SNL's Best Political Sketches

Title: SNL's Best Political Sketches [theme music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Did you watch the Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary special last night or Saturday Night's re-airing of episode one from 1975? We will end today's show with a look at the last 50 years, specifically of political comedy on Saturday Night Live. We'll play clips of three iconic political sketches from the last 50 years with our guest Eric Deggans, who you know is the NPR TV critic. He argues that the primetime show isn't just recreating political moments over the years, it's also been playing a role in shaping how America views politics. Eric, always a treat when you come on this show. Welcome back to just this one little NPR station.

Eric Deggans: [chuckles] No, not so little and I appreciate you having me.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, this is for you too. As I said before the break, do you have a favorite political moment from SNL over the last 50 years? Call about any year from any SNL generation, and no matter your age, if it's one-liner, you can even try to land the joke or just name a sketch or a political comedian you've especially liked on the show, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

Has a Saturday Night Live sketch shaped your view of a politician or a news story? Has it informed your overall politics or made you feel less isolated, maybe, in your life experience or political views? Or has political comedy on Saturday Night Live helped you understand a particular moment in our country's history, as satire can do? Call or text us 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

Eric, before we play these three archival clips, can I just ask you first if you liked last night's special? I know you saw it and we're on Morning Edition today about it. Maybe you were a little bit mixed.

Eric Deggans: Yes, I was mixed about it. That's a deal with Saturday Night Live. It's a live show where it's hard to predict sometimes how entertaining a sketch is going to be. People who've worked on the show have talked a lot about how something will seem to kill in dress rehearsals and then when they get in in front of an actual audience, people react differently. This was a pretty ambitious undertaking. This was a three hour live primetime show.

It was three and a half hours by the time they actually did it, which meant it was more than twice as long as a typical Saturday Night Live episode. I give them kudos for just pulling it off, especially given that they had to shoehorn in all of these special appearances from former cast members and stars who are considered friends of the show, Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, just the list went on and on and on.

There were a lot of great moments, but overall, I thought it was an uneven show. I thought it was oddly, not focused on some of the best known and most classic sketches and we didn't see politics. They had one political impression. Kate McKinnon played Rudy Giuliani in a skit but the appearance wasn't really about modern politics. It was much more about how Rudy Giuliani's image has suffered recently in a huge musical parody.

It was an odd SNL where they tipped the hat to the show's 50 years of history but seemed a little reticent about actually featuring some things for which the show is best known, including a lot of its political sketches.

Brian Lehrer: It's funny. I thought it was going to be more political based on Steve Martin's monologue at the start. I was thinking originally, in the first minutes of the show, at this time when other big gala shows like the award shows seemed to be pulling back from politics after the election and maybe Hollywood got embarrassed.

Steve Martin came right out there and started with saying he was vacationing in the Gulf of Steve Martin, ha, ha, ha and having Martin Short carted off by actors playing ICE agents because Short didn't have his Canadian passport on him. At the beginning, I thought they were trying to plant a flag that, yes, we can still do that, but then, maybe it didn't go much after that.

Eric Deggans: It was interesting too that even in those jokes, they never really mentioned Trump's name. They didn't mention Republicans. [chuckles] In a way, it seemed like they were trying to have their cake and eat it too in terms of having some jokes that were topical and about things people were thinking about in the moment, but not risking any larger tumult by specifically naming why ICE agents are so interested in immigrants now [chuckles] or why we're talking about renaming the Gulf of Mexico in the first place and what happens to media institutions that refuse to go along with the new name?

Again, you got a sense that that Saturday Night Live was trying to commemorate its history while also avoiding some of the more uncomfortable or inconvenient elements of it all.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Here's a clip from a 1977 sketch called Ask President Carter. Folks, you'll hear Dan Aykroyd as Carter and Bill Murray as the legendary CBS broadcaster Walter Cronkite.

Bill Murray: Our next call is Peter Elton of Westbrook, Oregon, who I am told is 17 years of age.

Peter Elton: Hello? Hello?

Dan Aykroyd: Hello, Peter.

Peter Elton: Is this the president?

Dan Aykroyd: Yes, it is.

Bill Murray: Do you have a question for the president?

Peter Elton: I took some acid.

[laughter]

Peter Elton: I'm afraid to leave my apartment and I can't wear any clothes and the ceiling is dripping and I--

Bill Murray: Thank you very much for calling, sir.

