SNL Was Everything Trump Could Have Wanted

I wasn’t going to watch SNL on Saturday night. I already don’t watch it most weeks anyway, but this time I was making a much more conscious decision not to tune into the live broadcast.

But then, exactly as I feared, it ended up not mattering anyway. The program’s host for the evening, notable racist and actual presidential candidate Donald Trump, got exactly what he wanted and, as EW reported, gave the show (and ostensibly, himself) its best ratings in years.

And it would have been great if those ratings were for a show that challenged Trump in any way or made some attempt at, you know, actual satire. But after white-knuckling my way through the episode on Hulu, it became clear pretty quickly that the show didn’t do any of that.

At best, SNL put on a weak show and enabled Donald Trump to look cutesy and harmless to thousands of viewers who might not realize the despicable things he advocates. At worst, it outright encouraged both Trump and the viewers of the show to laugh off and ignore the candidate’s very much deserved reputation as a bigot.

What’s especially disheartening is that this was even allowed to happen in the first place. Remember that not long ago, NBC declared it was barring Trump from appearing on its network because of his ugly comments about Latinos. That was back when Trump was nothing but an obnoxious sideshow that we all expected to eventually slink away like he did in the last election cycle. But then several months passed, and the controversial candidate turned into a media spectacle and guaranteed ratings generator, and the network suddenly changed its tune.

Funny how that happens. Too bad the show wasn’t also funny.

The closest the episode got to mustering up any sort of takedown was during “Weekend Update.” First, the boorish and pathetic Drunk Uncle was presented as Donald Trump’s biggest supporter. Then Michael Che offered the only truly direct jab of the night, when he joked about being suspicious whenever old white men like Trump talk about “the good old days” because, “My Negro senses start tingling. After all those years of progress, Trump’s gonna go, ‘I think we had it right the first time.’” But even Che looked nervous to have stepped out that far, and after that the show retreated to toothless ribbing.

The most bizarre sketch to air was one in which Trump and several cast members acted out Trump’s hypothetical first days in office. In Trump’s America, the sketch goes, ISIS is defeated, Putin driven out of Ukraine, and Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto pays Trump personally for a border wall constructed between the U.S. and Mexico. I kept waiting for the punchline that never came. I guess you could say that the joke was supposed to be that all these goals of Trump’s are ridiculous fantasy, but you’d have to already agree with that point of view to read it into the sketch. The subtext was barely there, if there was any at all. The sketch ended up doing nothing but allow Trump to literally play out a wish-fulfillment fantasy and give a stump speech disguised as “comedy.”

The most upsetting moment of the night came in the first four minutes. During Trump’s opening monologue, a husky voice yells from the crowd, “Trump’s a racist!” It turns out the “heckler” is Larry David, who when asked why he interrupted, says, “I heard if I yelled that, they’d give me five thousand dollars.”

Ha ha!

For some reason, many have taken this for a daring jab, but there was nothing clever or subversive about it. The organization Deport Racism, who put out the bounty for hecklers to call out Trump’s racism live on the air, inexplicably awarded the $5,000 to Larry David for what was obviously a staged moment to ease tensions and smooth the way for Trump’s easy ride through the rest of the show. Even if David technically made the statement, it was completely deflated by the punchline of the joke, which was made at the expense of those protesting Trump’s appearance on the show and not at Trump himself.

All the joke did was belittle the thousands of people who have a legitimate grievance against Trump’s politics, and encourage him to ignore the haters and keep on doing his racist thing. I mean, all of those people upset that a man who wants to be President of the United States called Mexicans rapists and criminals and now gets free airtime on one of America’s most-watched shows are just crazy right? Trump’s not really a racist, that’s just dumb chant by some over-sensitive losers. Hilarious.

I wish that Larry David had actually called Trump a racist. It wouldn’t have been funny, but even a flailing outburst from somebody in the studio would have been better to watch than the neutered writing and sycophantic pandering.

At least it would have been saying something.

Why Game of Thrones is Actually About Climate Change

Game of Thrones has become a bigger hit than one would normally expect a television adaptation of a saga of dense fantasy novels from the 90’s could ever be. Anyone who has watched the show could tell you that this success probably comes from the fact that, as Adam Scott’s character in Parks and Recreation once emphatically insisted, they tell human stories in a fantasy setting. Even though there are direwolves and giants running around, the characters in GoT deal with real human problems like greed, loyalty, and love. It’s pretty easy to spot all that basic human drama stuff, but there’s one storyline that hits way closer to home that nobody else has seemed to notice.

What I mean is that Game of Thrones is basically an allegory for the political battle over climate change.

To be clear, I’m only talking about the show here. If this same argument is borne out over the books, I don’t know, because I’ve only made it through the first one. I’m only dealing with the HBO television series which, on its surface, seems mostly to be an instructional series on how to design sets that artfully obscure penises. But, if you dig deeper, you’ll find it’s so much more.