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The Satire RecessionHow political satire got so flabby.

By Troy Patterson
Posted Tuesday, April 8, 2008, at 7:08 PM ET

Troy Patterson chatted online with readers about this article. Read the transcript.

(Continued from page 1)

The word endangering might look a bit overheated there, but please consider it in the context of one of Peterson's remarks about the way that Saturday Night Live's political impressions tend more toward cuddly caricature-making than worthy satire: "The show's political 'characters' are as one-dimensional and 'lovable' as any of the other catchphrase-spouting mannequins Lorne Michaels might hope to spin off onto the big screen (Jason Sudeikis as George W. Bush and Darrell Hammond as Dick Cheney in—Night at the Roxbury II)." Rumors of SNL's rebirth have been greatly exaggerated. Since the end of writers' strike, a lot of noise has been going around that SNL has achieved a new political relevance, and much of that talk is nonsense on its face. The show is still leaning on material about Bill Clinton's libido and probably always will.

To review: SNL has twice devoted sketches to the idea that debate moderators, as members of an Obama-besotted media, have given the Illinois senator an easy go of it in his one-on-one debates with Hillary Clinton. But the only jokes were in the impersonations (Amy Poehler's schoolmarm nodding as Hillary, Fred Armisen's catching Obama's professor-preacher cadence) and in the hyperbole (CNN's Soledad O'Brien so hot and bothered that she fans herself). The joke never develops beyond its premise. We all already know that the media is in the tank for Obama because we read it in the papers. SNL might have tried to turn these sketches into jokes about why this is the case—Is it about race? Celebrity? The hunger for a new narrative?—or it could have wondered about the relationship between this adoration and Obama's oft-reported aloofness from reporters. It did not.

Likewise, Tina Fey's editorial in support of Hillary as a guest on "Weekend Update" was not a political statement. She might have cut at the press or at Obama. What she did, instead, was to identify herself and her candidates as "bitches." I can't dispute Fey's point that "bitches get stuff done," but I will argue that the entire joke falls apart without the frisson of that word—a shock tactic that Sarah Silverman must have outgrown before her first period. Of course, all of this was cozy enough that Sen. Clinton saw fit to show up and offer an "editorial response" to Poehler, and nothing happened there, either, except for Hillary's seeming perfectly lovely and teasing the relentlessness of her ambitiousness very gently. As Peterson writes, "pseudo-satire is often embraced by its supposed victims, who are eager to get credit for their good sportsmanship and to show they are impervious to such 'criticism.' "

Obama's loops around the talk-show circuit are a bit more fraught with danger. On the glowing and gynocentric chat fests of daytime—your Ellens, your Tyras, your one and only View—he is catnip, but on late night he's a stranger. True, he visited Letterman's Late Show last year and returned to read a toothless Top 10 List. Yes, in October, he made the pilgrimage to SNL. That appearance, like Clinton's, was short, cute, and meaning-free, with the real Obama turning up at "Bill and Hillary's" Halloween party in an Obama mask, abjuring falsity. It seems almost intentionally unfunny. Maybe Obama, whose sense of humor is dry and literary, was wary of being too funny, a problem that plagued Adlai Stevenson, the intellectuality of whose wit supposedly underlined his egghead quality. Obama's blackness also complicates his ventures into comedy. If, as Peterson writes, someone like Al Gore could be funny in the wrong way on late-night TV—too self-deprecating, too eager, too pathetic—it's easy to imagine the minefield of racial imagery Obama would have to tap dance through when spoofing himself. It's no coincidence that one of SNL's few genuinely satirical bits of Obama comedy is a "TV Funhouse" cartoon in which the candidate sends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton on fact-finding missions to nonexistent nations, distancing himself from old racial politics, trying not to look too black.

The impossible dream, of course, is that Barack Obama might someday appear opposite Stephen Colbert, who, via his know-it-all know-nothing character, engages in true, niche-market satire—an act so irresistible that the debut of Not Just Another Cable News Show ultimately threw its hands up and just played clips from The Colbert Report's "Better Know a District." Obama has already engaged Colbert on his own terms, publicly sending the host a letter on the eve of his delivering a commencement address at Illinois' Knox College. "Don't forget to bring the Truth," Obama wrote. "I'd recommend putting it in your carry-on bag rather than in your checked luggage. O'Hare Airport is notoriously unreliable." The letter is droll, the tone poker-faced. At one point, Obama refers to his constituents as germy ("a few words of advice ... use hand sanitizer") in a way that subtly acknowledges the disgust that all politicians must feel, at some level, for the public. It's very funny, and you can't do that on television.

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Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic.
Photograph from Saturday Night Live © 2008 NBC Universal Inc. All rights reserved.
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