Dan Aykroyd: Please, just a minute, Walter. This guy's in trouble. I think I better try to talk him down. Peter?

Peter Elton: Yes.

Dan Aykroyd: Peter, what did the acid look like?

Peter Elton: They were these little orange pills.

Dan Aykroyd: Were they barrel shaped?

Peter Elton: Yes.

Dan Aykroyd: Right. You did some orange sunshine, Peter.

[laughter]

Bill Murray: Very good of you to know that, I'm just saying.

Dan Aykroyd: How long ago did you take it, Peter?

Peter Elton: I don't know. I can't read my watch.

Bill Murray: All right, Peter, now, just listen. Everything's going to be fine. You're very high right now. You'll probably be that way for about five more hours. Try taking some vitamin B complex, vitamin C complex. If you have a beer, go ahead and drink it.

Peter Elton: Okay.

Dan Aykroyd: Just remember, you're a living organism on this planet and you're very safe. You've just taken a heavy drug. Now, just relax, stay inside and listen to some music, okay? Do you have any Allman Brothers?

[laughter]

Peter Elton: Yes, I do, sir. Everything's okay, huh, Jimmy?

Dan Aykroyd: It sure is, Peter. You know I'm against drug use myself, but I'm not going to lay that on you right now. Just mellow out the best you can, okay?

Peter Elton: Okay.

Brian Lehrer: Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, 1977. You want to talk about that or that era? I mean, the news media was pretty stodgy in 1977 compared to now, and of course, there was no social media with all of its edginess. Was it almost like alternative media in its original iteration to be having LSD jokes on television and referring even to the Allman Brothers?

Eric Deggans: I think when SNL first debuted in '75, it was setting itself up as a very distinct and different voice than the professional comedians who dominated television in more conventional spaces. The people who went on The Johnny Carson Show or went on the Mike Douglas Show and cracked jokes about drinking and played Las Vegas. These were younger comedians who were trying to subvert all of that. And so part of. They came of age in the '60s and early '70s. Drug culture was a big part of their humor and their comedy gods were people like George Carlin and Richard Pryor who talked a lot about that stuff in their own work.

Bringing that to television in a way that they could get away with made it feel like you were getting away with something by watching it on Saturday Night. I also think that Jimmy Carter was seen as a different politician. The hope was here's a guy who's very different than the politicians who got us into the Watergate scandal and mired America in one of its worst chapters in terms of how the presidency operated. Here's a guy who's going to come in and he's willing to be empathetic about somebody who's having a bad trip rather than be authoritarian, which might have been the response that maybe Nixon would have taken.

If you don't know the social context of when the show debuted and the humor that they were focusing on back then and why, you maybe lose a little bit of resonance with sketches like this and might not be able to understand why people liked them so much back then.

Brian Lehrer: Let's hear a couple of listeners' favorite political moments from Saturday Night Live. Gary in Montclair, you're on WNYC. Hi, Gary.

Gary: Hi, how are you? One of my favorite sketches of all time was back when Phil Hartman played Ronald Reagan. The scene is they set him up as the doddering persona, talking to people slow and handing out jelly beans. The door closes after they leave, and all of a sudden, he snap on it, pulls down the screen, has all the details, shouting orders at people. It was a brilliant take on do we even know this guy?

Brian Lehrer: Gary, thank you very much.

Eric Deggans: Speaking multiple languages even. It was, I think that sketch was called Masterminds. That was really great.

Brian Lehrer: Andy in the Bronx, you're on WNYC. Hi, Andy.

Andy: Hello there. My favorite was the Sarah Palin spoofs by Tina Fey, certainly when we thought politics were hitting a low, but when Alec Baldwin had her in the hallway and pretending that he was talking to Tina Fey, but that whole series was my personal favorite.

Brian Lehrer: Andy, thank you very much. Let's jump ahead. In fact, 30 years from our first clip to the 2008 election cycle, it is Tina Fey and Amy Poehler as Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton.

Tina Fey: It's truly amazing and I think women everywhere can agree that no matter your politics, it's time for a woman to make it to the White House.

Amy Poehler: No, mine.

[laughter]

Amy Poehler: It's supposed to be mine. I'm sorry. I need to say something. I didn't want a woman to be president. I wanted to be president and I just happened to be a woman. I don't want to hear you compare your road to the White House to my road to the White House. I scratched and clawed through mud and barbed wire, and you just glided in on a dog sled wearing your pageant sash and your Tina Fey glasses.

