SNL’s Palin Approach Bad for Comedy, by Default

By parodying Sarah Palin with the tenacity of a pitbull (lipstick optional), has Saturday Night Live shot itself in the foot?

There’s no denying that the show’s current streak of sketches showing the vice-presidential candidate at her worst have been an incredible boon for the sketch series; ratings are up 46 percent, and three live Weekend Update specials will air on NBC Thursdays over the next month, which looks like an attempt to, um, borrow the Daily Show format while capitalizing on its greatest hits in political satire (Will Ferrell as George W. Bush is pictured on the preview site, while Fey’s appearance is a near certainty).

It’s been so long since Saturday Night Live actually felt like it was capturing the cultural zeitgeist that it’s honestly a little unsettling — especially since the show’s level of writing hasn’t actually improved. Instead, SNL has blundered into a joke they can’t help but revisit — and with one month to go in the race, they won’t be letting go of this newfound relevancy anytime soon. Especially since after an extended period of trying to figure out how to handle a web audience’s demand for sketches, NBC has finally mastered web video to the point that its official uploads of its content get almost as many views as the pirated versions. And its policy of hosting only five or six of the night’s best sketches means that the best way to really enjoy the show is by checking out the clips deemed worthy online; which have reliably, over the past three weeks, included the Fey-as-Palin pieces.

But it’s a double-edged sword being wielded around at 30 Rockefeller Center right now, as the portrait painted by Tina Fey and the writing staff over the past three weeks has been ruthlessly focused on Palin’s lack of experience, eccentric background, and extremely conservative stance — to the point that they may have damaged her political reputation. With the amount of views they’ve gotten online, it’s hard to believe that those sketches didn’t contribute to Palin’s post-convention drop in the polls.

SNL’s political bias has always been hard to pin down. While officially its policy has been to mock the party in power, fair and balanced coverage is an impossibility. The biases are showing a little more clearly than usual, though. Tina Fey is “tired” of playing the Republican governor, stating after winning three Emmys for her work on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock that, “I want to be done playing this lady Nov. 5 — so if anybody can help me be done playing this lady Nov. 5, that would be good for me.” And as Mashable brought to light on Monday, last Saturday’s sketch covering the economic bailout (which hammers key members of the Democratic party about their connections to the current economic crisis) has been removed from NBC.com and Hulu — there are some inaccuracies in the Mashable piece (the official NBC YouTube uploads to which they refer are completely fictional) but the sketch is definitely offline.

Sure, SNL creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels donated $2,300 to the McCain campaign in 2007 — but he also donated the same amount to Al Franken’s Senate campaign (admittedly, something you’d probably do for one of your friends/ex-employees).

Not only is Fey’s Palin impersonation now the stuff of legend, but Darrell Hammond’s John McCain is infinitely superior to Fred Armisen’s Barack Obama. The perfect target, the perfect actress to play her — SNL found itself with the chance at a Dan Quayle-caliber public figure to mock for the next four years, but may have blown its wad too early by being so savage in its attack. That’s the danger of making fun of a candidate — tell the joke too much, and you make the candidate a joke, too.