There was a time, believe it or not, when Saturday Night Live was the touchstone of American humor, the show for which you would stop everything. It was where the nation’s most absurd, most laughable moments were skewered, where the political figures of the day were parodied to perfection, and where the comedy of the week could become the comedy of the year. But somewhere along the way, SNL lost its compass. Today, it feels more like a tired echo of its former self, a shadow of the vibrant, cutting-edge satire it once was. It isn’t that the cast is simply weaker or that the writing lacks bite — though both of these are true — but that the show has become a victim of its own self-importance, trapped in a cycle of political correctness and worn-out caricatures, and having developed a deliberate blind spot to where the true humor in American culture presently lies: the political and cultural Left.
That’s not to say that the cast is without blame. There is some real talent there, but by and large, the current SNL ensemble is — how should one say this with Christian charity? — inadequate. And SNL tacitly admits this. Consider that SNL this season boasts seventeen cast members. That’s a staggering number. Yet, this group is so lacking that SNL regularly supplements its bloated roster with ringers in the form of former cast members Dana Carvey, Maya Rudolph, and Andy Samberg; along with repeated guest appearances from Jim Gaffigan (playing Tim Walz), and once again Alec Baldwin, who has transitioned from passable Trump impressions to a frankly lazy one for RFK Jr. What, they couldn’t find a single white male cast member to deliver lines with a raspy voice? The show feels like it’s stuck in a loop, pulling in outside talent because the current cast can’t fill the void.
But the real problem, the crux of the issue, is something far more significant: Saturday Night Live has, for all of its history, been a creature of the Left, its humor fixated on a narrow ideological target. The political satire that once zinged with the sharpness of a perfectly timed sketch now feels dated, its jokes floundering in a sea of predictability. Take the endless Trump jokes, for instance. For years, Donald Trump was the comedic goldmine for the show’s writers. His outrageous antics, bombastic style, and tweetstorms made him an easy target. But these jokes are now stale and overplayed, and now we have to endure four more years of this show pulling from a well has long since run dry. The repetition of the same Trump impersonations, the same tired gags, has dulled what once seemed like an endless fount of material.
The real target-rich environment for comedy today lies not on the Right but on the Left. The Left is where the absurdities of modern life have truly taken root — where the contradictions, the hypocrisies, and the outlandish behavior practically beg to be skewered. There’s humor in the Left’s unflagging commitment to identity politics, in its obsession with ideological purity, and in its endless reinterpretations and outright denials of reality. The Left, it seems, is trying to outdo itself in an ever-escalating game of “who can be the most absurd” — a game that’s rife with opportunities for satire.
Conservatives and the average, middle-class Americans from which we draw our ranks, are actually kind of boring. We don’t identify as cats or demand mental health counseling after elections. But the Left? Oh, the Left is where the comedy is! It’s there that you find the political correctness gone mad, the college students who can’t decide whether a man can have a period or a woman an erection, the influencers who try to outdo each other in self-righteousness, and the incredibly privileged social justice warriors who see themselves as victims. It is an environment that demands ridicule! And yet, with only rare exception, SNL, seemingly bound by a sense of obligation or blind allegiance, has failed to mine this fertile ground for comedy. Instead, it continues to beat the same dead horse of sketches aimed at Trump and middle-America, oblivious to the goldmine of material sitting just across the ideological divide.
If only SNL would turn its gaze on the Left, it would find comedy that writes itself. Consider, for example, the work of non-comedian Matt Walsh, whose riotous documentaries “Am I a Racist?” (which examines the DEI movement), and “What is a Woman?” (which asks those supporting gender reassignment surgery for children this very simple question, much to their frustration), are prime examples of a simple but effective approach to comedy: revealing absurdity where it already exists. Walsh’s method is hardly sophisticated. He doesn’t write jokes or tell them. He simply interviews individuals who either are hopelessly mired in identity politics or cannot answer basic questions about the reality of gender. The resulting conversations are so painfully out of touch with common sense that they practically beg for comedic treatment. It’s not hard to make something funny when the world is already so absurd; but it’s almost impossible to make something funny when trying too hard to be important.
In the end, what’s most frustrating about SNL is that it doesn’t seem to understand this basic principle. It used to skewer power, now it struggles for its own. It used to lampoon the establishment, now it sees itself as part of the liberal establishment, on par with the legacy media. And in so doing, it has become a victim of its own ideological echo chamber, so concerned with political correctness that it has forgotten how to find humor in the real absurdities of the world. The answer isn’t to abandon the Left altogether or to go in search of a new target; it’s simply to embrace the contradictions, the excesses, and the outrages of contemporary liberalism with the same verve and energy that made the show great in the first place. Instead of recycling the same old jokes, SNL should be looking for the real comedy that exists right in front of its eyes, if only it would dare to look.
