So as I stated yesterday, I did not see a single moment of last night's SNL.
I have also avoided any videos of the show on the internet, and have tuned the station when cable news has wanted to talk about it. So essentially I have done significantly better at boycotting this show than I have keeping my pledge to stop eating cheese.
God I love cheese!
Anyhow I did a quick search this morning, and found that many of the people who DID watch really wish they would have joined my boycott.
Courtesy of the AV Club:
Look, no one was going to be happy here. The political discourse surrounding this election is so entrenched and without nuance that the response to this episode will undoubtedly be strident and abusive, no matter where it comes from. (Let me show you the folder of messages I’ve gotten in response to the article I wrote about the upcoming show sometime.) The chances of this doomed pairing of host and show was, well, doomed, from the moment it was announced. But neither Trump nor the people at SNL rose to the challenge of presenting something thoughtful, or entertaining, or even just plain funny. Given an opportunity to express themselves in what, I maintain, is still one of the most unique, excitingly risky live TV shows of all time, neither camp raised the level of public debate, made a single memorable joke, or did anything but confirm my worst fears about what this show would be. Tonight’s episode was bad satire, bad comedy, bad TV. SNL isn’t great political comedy—it swings and misses more often than not, mainly because it doesn’t commit to the swing. But when it connects, it still has some power. An episode like this isn’t just failing to suit up. It’s throwing the game.
Courtesy of The Wrap:
Saturday’s broadcast was an extension of “SNL 40” and of the franchise’s laziest, worst impulses. It’s telling that the most clever line of the night came not from anyone on the show, but from Stop Racism PAC, the group that offered the bounty to anyone who would interrupt the broadcast and had, before the East Coast feed had ended, promised to pay it to David for his scripted “Trump’s a racist” line.
“Joke or not, it’s true,” the group said in a statement.
Courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter:
Appearing at either the very beginning or very end of at least three or four skits, plus a monologue that has to have been rushed through at a record pace, Trump hardly had any time to flail or succeed. Trump's funniest moment, and the only moment in which he attempted to move, came as he danced for 10 seconds in a parody of Drake's "Hotline Bling" video. It wasn't bad! Other non-political skits found Trump pretending to tweet mean things about the cast members participating in a not-funny skit, stumbling in as an opportunistic record producer in an already-dead family dinner dud and complaining that he didn't have enough time for his laser harp solos in a sketch in which he stumbled over his few lines, which wouldn't have worked anyway.
Courtesy of the Chicago Tribune:
For weeks, people had fretted about Donald Trump, Republican presidential candidate, despoiler of a Chicago skyscraper and former NBC reality star, being given a chance to host "Saturday Night Live." Free advertising, they said. Unfair!
But the show that aired Saturday was one of the genuine duds in the recent history of the NBC late-night warhorse, and that's saying something. "SNL" didn't seem to know what to do with Trump beyond, mostly, a string of late appearances in sketches that sapped whatever meager power they had managed to muster.
Courtesy of Yahoo TV:
The only entity that came off worse than Donald Trump was SNL. Turns out, this really was just a craven move for ratings. There was no attempt by Lorne Michaels and company to use Trump as a critique of himself, no moment that did not feel vetted by the candidate. But the way this campaign season is going, the insulting, often repulsive content of this SNL show won’t matter. All that’s important to Trump — constant, pervasive ubiquity in the pop culture — was achieved.
I don't think I have ever been more happy to have boycotted a show in my life.
You know the problem with Donald Trump on SNL is that HE is the punchline. You cannot make effect jokes when the punchline is standing right in front of you the entire time.
Now the only question is when will the Republicans see that as well?
(H/T to Politicususa.)
The good news about Donald Trump's SNL appearance is that there is really no good news about Donald Trump's SNL appearance.
10:06 AM
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