Trump flops on SNL,
Cringeworthy sketches have viewers sitting in silence throughout joyless show
It’s been a running question of this year’s Republican primary cycle: Is Donald Trump a clown?
Answer: Not nearly enough for Saturday Night Live.
It would be unfair to blame Trump alone for the deadness of the Nov. 7 episode. It’s hardly the first time the show has worked with a host who struggled with comedy line readings (some were professional actors). The bigger problem was the anodyne material. Trump said he hosted the episode to show he could “take a joke,” but SNL hardly threw any his way.
Instead, having chased ratings by casting the controversial candidate, SNL stuck with obvious, anemic political riffs and apolitical sketches that were cringeworthy all around. Trump himself had said that he had vetoed some material he found too risqué (a prerogative of hosts in the past), so maybe he killed better material that we’ll never see. But SNL, having cast a boisterous figure whose political raison d’être is “winning,” delivered an episode that did nothing except play not to lose.
Arguably the most exciting moment of the broadcast came during Trump’s brief monologue, when Larry David — on set to reprise his role as Sen. Bernie Sanders — called out “You’re a racist!” from the wings. It was a clever move to co-opt the $5,000 U.S. bounty that protesters had offered to anyone willing to disrupt the live broadcast. But it was a clear setup; David delivered his lines half-smiling, and Trump’s prepared response (“As a businessman, I can fully respect that”) fell flat.
That bit captured the problem with the episode: no one’s heart seemed to be in anything. SNL is not obligated to take sides in the election — or not to take sides — but as a topical comedy show, it needs to have some point of view, an animating idea.
Instead, the show used Trump, or the idea of Trump, in predictable ways, as in a sketch he introduced that mocked a limp restaurant gag with mean tweets.
His most specifically political bit was the first full-length sketch, which imagined Trump in the Oval Office in 2018 after having defeated the Islamic State, gotten Mexico to pay for a border wall and made the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, cry by insulting him.
In theory, it was a sharp idea. Just as Tina Fey lampooned Sarah Palin in 2008 using variations on her own words, the sketch presented Trump’s own grand, vaguely sketched campaign promises — “You will be bored of winning” — as their own parody.
(Asked in the sketch how he had been so successful, he answered, “Well, you know what, I don’t have to get specific. With me, it just works, you know, it’s magic.”)
But the segment fell lifeless and mostly laughless on the Oval Office carpet. Even a surprise cameo by Trump’s daughter Ivanka left the au- dience quiet.
There is, it turns out, something worse than heckling: silence. The crowd seemed to check out early, creating an energy-sucking vicious cycle. (Some of Trump’s biggest applause came when he first introduced the musical guest, Sia. Maybe because it rhymed with, “See ya.”)
The “Weekend Update” segment was more pointed, sending up Trump along with several other candidates. Without the host present, co-anchor Michael Che poked at Trump’s questioning of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate and his promise to “make America great again.” (“Whenever rich old white guys start bringing up the good old days, my Negro senses start tingling.”)
But the rest of the episode deployed Trump in sketches that played like parodies of late-episode SNL filler material: he strummed a laser harp in a bar band, walked on to Vanessa Bayer and Cecily Strong’s “Former Porn Stars” endorsement of him, danced like a tax guy in a parody of Drake’s “Hotline Bling” video and played a sleazy record producer pitching demo recordings to amateurs.
It’s not as if anyone could reasonably expect SNL to blisteringly satirize its own host, any more than it did Hillary Rodham Clinton when she guested on a generally charitable sketch earlier this season.
Whatever one can say about Donald Trump, he’s shrewd about the TV business. He knows what pressures producers work under, he knows what he can deliver in ratings and he knows the leverage that gives him.
He’s used all that to his advantage in the campaign. He’s not only availed himself of free media, he’s often set the terms: for instance, phoning into news shows that usually prefer candidates to sit in person for questioning. He’s even used television savvy as a political point. In the most recent Republican debate, he said that he had pressured CNBC to limit the length of its debate to two hours and cited that as evidence of his skill as a negotiator.
On a meta level, Trump probably left SNL with another such victory. The episode is not likely to hurt him among any voting group.
He can take credit for the high ratings — adding that he delivered for a network that recently had cut ties with him over his comments about Mexican immigrants — and lay any criticism on the writing staff.
And what did SNL and producer Lorne Michaels get?
The ratings, but then again, any new viewers tuned in to see a joyless, nearly unfunny show, which ended in a curtain call with Trump and the cast that played like a hostage video. In this bargain, Donald Trump won. And just like he’d warned us, it was boring.