“Saturday Night Live” returned for the premiere of its 45th season on Saturday night with Academy Award nominee Woody Harrelson as the host and 17-year-old Billie Eilish as the musical guest.
As you probably already suspected, they absolutely parodied much of what has happened in the political climate over the last couple of weeks.
But “SNL” had the entire summer to prepare and it was about as unfunny as you could’ve possibly imagined.
“Saturday Night Live” is a partisan machine that pumps out liberal propaganda on a weekly basis, but they’ve also been all off all summer so they haven’t been on the up-and-up with the political climate.
However, over the last several weeks, they’ve inarguably had a lot of material to work with given the whistleblower and the transcript of the call between Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Trump.
It doesn’t take a staff writer to know they’re going to attack everything that’s occurred there to be the cold open of the show.
Of course, it opened up with Alec Baldwin as President Trump sitting at his desk in the Oval Office where he takes a call from Rudy Giuliani played by veteran Kate McKinnon.
Then he takes a call from Attorney General William Barr played by female cast member Aidy Bryant.
Beck Bennett played Vice President “Big Mike” Mike Pence. That call was cut short so Baldwin-as-Trump could talk to his sons, Eric (Alex Moffat) and Don Jr. (Mikey Day).
Don Jr. (Day) obnoxiously says, “I can’t believe the lame-stream media is focused on you and not the corruption of Joe Biden’s son.”
Newest cast member Bowen Yang played North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un where he instructs Trump to basically drown a whistleblower as that’s how he would take care of one. Jong (Yang) says, “You have a big ocean in your country? OK, send whistleblower to the bottom of there.”
And then Kanye West (Chris Redd) announced he couldn’t support Trump anymore alongside Don King (Kenan Thompson) saying, “this whole impeachment thing is hurting our brand.”
The penultimate impersonation was of Judge Jeanine Pirro (Cecily Strong) who gives him a pep talk.
Lastly, he calls actor Liev Schreiber who plays Ray Donovan, but he has to explain to him that he’s just an actor and not the character he portrays.
All in all, you’d think this would have the makings of something that liberals would be keeling over in laughter, but it wasn’t.
Even if you were being objective and compartmentalize the liberal bias out of it, it still wasn’t even close to funny.
The rest of the show was even worse.
They did spoof the Democratic debates with Larry David as Sen. Bernie Sanders, Woody Harrelson as former Vice President Joe Biden, McKinnon as Sen. Elizabeth Warren but the only real funny one was former “SNL” cast member Maya Rudolph’s portrayal of Sen. Kamala Harris.
They did a great job of mocking Sen. Harris.
At one point Sen. Harris (Rudolph) says, “I’m America’s cool aunt — a fun aunt. I call that a funt. The kind of funt that will give you weed but then arrest you for that weed. Can I win the presidency? Probably not, I don’t know. Can I successfully seduce a much younger man? You better funting believe it.”
Two funny moments of Harrelson-as-Biden was when they satirized his weird “Corn Pop” story that he bloviated about in 1962 about a “thug” he knew at a community pool and also at one point says of his involvement in the Ukraine scandal, “I’m like plastic straws: I’ve been around forever, I’ve always worked, and now you’re mad at me?”
You can obviously read through the lines of the euphemism used here.
Other than that?
It was lame. There was a sketch about a family who opened up a “Cheetos Museum” because they had the world’s largest Cheeto. Another was a weird spoof of 80’s infomercials about how a kid’s Dad is on his portable cellular phone.
All in all, it was terrible.
If you are able to be objective and laugh at the jokes, you’d still wonder if that’s the best they’ve got? Don’t these people do this for a living? That’s the real joke.
