‘Saturday Night’ depicts the panicky 90 minutes before the first episode of the long-running sketch comedy show.
This article appears in the December 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
What was Saturday Night Live? For Jason Reitman, it was an act of creative daring, a miracle of the countercultural fringe. Saturday Night, his frenetic film released this fall, depicts the 90 minutes preceding the 1975 premiere of the long-running sketch comedy show. Taking generous creative liberties, Reitman tells the story from the perspective of creator Lorne Michaels, then a nervy, 30-year-old would-be revolutionary on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Michaels, played by The Fabelmans star Gabriel LaBelle, spends the movie in a state of panic, reordering sketches, building the physical set, massaging volcanic egos, recruiting new writers and lighting technicians at the last minute, all to prove to the network—and himself—that the show must go on. Michaels and the young head of late-night programming Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) attempt to save SNL from the corporate suits while preserving Michaels’s vision: the 90 most subversive, groundbreaking minutes ever aired on television. Spoiler alert: He did it.
With its Aaron Sorkin–inflected “walk and talk” camera flourishes and rapid-fire overlapping dialogue, the movie wants the viewer to feel the cultural import about to burst forth. John Belushi rages against the very idea of acting on television; Garrett Morris wonders what he’s doing here; Chevy Chase pratfalls and deadpans his way to glory; writer (and Michaels’s wife) Rosie Shuster charms and coaxes these wild men into doing their jobs. Through the chaos, you try not to fixate on those who died far too soon: Belushi, Gilda Radner, Michael O’Donoghue, Andy Kaufman, and others.
SNL’s broader approach to politics suggests something of a failure of comedy in an age of partisan uniform-wearing.
On November 2, 2024, three days before the U.S. presidential election, SNL kicked off the fifth episode of its 50th season on familiar territory: a cold open lampooning Donald Trump’s marathon campaign speeches. Decked out in an orange construction vest, resident Trump impersonator James Austin Johnson treats viewers to his version of the meandering, Dada-esque rhetorical “weave,” poking fun at the former president’s supposed exhaustion at the blasé never-ending charade of campaigning and contempt for the MAGA faithful. The sketch then cuts to beloved SNL alums Maya Rudolph and Andy Samberg as Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff, respectively, alongside comedian Jim Gaffigan as VP nominee Tim Walz, watching Trump on TV with annoyance and disbelief.
Relying on outside help for political sketches—Dana Carvey, another legend, has also shuffled onto the scene as Joe Biden and Elon Musk—has become a go-to move for SNL to ensure must-see virality. Harris herself appeared in that same episode, projecting a sunny optimism while reminding viewers of the stakes of the election.
Nothing about the sketch felt groundbreaking or subversive. Politicians have appeared on SNL over the years to clarify they are in on the joke; even in that initial “radical” season, White House Press Secretary Ron Nessen hosted an episode, and President Gerald Ford uttered the famed slogan “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”
But Harris’s appearance invited viewers to laugh with rather than at her, with built-in assumptions that she was empathetic to their problems and fighting the good fight against America’s ongoing MAGA-fication. Targeting the audience for its too-cozy parasocial relationships with those in power was off the menu.
The Lorne Michaels who produced that sketch in 2024 was the very sort of out-of-touch, too-comfortable elitist the Lorne Michaels of Saturday Night was railing against.
While it’s hardly original to suggest that SNL has lost its fastball, its evolution from countercultural vanguard into comfort food for powerless liberals represents a wholesale reversal of the mission depicted in Reitman’s film. Once, viewers could tune in at 11:30 p.m. to see authority laid low and given the finger. Today, the program has become more reactive to the 24-hour cable news cycle and the never-ending stream of online commentary that forces viewers to choose a side first and be funny later.
As a consequence, the edge has dulled. SNL’s broader approach to politics suggests something of a failure of comedy in an age of partisan uniform-wearing. Satire has become defined down to “my team’s better than your team”—an uninspired trend that infantilizes rather than challenges viewers.
FOR MICHAELS AND HIS INITIAL ROSTER OF WRITERS, including Shuster, future senator Al Franken and his partner Tom Davis, and resident dark wizard O’Donoghue, there was no shortage of material. Watergate, Vietnam, stagflation, oil embargos, urban disinvestment and white flight, and the rise of social conservatism and evangelical fervor had swirled into a miasma of cynicism, frustration, and paranoia. Trust in the federal government, or really any institution of significance, had crumbled. “They flirted with the margins of taste: a sketch about the Holocaust was rejected, but others about child abuse and the murder of lesbians made it onto the air,” The New York Times wrote in its obituary for Tom Davis.
In those early years, Chase played Gerald Ford as an inept, pratfalling doofus who was thrust into history without being ready for the task. Later, Dan Aykroyd played Jimmy Carter as a micromanaging genius, conversant about automatic letter sorter systems and how to come down from acid highs, and perhaps too buried in the details to see the big picture. Watching these bits now, one is struck by how little effort SNL made to help viewers feel better about their powerlessness.
