Reitman’s film goes back before all that, with the SNL writer Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott) trying to describe the show to a befuddled NBC network executive. “It’s postmodern, it’s Warhol,” she says of sketches that include a deadpan Andy Kaufman (Nicholas Braun) lip-synching to a recording of the theme from the children’s cartoon Mighty Mouse. The humour was postmodern bordering on performance art, at least part of the time, and a radical change from the creaky musical variety shows that flooded television then. But the avant-garde inevitably becomes the establishment, and over the decades SNL has turned into the kind of show people complain is bad but watch anyway, from habit as much as anything else.
The loss of its cutting edge
Perhaps because it is so ingrained in popular culture, it still has some currency – but in the age of social media, SNL seems to respond to the culture instead of being on the cutting, forward-facing edge. When Kamala Harris announced that Tim Walz would be her running mate, social media exploded with speculation about who might play him on SNL. People had wish lists of possibilities, living and dead (comedy director Paul Feig wished it could have been Chris Farley). Near-lookalike Jim Gaffigan was among the most plausible, so it wasn’t a huge surprise when he turned up on Saturday in the opening sketch about contrasting Harris and Trump rallies.
That opening sketch was the highlight of the premiere before its long downward slide. Gaffigan’s brief appearance did little more than echo the Walz dad-joke memes that have been online for months. Maya Rudolph was brilliant as a likeable Kamala Harris, a part she has played before. She captures the dancing, the laugh and the steeliness behind the buoyant energy of the “fun aunt”, as the fictional Harris calls herself. But the comic gem was the surprise appearance of Andy Samberg as “second gentlemensch” Doug Emhoff. He entered doing a goofy dance that we haven’t seen the real Emhoff do but we can totally imagine him doing. And Samberg nailed the delivery of every line, especially when enthusiastically talking about how he would embrace the traditional role of first spouse. “I for one can’t wait to decorate the White House at Christmas,” he says. “The theme will be Hanukkah.” That was the kind of sharp, funny, unexpected moment viewers hope for and rarely get.
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What’s lost in the fog of the past is that these moments were always rare. SNL is known for its political humour, but for every portrayal that seems so potent it echoes through political reality – Tina Fey’s scathing Sarah Palin impression, chirping, “I can see Russia from my house,” was brutally close to Palin’s own floundering on foreign policy when running for vice-president – there are dozens of toothless caricatures like Alec Baldwin’s purse-lipped Donald Trump, more an impersonation of a cartoon Trump than a satire.
