I watched the return of Saturday Night Live anxious to see what the writers had come up with during their three months on the picket lines.

It turns out they still don’t know what to do with Obama. Their opening skit was a very weak parody of Thursday’s CNN debate. The gist of the skit was… the debate moderators loved Obama and were fawning over him the whole time. Hillary is left saying, ” What about me?” for most of the skit.

It’s not a very good joke and it points to the trouble with Obama and humor.

First off - it failed as satire - since CNN - and Campbell Brown in particular - were not playing favorites with Obama - quite the opposite. He’s the front-runner and more than a few questions on Thursday seemed to be framed in terms of Obama’s lack of experience to Hillary’s mountains of experience (a bogus narrative which doesn’t hold up but I don’t blame SNL for picking low-hanging meme fruit. Mmmmmm meme fruit.). I’d be very interested to see what this parody of media love for Obama will have on Tuesday’s MSNBC debate. MSNBC has been rapped on the knuckles by Clinton for Chris Matthews’ repeated offenses and David Shuster’s boneheaded “pimping” remark. Will MSNBC get tougher on Obama because of this?

Secondly, and most tellingly was that they just couldn’t make fun of Obama. Fred Armison did a barely passable job in the role. (Some have given SNL some grief saying Obama should be played by a black actor. IMO, that’s silly. He should be played by a good actor. Darrel Hammond’s Jesse Jackson is a stroke of genius. Armison’s Obama is as weak as Will Forte’s George W. was. Who knows maybe it’ll get better.)

Here’s the problem (and forgive me for using a definition)…

Satire: -noun: 1. the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.

The key part of satire is “exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.” And so far with Obama, he doesn’t have much by way of vice and folly for us to work with.

At least not yet. When he does give us something to work with, you’ll see everyone seize on it.

The man even gave up smoking for the campaign.

Satire is WAY harder to do than humor (personally, I shoot for satire but settle for humor when writing this strip). All the age jokes from Dave Letterman and Bill Maher (and Vinny’s stand up routine) about McCain are humor not satire - there’s no real depth to those jokes. It would have been far easier for Saturday Night Live to have a 12-year-old kid come out and play Barack Obama as a joke on his youth. It would have been funnier than what SNL did but it would have been just as paper-thin.

What it comes down to: Obama’s general lack of “vice, folly, etc.” is making satire almost impossible.

——————

Also on SNL:

Mike Huckabee made an appearance during the Weekend Update section and again proved to be a very good comedian. For a bigot, that is. The joke there was that once the skit was over, Huckabee didn’t know when to leave. Cute.

Tina Fey was also on and essentially endorsed Hillary. She took issue with a few of the commonly stated problems people have had with Hillary such as the co-presidency with Bill and “she’s as bitch”. Fey deftly dismantled those arguments going so far as to saying many women in power need to be bitches - it’s a good thing - and that, “bitch is the new black.” Good lines. The problem with that line of reasoning is that those are not reasons to be for Hillary - they’re reasons to not be against her. Those are two different things and seem illustrate the basic philosophical problems with the Clinton candidacy.

– Steve

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 3:00 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.