'SNL’ review: With Trump in the hospital, a nervous season opener finds itself between a 30 Rock and a hard place
Saturday night, once again, Donald Trump — longtime hater (and host) of “Saturday Night Live,” COVID-19 patient and current U.S. president — sucked all the air out of the room, and the country.
The 46th “Saturday Night Live” season opener labored from deadly serious competition waged by the 45th POTUS and his domination of the weekend news cycles.
Was it even possible to be truly funny, in any mode, about Trump going public with his testing positive for the coronavirus one day before showtime?
The answer was a qualified no, not really. But the effort was weirdly compelling anyway. The season launch for “SNL” returned the cast to a live format produced at Rockefeller Center’s Studio 8H, for the first time since Daniel Craig hosted back on March 7, which made it feel like a real show, at least, not another Zoom meeting.
To sincere applause, host and current-season “Fargo” star Chris Rock introduced pandemic first responders, seated up front in what appeared to be a scaled-down and fully masked audience. Masks were the first thing on any sane viewer’s mind watching the show, and the last words out of Rock’s mouth at the curtain call: “Wear a mask!” he shouted over the music, though he was himself maskless.
Much was made of the daily testing the cast members reportedly underwent, and the cleaning protocols were plainly, even self-consciously evident in the offstage, between-sketch moments, as stagehands sprayed down and cleaned up scenery.
The cold open, erratically paced at best, wrestled with the question of how to be funny on any Trump-related subject right now. Cold, hard irony is what’s in the air, with the president getting nailed by the very virus he has downplayed for months. How do you lean into that and not be the worst people in comedy, ever?
If America still had a Monday morning water cooler culture, instead of a go-downstairs-and-job-hunt culture, would there be merry laughter about how “SNL” served up cold, hard irony and just desserts?
For the cold open, Jim Carrey’s version of Joe Biden squared off against Alec Baldwin’s by now dangerously familiar Donald Trump, in a satiric rerun of last Tuesday’s debate — a recent low point in American democracy that was, as the announcer put it, “pretty fun to watch. As long as you don’t live in America."
“You did take the COVID test you promised you’d take in advance?" Beck Bennett’s Chris Wallace asked Baldwin. "Scout’s honor,” he said, crossing his fingers.
For a while the sketch, more or less saved by Maya Rudolph’s appearance as “Mamala” Kamala Harris, made do with genial softballs. Baldwin’s Trump unspooled a litany of complaint. “Joe here is very mean; Chris Wallace is mean; the economy is mean. It keeps losing jobs, which is mean, to me. And the China virus has been very mean to me in being a hoax.”
Then, the Saturday night quarterbacking: "That statement will probably come back to haunt me later this week.”
Trump’s current crisis came under direct scrutiny near the end of the sketch. After Carrey’s Biden wielded a TV remote and put Baldwin’s Trump on pause, he basked in the momentary “Trump-lessness” and exhorted debate viewers to “look directly into my eyeballs. You can trust me because I believe in science and karma. Now: Just imagine if science and karma could somehow team up to send us all a message about how dangerous this virus can be.”
Here, the show flirted with true danger. “I’m not saying I want it to happen,” Carrey said, milking the laugh just so. “Just imagine it did.”
Too soon? Too cruel? Maybe, but the timidity of so much of the rest of the evening offered a weak alternative. Host Rock’s monologue moved along well enough, but the sketches (one about contact tracing, another about the NBA Bubble Draft) came and went, and rarely soon enough. Of the pre-made segments, only the “Bottom of Your Face” video — a wry, shrewdly sustained nod to masks in the age of corona — scored throughout. Musical guest Megan Thee Stallion didn’t hurt, either.
Radically underused, Kate McKinnon popped up for a wordless, just-right Ruth Bader Ginsburg appearance in the studio audience, just before a commercial break. The “Weekend Update" duo of Colin Jost and Michael Che chuckled warily throughout their set per usual, this time with Che riffing on the brand-new strangeness of dealing with Trump heading to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center Friday. “I wish him a very lengthy recovery,” Che deadpanned.
Jost noted that if the shoe were on the other foot and Biden were in Trump’s position, Trump would be doing a MAGA rally and “getting huge laughs” imitating his rival on a ventilator. The tense heh-heh response from the live audience said it all: “Funny” and “true” are not synonyms.
Back in 2001, then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani appeared on “SNL” for a season opener 18 unfunny days after 9/11. “It’s important for you to do your show tonight,” he read off the prompter to producer Lorne Michaels.
“Can we be funny?” Michael asked.
The mayor’s punchline: “Why start now?”
The current crisis, with a mask-averse, safety-last president now in the cold, grimly ironic grip of his present condition, in no way equates to 9/11. Except this way: Topical humor may be the lifeblood of “SNL.” But that doesn’t make it any easier to get right, as history is happening every hour.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune
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