Response to The Reviews Are In

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Reviews Are In)

I didn't see the show and hadn't read any reviews, but just this morning, my wife and I heard CBS's morning show do a story on Donald Trump hosting SNL, and I mentioned that he didn't seem funny at all in the clips the news shows have been using, except maybe for that Oval Office skit about the Mexican president delivering the check for the wall, and my wife said it's probably because Trump totally lacks a sense of humor.

I suspect that's part of it, but I also think whoever it was (Hank Stuever in the Washington Post, apparently) who said this "was a reminder of what SNL is really for – to make fun of people running for president, not to buddy up to them", hit the nail on the head. And it's not that Trump is incapable of making people laugh, but that only seems to happen when it's not what he's trying to do, only when people are laughing at him, not with him. No SNL skit will ever measure up to the quality of that laughter, maybe because it's hard to parody someone we are already laughing at, especially someone we don't like -- and despite polls showing that about one-fourth of Republicans think otherwise, most of us do not like Donald Trump.

There's this "old saw" from way back that famous people are actually flattered when impersonators mimic them, supposedly proving that they have a capacity to "laugh at themselves", which I always suspected was mostly pig poop. Still, it was one thing for Barbara Wawa to play along when someone ridiculed her alleged speech impediment, and quite another for Sarah Palin to laugh when someone lampoons her claims of having foreign policy experience because she "can see Russia from [her] house". Tina Fey's sendup of Sarah Palin in 2008 was excellent, and yes, it was even wonderful seeing the two of them, at one point, side-by-side on stage, but that magic moment was bought at the expense of the show's independent brand, and even let some of the air out of the balloon.

The problem is, Sarah Palin's foreign policy claims were dangerous, and were worthy of ruthless mockery, which is something best done without her being there, lest someone think the issue of her being an ignoramus was not important enough to deserve all the attention it was getting in the news. The fact that Palin was in on the skit almost killed the joke, and especially so later, once it became apparent that she didn't seem to be laughing along.

It's much the same with Trump, a man whose bizarre policies, once he's been accepted to host this show, seem to lose their menace, and in fact are made to seem not at all out of the ordinary. Especially now that Jon Stewart is off the air, America needs a vehicle where mockery can be used to expose political outrageousness to public inspection, all of which is more effective when done behind the target's back.

But the worst thing about this is, Trump seems to be using his embarrassing appearance to his political advantage, bragging about the show's ratings, even though the good ratings were only the result of all that advance hype of the show, not his actual performance, which, according to all the evidence, was a humongous flop.