The Bill Burr-hosted SNL this week was pretty mediocre stuff. I know that's par for the show on the best days, but being Burr coming on the post-election show, there was some hope for inspiration. The above commercial parody is about as good as you got. There's also some background context to take into account.
These "post-election" SNL's have only started to become a thing since 2016, when Dave Chappelle hosted and gave a classic monologue about salving the disappointment of Trump's win, trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, not losing sight of the big picture, etc, all while being damn funny. Dave doing what Dave does. And for every post-election show since (including mid-terms), Dave Chappelle has returned to make these shows a tradition. So this year was the first non-Chappelle post-election show, and expectations were that Burr would pick up the mantle and deliver an equally poignant episode. Well, he didn't, and didn't really seem to want to, and furthermore there didn't seem to be much appetite at the show itself to do anything that might ruffle Trump's or his supporters' feathers. Burr's monolgue did have some sharp quips, and some of the sharper ones seem to have gone over the audience's heads (hint: RFK Jr doesn't wear shoes on airplanes), but Burr made it clear immediately that he didn't want to get too political, and even when he did he kept it pretty tame. I was hoping he might do a variation of his riff about blaming immigrants for all of America's problems, but the subject was never broached.
There's some deeper context as well, which is that Lorne Michaels has a special relationship with Trump. You may remember that he allowed then-candidate Trump to host the show in 2015 - which is unprecedented. Candidates from both parties have appeared on the show during their capaign runs, but a presidential candidate has never hosted the show before or since. (Funny enough, at the time there was no talk about "equal airtime", such as we saw this year after Kamala appeared briefly on the show, and Trump forced NBC to give him a 10 minute block of time to compensate.)
Like most of the real elites in this country, Lorne Michaels has known and been preparing for a Trump victory for several weeks now, which is why he chose to have Chappelle replaced for this post-election episode, and quite likely why the show - even with the veneer or sarcasm - went much more lightly on the president-elect than in '16 and '20. Far more troubling in my opinion is the news that Lorne Michaels had asked comedian Shane Gillis to appear on the show throughout the season's run to do an impression of Donald Trump. This is appalling for a couple of reasons. First of all, the current Trump impressionist on the show, James Austin Johnson, happens to be the finest Trump impressionist available at the moment. It would have been an absolute insult to ask him to step down for what is pretty objectively a far weaker rendition (you are free to decide for yourselves). But the obvious truth is that Michaels did not ask Gillis to play Trump because anyone honestly thought he was better than Johnson, but because Gillis, being part of the Joe Rogan clique of comedians, would have been far more ingratiating to Trump, and likewise this shows Michaels' wish to ingratiate himself as well. (Thankfully for Johnson, Gillis still harbors some resentment for getting fired from SNL back in 2018.)
How much of the tepid satire on this week's SNL has to do with Michaels' - like so many other media elites - wish to avoid Donald's vengeful wrath in his new administration that happens to be armed with a fully weaponized Justice Department, well, who knows?
crumbsroom wrote: