SNL's sketches about Kamala Harris and Trump fail at political comedy.

In this tense political moment, there are few things more harrowing than the experience of watching Saturday Night Live in a swing state. In commercial breaks full of threatening attack ads, the country is on the brink: Liberal Kamala Harris releases murderers, and Donald Trump distributes tax breaks for his billionaire friends. But when the cameras go live in Studio 8H, the stakes go down. We are no longer facing the most consequential election of our lifetime, a life-and-death struggle in which democracy and the very existence of the country are at stake. We are watching a spectacle staged for our amused enjoyment, a contest between slightly and not-so-ridiculous characters in which the only real losses are dignity and sanity. It's not a fight. It's a circus.

In its strongest form, SNLPolitical comedy can define a public figure for eternity. Will Ferrell's George W. Bush and Tina Fey's Sarah Palin feel in some ways more present than their real-life counterparts who, contrary to what many might think, never actually said “strategy” or “I can see Russia from my house.” Chevy Chase's pranks cemented the public's perception of Gerald Ford as an affable buffoon, and the droning repetition of Darrell Hammond's Al Gore exponentially reinforced the vice president's image as a humorless technocrat. The famous debate sketch in which Hammond's Gore repeats the word endlessly locker– which the presidential candidate didn't say quite as often, but perhaps not as often as he used to SNL Author Al Franken recently opined that they were solely responsible for Bush's election, but it allowed viewers to become bored with Gore's virtue, just as Ferrell's portrayal allowed them to accept Bush as a well-meaning jerk.

If not exactly impartial, SNLHis approach has always been to downplay political comedy in favor of political comedy – the equivalent of political reporters focusing solely on the gamesmanship of the campaign rather than the people whose lives and livelihoods are at stake. James Downey, the storyteller SNL The writer, who led the show's political coverage for decades, described himself as a “conservative Democrat,” and while watching the last few seasons you'd be hard-pressed to believe that the staff was staffed by Trump voters, the show has been hard-working and sometimes hard-working It's an incredibly middle ground – a position that can only be maintained with more effort as broadcast audience numbers have become both smaller and more polarized. In an interview in 2022, Lorne Michaels took the lead SNL For most of his nearly 50 years on the air, he openly longed for a time when it was easier to avoid taking sides. “It's a lot easier when everything in politics is normal,” he told Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times, “and the two parties just hate each other.”

SNL opened its 50th^Th Season this fall with firm feet on the median strip. In keeping with the series' recent penchant for stunt casting its big performances, Michaels had made headlines in the offseason by securing the return of former cast members Maya Rudolph and Andy Samberg to star as Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff playing while taking over off stump James Austin Johnson's Trump and Bowen Yang's newly assigned JD Vance. Rudolph's Harris impression has been appropriately adjusted since her first appearance on the show in 2019 as America's “funny aunt,” but the underlying text was flaccid and formless, treating Harris more like a quirky celebrity than someone running for the highest office the nation competes. With a number of new and returning impressions to introduce – Samberg's submissive Emhoff; Jim Gaffigan's Tim Walz, a hyperactive golden retriever of a would-be vice president; and Dana Carvey's confused Joe Biden – Rudolph ended up playing the straight woman instead of the spotlight, an island of competence in a sea of ​​instability. Like Barack Obama, Harris' stoicism and composure resist easy ridicule. (As Downey once said of Obama, “There's nothing to hold on to – certainly no flaw or snag to caricature.”) The result often has the effect of grasping at straws, and the show's writers making a meal of small things, exploiting weaknesses, or just sluggishly recycling the opponent's attack lines. When Rudolph's Harris asserted that her campaign was as vacuous as Sabrina Carpenter's “Espresso” – “the lyrics are vague, but the mood is bad” – it sounded like the work of a high school debater assigned to a proposal which they do not support.

