Author: Sophie Gilbert / Source: The Atlantic
After one of the most bruising, divisive, emotional weeks in American political history, the most subversive thing on Saturday Night Live this weekend was Mitch McConnell’s chin. Attached to the neck of the cast member Beck Bennett, the chin sidled into shot with an apparent life of its own, replete with folds and dimples and what looked like messages in ancient Sumerian.
As Bennett emulated McConnell’s defiant, befuddled liplessness, the chin was so dazzlingly lifelike that you barely noticed what the character was saying.Which was kind of the point? To be fair to SNL, it had a matter of hours after Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed by the Senate as an associate justice on the Supreme Court to respond to the news (even if the confirmation seemed inevitable by Friday). And allegations of sexual assault, even in 2018, aren’t exactly a subject any mainstream comedy series wants to dive too deeply into. So SNL opted for the safest sketch imaginable: a cold open imagining feverish Republican festivities happening in a post-game locker room, complete with brewskies (Miller High Life, to celebrate “the Natty Light of judges”), Montell Jordan, and a parade of SNL players providing pitch-perfect, uncannily costumed, totally anodyne imitations of people in power.
“Ugh, winning,” Senator John Kennedy (Kyle Mooney) said.
“That was awesome, wooooooo,” McConnell told Dana Bash (Heidi Gardner).
“How amazing is this?” Senator Lindsey Graham (Kate McKinnon) said. “We made a lot of women real worried today, but I’m not getting pregnant so I don’t care.”
Saturday Night Live, Mark Harris wrote in an insightful analysis for Vulture last week, has a politics problem. As in, it doesn’t have any, if you interpret politics to mean “a particular perspective, or advancing a particular position, or, basically, doing anything to risk a reaction more polarizing than ‘Hey, they’re doing that thing that I saw on the news two days ago.’” Harris was writing in the wake of SNL’s starry restaging of Kavanaugh’s hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which Matt Damon played a manic, deranged Kavanaugh shotgunning cans of water and screaming about his virginity. The sketch, Harris argued, was defined more by the jokes it declined to make than by the ones it actually did (it notably opted not to portray Christine Blasey Ford, who had testified that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were in high school). “When SNL’s political comedy is at its most toothless,” Harris…
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