mental decline.
The jokes were all sitting right there. Chevy Chase lampooned Ford for falling down stairs. Where were the sketches about Biden tripping over himself at the U.S. Air Force graduation or on Air Force One? Will Ferrell poked fun at Bush’s many verbal fumbles. Where were the sketches about Biden’s many gaffes? Phil Hartman played Reagan as a doddering old fool in front of the cameras but a mastermind behind closed doors. Why did similar impressions evade the cast and writers of SNL when Biden was on the ballot?
The reason these sketches weren’t written: SNL (and comedy writers across late night) became more concerned with being On The Right Side of History. This wasn’t about comedy. This was about Saving the Republic—but in the most counterproductive way possible.
Being On the Right Side of History led those who were once outside agitators mocking the powerful to become mouthpieces for the Biden Administration—an administration that more closely resembled “Weekend at Bernie’s” than “The West Wing.”
For at least a year (likely longer) Biden’s inner circle covered up the serious decline of the president—aided and abetted by late night comedians.
In 2006, Stephen Colbert gave a brilliant and blistering speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner, skewering President Bush mere feet away. In 2024, the Deitrich Bonhoeffer of Late Night stood onstage with President Biden—but not to skewer him. To fundraise for him.
Months later, Jimmy Kimmel—misogynistic, problematic host of “The Man Show” turned Conscience of The Nation—hosted another Democratic fundraiser with George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and others. Weeks later, after Biden’s disastrous debate, George Clooney wrote his famous New York Times op-ed admitting that “the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
If George Clooney saw this, surely Kimmel did, too. So did Colbert. So did anyone who had spent any time with Biden at a fundraiser or handed him a softball interview on late night. Being on The Right Side of History meant hiding from the American people the true condition of their president. Democracy Dies in Darkness.
If there was one show that defied this trend, it was the revamped version of The Daily Show under Jon Stewart. During his first monologue after returning to the show he took clear aim at both candidates and pushed back against the suggestion that now was the time to pull punches:
The stakes of this election don’t make Donald Trump’s opponent less subject to scrutiny. It actually makes him more subject to scrutiny. If the barbarians are at the gate, you want Conan standing on the ramparts not chocolate chip cookie guy.
Stewart was pilloried for this. But as “The Daily Show” head writer, Dan Amira, observed to Politico: “If you’re in power, or trying to get into power, you should expect some scrutiny from late night shows. That’s what political comedy is about.”
As many, many, many, many people have said, had Biden chosen not to run, or dropped out (been forced out) sooner, the opposition to Trump might have had a fighting chance. SNL and Late Night could have helped rather than hinder the national discussion on Biden’s obvious decline and the clear need for him not to seek a second term. But a mixture of Biden’s bottomless vanity—combined with late night’s subservience—spelled disaster. Folks, I’m serious! No joke!
Now, we have a man in the White House who has already:
Pardoned 1,500 Jan. 6 rioters, including violent offenders who attacked police officers.
Acted to repeal birthright citizenship via an executive order.
Named several dubious, unethical people to cabinet positions.
And so much more.
Whatever late night sketch and comedy shows thought they were accomplishing by pulling punches on Biden and sanctimoniously grandstanding night after night, it had the opposite desired effect.
Virtue signaling is its own reward, I guess.
Days after the 2024 election, the SNL Cold Open included cast members discussing the election outcome—but this time with jokes! They made serious points, but then pivoted to a comedy bit about sucking up to Trump and falling into line. It was funny while making an important point! Jokes weren’t just “limply tossed out as obvious applause lines.” There was laughter!1
Maybe there’s hope for late night comedy after all.
I also want to note I think James Austin Johnson’s Trump is a significant improvement over Alec Baldwin.