By last weekend's opening, which was based on Harris' controversial interview with Fox News' Bret Baier, the show had at least grown some baby teeth. Rudolph struggled with Alec Baldwin's eerily formless Baier and managed to rattle off a list of Harris' real-life achievements despite being interrupted at almost every word. (“Are you going to stop?” Rudolph, playing an exasperated Harris, asked him, to which Baldwin's Baier replied, “Maybe when I go to bed.”) Meanwhile, a clip from one of Trump's rallies, framed as a clip for Harris He responded by allowing him to ramble freely, proclaiming the January 6 insurrection a Woodstock-style act of love – repeating an Obama attack line from the day before – and promising: “I would never threaten anything…except perhaps violence.” .”

Like the moment in the season's opening sketch when the bulletproof barrier protecting Trump from an assassin's bullet is rolled away to leave a stunned Vance standing alone and exposed on stage, it conveys the casual ease with which Johnson's Trump goes from reassurance to outright threat, something on the order of deeper and disturbing. But it also reaches the limits of what SNL can achieve. In an earlier era or with a different candidate, this characterization might have stuck, as it did with Ferrell or Fey. But Trump is already his own knowing caricature — the Woodstock jab is hardly a whitewash of the words he actually used — and it would take a sustained assault beyond the confines of a six-minute sketch to explore the dark underbelly of his appeal. (During one Weekend update Later in the show, Colin Jost could only assure viewers that the footage was of Trump singing along to a song by Cats was the real thing.) Instead, the skit takes a look at Harris' attempts to get a “viral moment” out of the interview by placing her in a vertical TikTok frame in hopes of creating one SNLis his own. Very attentive, very reserved.

More than 30 years after it first aired, one line still haunts me Saturday Night LiveThe 1988 debate between Carvey's George HW Bush and Jon Lovitz's Michael Dukakis responds to a rambling, incoherent response from Bush with a stunned: “I can't believe I'm losing to this guy.” But it's less that what is said about Dukakis, but rather because of his party and the astonished incomprehension with which failed Democratic candidates have treated the rising Republicans of the last few decades. (Even Hillary Clinton couldn't believe she would lose to this guy.) During this time SNL has lost sight of the idea that his impressions should amount to more than just imitation — after all, Chevy Chase made no attempt to look or sound like the real Ford — and that politics isn't just a matter of what happens on the campaign trail.

In “Washington's Dream,” a sketch from the second episode of this season, host Nate Bargatze's George Washington stands majestically in a boat full of ecstatic revolutionary soldiers and lays out his vision of the proud nation of the future. But that vision is full of contradictions and utter absurdity. Many of the founding father's inexplicable dreams are based on peculiarities of the English language. (For example, why do we call the meat of cows “beef” and the meat of pigs “pig” but chicken remains just “chicken”?) But he also proclaims the high ideals of freedom and democracy that make the boat The Only Black One Soldier, played by Kenan Thompson, believes these ideals could apply to him too. Of course, Washington just stares blankly into space and then abruptly switches to hot dogs and predicts the centuries of white Americans denying others the rights forbidden in the nation's founding documents by simply ignoring that there was even a contradiction.

“Washington's Dream” is neither timely nor provocative; You can imagine something like that with Bob Newhart. But it sticks in a way that the more desperate, topical installments of the series don't. This also applies to the moment last Saturday when Jost made the decision after several minutes of material about the Trump and Harris campaigns Weekend update Desk to main actor Emil Wakim. Wearing a heavy sweater, Wakim spoke for several minutes about how people are confused when they learn he is both Lebanese and Christian, and about how he is the son of an immigrant father so successful that “he now Republicans” — a reference to a demographic still unknown to some political strategists. He even said “Free Palestine,” although only in quotation marks. Wakim's monologue was not particularly confrontational, although a joke about how ordinary Arabs are being turned into extremists by repeated bombings was so unsuccessful that he jokingly blamed Jost for writing it. But it gave voice to a point of view that is rarely heard, and not just on late-night comedy shows. Most of them SNLThe segments of are forgettable as soon as they air, but this one was built for that last.