It wasn’t a political satire. Headlines from CNN, The Hollywood Reporter, and many others — “‘SNL’ targets pro-Palestinian campus protesters in ruthless fashion,” reported The Daily Beast — are saying it’s all wrong. Reported. If you take politics out of politics and not just satire, it’s not political satire.
The sketch featured anxious and conflicted parents speaking on NY1’s Community Affairs Panel television show about the protests, police and government retaliation, and confusion about encampments at higher education institutions across the country.
“SNL” veteran Kenan Thompson, who played the father of a fourth-year undergraduate at Columbia University, was the black exception to the white panelists, and was hired to cover the nearly $70,000 in tuition fees charged by his daughter’s school. I broke the hump of Uber driving. “There’s nothing I’m more proud of than young people voicing dissent,” Thompson’s character said. And here’s the punchline: his Girl, of course! Protesting the war on Gaza or Hamas attacks on Israel or anything else is really a white problem, and rightly so. do not havebut …
Topical humor? In a sense. satire? Awol. And in America in 2024, says Ann Rivera, associate professor of comedy writing and performance at Columbia University Chicago and director of comedy studies at The Second City. “Satire is not a useful tool. When we make comedy, we are exploiting perception; pain; and some form of mental or temporal distance.”
“All we have is pain,” Rivera said Monday, before student protests preceded the worst of the pandemic and the possibility of a second Trump administration. Ta. But there’s no distance. ”
Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
question: Ann, about that “SNL” cold open — I don’t know if it’s possible to find anything interesting in the reactions in Gaza or Israel or even campuses at this point.
A: That’s right (lol). I wasn’t particularly good at sketching. If I had to guess, Keenan’s character was originally going to be part of “Weekend Update,” but then they thought maybe they could do something with it in the Cold War Open. Given the frame of the song and the fact that people’s attitudes didn’t quite hit home, it seems to me that they thought of it as just a monologue and then rewrote it as a cold open. .
I’m currently directing one of Second City’s touring shows, and there’s a lot of original material. So I’m in the theater regularly, watching comedy being improvised in front of an audience. All I can say is that these audiences react very strongly to absurdity and absurdity, so when we get a little more candid about what’s going on in the world, they just seem a little tired. is.
Steve Martin talks about when he started changing up his stand-up act and becoming ridiculously wild and crazy. It came from a sense that audiences were really tired of the serious, complicated, dark world (post-Vietnam). People were prepared for absurdity.
For now, for better or worse, it’s hard to say whether SNL is particularly good at political satire. This is a difficult time for that. We are exhausted from the past few years. And let me be clear about this: Trump is actually caricaturing himself. There is no use exaggerating that Trump is behaving like the Mafia, because as president he is already an exaggerated version of the Mafia.
The true heyday of American political satire occurred before the Vietnam War era. There wasn’t any good political satire during the Vietnam era for the same reasons we don’t have it now. Lenny Bruce, Molt Sahl, Nichols, May, they all came out in the late ’50s, early ’60s, when conformity was so valued in America that everyone was afraid to talk about it. I was there. and now?There is so much I’m talking.
Satire is meant to torment the comfortable. And I don’t know if any of us feel comfortable.
Q: Going back to the “SNL” sketch: To me, it felt more like a generation-gap father-daughter comedy from the ’60s, like “The Impossible Years.” Thompson is so skilled at eliciting every laugh he can. But was there satire?
A: If there was, it was very faint. A satirical point about the idea that students from families of color don’t have the space or time to protest at student camps, whereas white privileged children and parents do have a space to protest. I think there is. However, that element was not revealed at all.
Q: Film critic Pauline Kael wrote this because the major Hollywood studios had flopped with campus rebellion films like The Strawberry Statement and RPM, and in that subgenre, Elliott Gould had made The Getting Wrong. It was in 1970, after the success of “Straight”. She said the student riots “should have been a great subject. Students become idealists and try to put their feelings about justice into practice; “And the students thought it would be a great topic.” Their impatience with delays. The relationship between boredom and activity. and what Angus Wilson called “the mysterious bond that unites kindness and cruelty.” Anne, speaking of news-stricken audiences, every time one of these movies reaches its climax of campus riots or police attacks, you must have felt like: Another movie?
A: Think about it. Around the same time, television was showing “The Carol Burnett Show,” “Laugh-In,” and “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.” Carol Burnett ignored the problems of her time in favor of parodies of 1940s and 50s films. “Laugh-In” is so sick of me. Goldie Hawn dances to “PROTEST NOW!” in a bikini in an attempt to make a joke out of “what’s going on.” It’s written on her navel – it’s not satire. It’s not even a parody!
Q: Just for your information.
A: Yes. The Smothers Brothers covered what was really going on and their show was the most popular of these three of his shows. And they were taken off the air for not censoring their material (at the request of the CBS network). It all comes down to who makes movies and TV shows and why. On television, we create programs for our customers, our advertisers. Not the viewers.
Q: Is that another way of saying that “SNL” guru Lorne Michaels has ample reason to offend as few people as possible?
A: In many ways, he has the last slot to star in a semi-hot sketch comedy. And he has no intention of rocking that boat.he teeth Established.
There was room for satire in the student movement sketches we’re talking about. But they couldn’t find it or get there. It was a comedy. But I have no teeth. Maybe it’s because everyone is already baring their teeth these days.
Ann Rivera’s book, Funnier: A Theory of Comedy with Practical Applications, will be published by Northwestern University Press in early 2025.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
