‘SNL’ and Jim Carrey are failing to make 2020 funny
Joe Biden won the presidency, but Jim Carrey and “SNL” have lost big so far in 2020.
In October, “Saturday Night Live” returned to Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Center in New York ready to bring some normalcy back to a 2020 that has been traumatic and taxing. With a masked audience and political opening sketches, “SNL” and producer Lorne Michaels are trying to bring the funny back to our lives. If only they were succeeding.
So far in its 46th season, which has run for the past six weeks without break, “SNL” has been cathartic but hollow, occasionally funny but rarely hilarious, topical without being relevant and loud without saying much of anything. With a pandemic leaving Americans craving humor and relief, a presidential election to parody and a strong series of hosts, why has the quality of the new season of “SNL” failed so miserably?
The sketch comedy’s biggest problem is also its most famous: Carrey as Joe Biden. Over the summer NBC made a big deal out of Carrey, a veteran comedian who has excelled as an “SNL” host in the past, taking on the role of the then-democratic presidential nominee. But when Carrey arrived with silver wig and aviator sunglasses in the Oct. 3 season premiere, his performance quickly became cringe-worthy.
The comedian’s impression of Biden isn’t so much a character as a costume. His Biden wears the aforementioned aviators, makes a lot of finger guns, and that’s pretty much it. Carrey slips into other characters frequently: a touch of “The Mask” here, a pinch of Clint Eastwood there. Biden has a distinctive voice, but Carrey mostly growls at the camera.
Carrey is a symptom of a larger issue: Michaels and the writers don’t seem to trust the cast, considering how many celebrity ringers continually make appearances. Alec Baldwin has been showing up to play President Donald Trump in cold opens for so long that we forget it’s not par for the 45-year course for big stars to jump into the fray to portray big names. But after Baldwin came a parade of famous faces as the Democratic primary contenders, including Maya Rudolph, who continued playing Vice President-elect Kamala Harris after she joined Biden’s ticket.
Most of the cold opens this season have included the trio of Carrey, Baldwin and Rudolph. Rudolph has even seemingly turned the clock back 20 years on her career, appearing in sketches that aren’t political: as old grandmothers, Aunt Jemima and an ’80s jeans model. Yet this year’s cast is huge: There are 15 repertory and five featured players from whom to choose (currently minus Cecily Strong and Aidy Bryant, who are briefly excused to work on other projects they would have filmed over the
summer if not for the pandemic). None of those young comedians were good enough for an “ass angel jeans” parody, apparently.
The cast members that actually manage to make it into sketches are usually the old standbys: Kate Mckinnon and Kenan Thompson remain as prominent as ever, as do Pete Davidson and Beck Bennett (last year’s newbies Chole Fineman and Bowen Yang have made it into a decent number of sketches). Audiences would be hard-pressed to pick out new cast members in a sketch, let alone name them.
Short on memorable original cast members, “SNL” is also short on jokes that land. Stuck in a year no Hollywood writer could have imagined, “SNL” writers are struggling to find parody in the absurd. Constantly repeating lines from actual presidential debates and events (”Will you shut up, man?”) is lazy and an admission of defeat. The actual words politicians say aren’t supposed to be funnier than what writers can come up with (Sarah Palin never actually said “I can see Russia from my house”).
The first sketch after the host monologue is meant to be the strongest of the night, but it has repeatedly fallen flat (in the second episode, Bill Burr and Mckinnon screaming at a socially distant party because they can’t pronounce words correctly was joyless). Host John Mulaney’s recent episode saw multiple sketches relying on terrible rape jokes for its punchlines. Bringing the audience back is just a reminder of how many jokes don’t land in the room.
A series as old and prominent as
“SNL” is always ripe for criticism, some of it unfair. Putting on any kind of comedy in a year as full of tragedy and hardship as 2020 is immensely challenging, even without on-set COVID-19 protocols. But it is possible to find humor in the pandemic and the election (see comedian Sarah Cooper’s recent Netflix special for a shining example).
“SNL” is at its best when it finds a good cast ready to confront the current moment in American history. In 2020, it just doesn’t have that.