Chase told Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller for Live From New York, their oral history of SNL’s first 40 years, that following its first season, SNL ran the risk of becoming “solipsistic,” spurring his exit midway into Season 2. The rest of the cast should have joined him, he said, arguing that SNL had succeeded in its mission to become “a vehicle to take apart television. Satirize it and rip it to pieces, show it for what it is.” Others involved with the program at the time say his motivations were much simpler: Hollywood paydays.
The election of Ronald Reagan brought “a kind of impending doom” across the country, as then-writer Barry Blaustein told Shales and Miller. Other writers sensed a conservative shift, with NBC shooting down politically sensitive sketches on topics like the Iran hostage crisis. Some would blame Ebersol, who ran SNL for a stretch in the early 1980s. “[Ebersol] tells me, ‘I don’t want to do political things, I don’t want to do controversial things,’” Tim Kazurinsky, a former writer and cast member, told Miller and Shales. “‘Who do you do impersonations of? Can you do Mickey Rooney?’”
Eddie Murphy’s honesty about race made SNL’s politics briefly confrontational. Dana Carvey, Tina Fey, and James Austin Johnson’s impressions reflect today’s “point and laugh” era.
Ebersol is also credited with instituting SNL’s enduring format, which foregrounded star performers and familiar laugh lines. Eddie Murphy, arguably the most significant American comic of the past 40 years, cultivated wildly popular characters like Gumby and Mr. Robinson, and his influential sketches like “White Like Me” saved SNL from cancellation, while poking at white liberal anxieties around race and class. Because of Murphy’s brazen honesty, the show was perhaps never as overtly confrontational in its politics as it was in that brief era.
After Michaels’s return to SNL in the mid-1980s, it leaned into impression and exaggeration, often to great effect. In a famous 1986 sketch written primarily by Robert Smigel, James Downey and Franken, Phil Hartman plays Reagan, deceptively switching between doddering old fool in public and Iran-Contra mastermind in private. With dark wit, the sketch calls bullshit on the White House’s insistence on treating the American public like fools, something of a throwback to the program’s early days with better mimicry. Carvey’s take on George H.W. Bush played up his oratorical tics and awkwardness, while Hartman played Clinton as a randy good old boy, seducing and charming his way to the White House. Arguably, this is when the program began to lean into the “point and laugh” style that sacrifices novelty in favor of flattering its young, educated audience about the correctness of their beliefs.
Where sexual impropriety and abuse of power are concerned, SNL’s contributions feel both dated and daring. In one sketch from the early 1990s, then-Sens. Joe Biden, Ted Kennedy, Strom Thurmond, and others trade tips on picking up women with Clarence Thomas during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Even as it disappeared the woman involved—Anita Hill, played by Ellen Cleghorne, has little to say or do—the satire focuses on prurient, exploitive obsessions of the powerful. “Good political humor proceeds first from a funny idea, not from the editorial point you want to make. If the silliness makes a point, that’s fine, but secondary,” writer Jack Handey said of the sketch in an interview some years later.
Will Ferrell’s himbo-in-chief George W. Bush was a genius blend of clownish buffoonery and bombast. But the way of telling the joke felt different from the past. Rather than delivering much satirical bite, Ferrell’s Bush, a character he would reprise intermittently even after his departure from SNL in 2002, reassured comfortable liberals that Republicans were indeed doomed by their cultural backwardism, social conservatism, and anti-intellectualism. But it seemed to suffer from breaking Handey’s first rule: The editorial point, that Republicans were morons and hicks, was in the foreground.
THE 2008 CYCLE SAW SNL FURTHER PERFECT the Ferrell formula, when former head writer and “Weekend Update” co-anchor Tina Fey returned to play Sarah Palin with a twangy, know-nothing swagger, somehow both clownish and deeply charming. The show benefited greatly from Fey’s star wattage, and the cultural feedback suggested that SNL had never been more relevant. But as funny as the interpretation was, it yet again gave the audience permission to smugly look down upon Palin and those she represented, a harbinger of electoral cycles to come.
The result was a program that seemed to fall in love with itself—and Barack Obama. The culture finally had a generational avatar who synthesized what made celebrity so enticing and politics so enthralling, the very sort of concentration of power and influence SNL had been built to satirize. But writers apparently found the job impossible, comparing the task of caricaturing Obama as “like being a rock climber, looking up at a thousand-foot-high face of solid obsidian, polished and oiled,” Downey told Miller and Shales. “There’s not a single thing to grab onto.”
Of course, there was: Obama’s warmed-over neoliberalism, his refusal to punish the architects of the Iraq War and the Great Financial Crisis, his condescending attitude toward bare-knuckle politics, the thrall in which the media held him. In Shales and Miller’s book, Michaels and beloved SNL writer Robert Smigel recall that Obama, slated to make a cameo appearance in an upcoming broadcast, effectively vetoed a risqué sketch about racial profiling.