[cheers]

[applause]

Tina Fey: What an amazing time. To think that just two years ago I was a small-town mayor of Alaska's crystal meth capital and now I am just one heartbeat away from being president of the United States. It just goes to show that anyone can be president.

Amy Poehler: Anyone, anyone.

Brian Lehrer: Tina and Amy as Sarah and Hillary 2008, Eric, we know Sarah Palin has satirized herself on the show. That's what the caller was referring to. Kamala Harris went on in the lead-up to last year's presidential elections. Any other politicians who embraced the impression or really hated the show? Maybe Trump because of the way they were portrayed?

Eric Deggans: I think there's little doubt that Donald Trump didn't like Alec Baldwin impersonating him, who might have been one of the most famous people to take on Trump. He did it for quite a while. John McCain, I guess, is one of the politicians who appeared on Saturday Night Live the most. I had heard that McCain and Lorne Michaels, executive producer of the show, were friends and so perhaps he felt comfortable appearing. There's this classic sketch that he appeared in, I think, just days before the election in 2008, where he goes on QVC with Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin. They're selling stuff like he sells jewelry called McCain Fine Gold jewelry [chuckles] after the legislation that he co-sponsored.

Politicians, I think, would go on SNL to try and show that they were good sports and also to try and offer an alternative vision to the impressions that people were doing of them on the show. I think Sarah Palin is a really good example of a politician whose public image and the sense of Americans about who that person was may have been shaped greatly by how Saturday Night Live satirized her because America didn't really know Sarah Palin when she was announced as the vice presidential pick, the running mate for McCain.

Saturday Night Live came up with this impression pretty quickly. I don't think Tina Fey was on the show anymore but I remember people trading emails when Sarah Palin was first announced saying, "Wow, she looks a lot like Tina Fey." I think it was out there in the zeitgeist in the same way that a lot of people traded emails saying that comic Jim Gaffigan looked a lot like Tim Walls, and then they wound up hiring Jim Gaffigan to play Walls last year.

Brian Lehrer: One more call, one more clip. Alan in Brooklyn, we have 30 seconds for you. Alan, Hi.

Alan: I was struck by the way sometimes they look for the humor in finding the very opposite of the character we see in a president and other times they look for the exaggeration of it like the Carter skit you had before and another one where he acted like the supreme nuclear expert exaggerating something we think he is, the Reagan skit where he's considered to be an aw-shucks bumbling fellow and they close the door and Phil Hartman shows he's a schemer and a strategizer and emphasizing the very opposite of what he is. Now, the question is, what is Trump really? I think many people think of him as bumbling but maybe he's more strategic than we believe.

Brian Lehrer: And here is James Austin Johnson as Trump on Saturday Night Live just last year.

James Austin Johnson: But we are here at courthouse, and yes, we will be abiding by this horrible gag order so I will not be saying that the judge is an idiot or where he lives or what kind of crappy car he drives. I didn't know they still made Wagoneers but it's a terrible time for our country. I am standing weirder than ever. Arms like a GI Joe, legs like the smooth criminal video, look like I'm always in ski boots. Make it make sense.

Brian Lehrer: Eric, I think he does a great Trump, but do you think Saturday Night Live with Alec Baldwin after the first election was trying to be part of the resistance, if we can use that term, not just a comedy show?

Eric Deggans: I think what Saturday Night Live is always trying to do is they're trying to put their finger on the pulse of what people are talking about and I think they're trying to make ways to create comedy that resonates in the culture. I don't think it's as simple as we're all a bunch of liberals and we hate Trump and we're going to go after him.

Although, I do think that they also felt a little stung by the fact that they had Trump on as a guest host right as he was starting to ramp up his first run at the Republican nomination for president and there were critics out there that said that him hosting Saturday Night Live was part of all of this free media exposure that he got from media outlets treating his candidacy like it could never be successful, and so they felt free to cover him a lot feeling that eventually some conventional politician would rise to the top.

[theme music]

I want to speak to what your caller said earlier. I do think also what SNL does is it tries to tap into what people might be thinking about this politician or what they may suspect about them. I think a lot of people looked at Ronald Reagan and said, "Is this guy really the way he seems or is there some is there some real secret plan behind it?" Then that's where the Mastermind sketch comes from. People look at Al Gore and say, "Boy, he seems stiff." You get Darryl Hammond's [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: The last word. Eric Deggans, TV critic for NPR, honored that you gave us this time. Thank you so much.

 

 

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