Things that aren’t as good as they used to be – Saturday Night Live
On a good night, with the good host, Saturday Night Live can still be funny. The ‘Weekend Update’ segment is funny, although John Oliver gets some of the same laughs while managing to work in some trenchant analysis.
The part of the show that is consistently unfunny, frequently cringe inducing and generally unwatchable is the political cold open. These segments typically starring Kate McKinnon as Elizabeth Warren or Alec Baldwin as Trump are just terrible.
McKinnon’s Warren (like her Hillary Clinton) is just as overly broad, dopey and lacking in any incisive commentary as Baldwin’s Trump. The writers seem to be on autopilot. The “jokes” are recycled show after show which creates the awkward feeling that the cold opening is parody of itself.
I hadn’t seen her Warren bit until last night. The highlight for me was when she said that money isn’t real, it’s just numbers on a computer, which is actually the stone-cold reality of economics. Then I realized they were saying it for laughs, and most people will never realize how true the “joke” was.
Like the news media, SNL suffers from trying to achieve some imaginary “balance” where no equivalents exist.
I’m already so sick of McKinnon’s stupidly overwrought Warren that I doubt I’ll watch between now and the election.