Downey, who says he is politically moderate, lamented that SNL “stopped doing anything which could even be misinterpreted as a criticism of Obama … We were doing what we’d often been unfairly criticized of doing, but this time it was true.”
The American electorate had delivered to the show the apotheosis of celebrity and political elitism. And yet SNL did nothing with the opportunity.
Eight years of failing to challenge power left SNL unready for the Trumpocene era. Perhaps eager to dilute the stink of relentless lib-appeasing, SNL booked Donald Trump to host an episode several months after he declared his presidential candidacy. The decision drew heavy criticism for normalizing Trump, who’d already built his platform around nativist policies and racism.
After Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, Michaels featured a cold open of Kate McKinnon’s Clinton mournfully serenading the audience with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and exclaiming, “I’m not giving up, and neither should you!” He gave his shell-shocked, resistance-liberal audience what they craved: catharsis. Taking its cues from breathless coverage of the constant swirl of chaos enveloping the White House, SNL re-enacted New York Times and Washington Post headlines with fervor. To bring it all to life, Michaels stunt-casted 17-time host Alec Baldwin as a domineering Trump, Ben Stiller as Michael Cohen, Larry David as Bernie Sanders, and Robert De Niro as Robert Mueller. Baldwin claimed to dislike playing the role. “I’ll say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to do it anymore,’ and people will go, ‘Don’t you dare give that up, we need you.’ Like I’ve gotten people through something in our nation’s history,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2018.
The Trump era, with its unceasing psychodramas and emotional violence, became something of a never-ending political season, with SNL there to document it all. This has boosted the program’s relevance and helped it travel well across the web, even as it comes at the expense of its bloated cast of featured players, who get less and less to do each week.
But it came at a cost. Comedy as therapy loses something in the translation. SNL made little effort to tease its audience about its own pieties, blind spots, and misunderstandings about a country that voted Trump into office. The show did little to provoke viewers to consider how little they understood about the world beyond their own, instead reassuring them they could simply wait him out and laugh away the pain in the meantime.
Eventually, the task of playing Trump fell to Johnson, a master interpreter of his unconventional cadence and logorrheic vernacular. Yet despite this talent, the Trump material rarely strays from grotesque caricature or rote repetition of oddball one-liners. A late-2022 sketch satirizing the January 6th Committee poked fun at the idea of Trump coming after Resistance Hero Liz Cheney for opposing him, with the conceit being that no one messes with the daughter of Dick Cheney. Arguably, this should have given Harris some pause before all but turning the Wyoming Republican into her running mate this year.
While it feels good to laugh at Trump’s brazen corruption, his still-shocking racism, his puerile fascism, one often feels exhausted or even haunted by these sketches. Part of the problem, of course, is that Trump’s entire schtick is that of the nightclub comic, for whom no laugh is too crass, racist, or cheap. His frequent hilarity, in itself, makes a mockery of any and all attempts to mock him. He will always be better at this than you—and with his victory over Harris, he’ll have ample opportunities to continue demonstrating why.
WHILE REITMAN DOES HIS BEST TO BOOST the stakes of Saturday Night, history has rendered judgment. Even as the competition to definitively skewer politics and pop culture has never been fiercer, SNL is a fixture of American culture and will remain so, insiders say, as long as Michaels, still the most powerful force in American comedy, wants to keep at it.
Through it all, one can still detect a whiff of absurdist mischief running through the show. In fits and starts, its cast and writers’ room have become more diverse and eclectic, while the drug-fueled, abusive work environment of yore seems to be left in the past. If anything, SNL has proven itself to be remarkably consistent.
Yet consistency need not mean safe. Even as SNL’s educated, cosmopolitan audience braces for the future, great satire can and should go beyond caricature. “I don’t see the courage … the experimental impulses,” original cast member Garrett Morris said of the program’s current incarnation in a recent interview with The Guardian. “That was the whole core of what happened the first 10 years … And nowadays, although people still check it out, I think they’re catering to too many people too much of the time.”
Comics cannot deny their own point of view, but neither should they neglect the hypocrisies, contradictions, and outright lies of those they admire, with the understanding that healthy skepticism gleaned through laughter may yet produce a durable democracy. You don’t have to indulge racists, misogynists, Islamophobes, and transphobes. But you do need to push your viewers to reckon with their fears and judgments about them.
While Saturday Night’s schmaltzy nostalgia, familiar anti-corporate moralizing, underwritten female characters, and banal “great man of history” framing ultimately make the film less than the sum of its parts, it is nevertheless a charming, energetic homage to the idea of SNL; its originality, craft, and showmanship.
Yet a great sadness hangs over the film. So many of the greats depicted, from Belushi to George Carlin to Radner, are dead, and history has proven them irreplaceable, at a time when we need jesters confronting our leaders more than ever. Reitman’s late father, Ivan, collaborated with many of those portrayed in the film, and one comes to feel he made it as a memorial to what’s been lost: a gentle yet fiery unpredictability.
