 The last time I looked — which was March 30 — Saturday Night Live was no longer funny. Maybe I caught the program on an off night, but even the opening, which had a big, fat, impossible-to-miss target — Donald Trump as a bible salesman — was corny and weak.
No doubt it is all too easy to poke fun at Trump, and most jokes made at his expense have become trite, though Seth Meyers and other talk show hosts — particularly Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher — continue to zap Trump regularly and often hilariously.
As one who used to thoroughly enjoy SNL, I may be judging the current edition too harshly, or my reaction may be due to watching politically laced videos on YouTube where I see snippets of what the idiots at Fox News are saying. A case could be made that Jesse Walters, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Maria Bartiromo, Harris Faulkner and other Fox personalities are the new Not Ready for Prime Time Players. They are consistently funnier than SNL skits. Or they would be if they didn't pretend to believe all the crap that comes out of their mouths.
(More depressing is the apparent fact millions of their viewers swallow what they are being told.)
AS FOR Fox rivaling Saturday Night Live, I offer as evidence a February offering when Sean Hannity, perhaps the country's least believable commentator, hit the streets of Manhattan to interview Curtis Sliwa, founder of the vigilante group, the Guardian Angels. Hannity and Sliwa talked as Sliwa's thugs went after an unidentified man, putting him in a headlock because he was a trouble-making immigrant seeking asylum in the Big Apple and he'd just committed a robbery.
No, wait. Turns out the man was a United States citizen who had committed no crime, but the Guardian Angels were a tad too eager to show off for the TV cameras. This would have been hilarious on SNL, but instead it was Fox being Fox, except for once Hannity admitted there had been a mistake, though he phrased it like he were an innocent who'd been duped by Sliwa and his head-bangers.
Hannity and other Fox morons want us to believe New York City is drowning in crime, though FBI statistics show crime is down, not only there, but in many major cities, and in the United States as a whole. But it's in the interest of Fox and the Republican Party to claim crime is rampant, and, of course, they blame Joe Biden. (Sometimes right-wing television channels support their lawlessness claims with video footage of events that occurred while Trump was president.)
Another amusing program was a Hannity interview with Trump, who spent his presidency playing golf, watching TV and sending electronic messages in ALL CAPS. Yet Hannity prefaced one of his softball questions with "I know how hard you work ..."
ALSO FUNNY was how the Fox comedy troupe went after Taylor Swift in the days leading up to the Super Bowl, so afraid were they that Swift would endorse Joe Biden in the November election, something that might still happen.
Fox also broadcast, with straight face, Trump's claim he was responsible for the Music Modernization Act for Taylor Swift and all other Musical Artists. Dina LaPolt, a key attorney behind the MMA, said, “Trump did nothing on our legislation except sign it, and doesn’t even know what the Music Modernization Act does."
Even animated female celebrities figured in some Fox nonsense when former employee Tucker Carlson and others went ballistic because Mars, Inc., decided the brown M&M would no longer be shown in stilettos, but wear block heels, and the green M&M would wear sneakers instead of go-go boots.
Carlson complained "M&M's will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous."
OVER EASTER weekend, the Fox comedians were upset about the White House Easter Egg Roll, claiming the Biden administration placed a ban on religious symbols in the designs on eggs. This was funny because the ban has been in effect for many years, including the four we suffered through while Trump was president.
Some Fox commentators also criticized Biden for declaring that from now on Easter Sunday would be Transgender Day of Visibility, when, in truth, the date for Easter changes from year to year, and in 2024 just happened to be March 31, which coincidentally is the annual date of Transgender Day of Visibility.
Facts mean next to nothing to Fox commentators. The network's position is Hannity, Ingraham and their cohorts are entertainers, not reporters, though it's likely their ill-informed viewers disagree.
DURING college basketball's annual "March madness," Vice President Kamala Harris misspoke about a bit of basketball history, saying there had been no brackets in the women's tournament until 2022.
According to Fox (and its cousin, the New York Post). this was a newsworthy mistake, though I don't recall Fox admitting it made an even bigger one about Easter and Transgender Day of Visibility, or the Post apologizing for equating the sale of Jon Stewart's New York City duplex with Donald Trump's action in lying about the size of his residence and lying again about its worth.
Stewart, on "The Daily Show," had explained to his audience how Trump's lies had benefited him in order to receive a loan or unfairly decrease his tax bill. Stewart told no lies about his duplex; like the rest of us, he merely let the market value determine what a buyer was willing to pay.
FOR YEARS people have been saying that watching Fox News makes you stupid, and logic indicates there's a lot of truth to that statement — unless you view Fox as a comedy network.
Consider that Fox promoted Donald Trump's big lie — that he won an election he actually lost by more than seven million votes. Fox led people to believe Democrats found ingenious ways to steal the election, including rigging machines from the Dominion Voting System.
The network was forced to admit their lies when Dominion took then to court, and Fox was punished to the tune of $787,000,000. During the proceedings we learned Hannity, Tucker Carlson and other Fox commentators were well aware Trump had lost the election, but reported what they thought their viewers wanted to hear.
UNDETERRED, Fox wanted viewers to believe FBI informant Alexander Smirnov's claims that Joe Biden accepted bribes and worked with his son, Hunter, to received millions of dollars from Ukraine. Even when the FBI exposed Smirnov as a liar and arrested him, Fox continued the lie that the man had provided evidence that supported the impeachment effort by do-nothing Republicans who have controlled the House of Representatives for the past two years.
Republicans and Fox News love the word "woke," though they have never defined it, except to tell us it's a very bad thing. To them, all Democrats are woke, and if you're woke, you hate America and want to erase our past.
That's not true, of course. We simply need to acknowledge certain things in our past, and do our best to insure they will never occur again. That doesn't mean the United States isn't a great country. Much progress has been made, but we could be greater.
The problem is there are a couple of generations among us who unfairly judge their elders and their ancestors. I attribute that to youth and gross ignorance. As Bill Maher said in a recent episode of Real Time, "Here's the thing, kids, there actually was a world before you got here."
FOX NEWS views all of our differences as weapons in a political war that has increasingly divided us. They side with Republicans, who, at one time, declared themselves to be the "law and order party."
That may be the funniest thing about Republicans and especially Fox News, which won't admit that the biggest crime wave we've had in the past several years are those committed by their champion, Donald J. Trump.
Which is why I enjoy a lot of laughs at the things I see on Fox, courtesy of YouTube, such as the expression on the face of Maria Bartiromo when Trump told her the reason the stock market is performing so well is because people believe he'll be elected in November.
Or watching humorless Harris Faulkner lecture a guest against name-calling while she defends a man who called Nikki Haley "a birdbrain"; who refers to former girl friend Stormy Daniels as "Horseface", and calls the president "Crooked Joe' Biden, and suggests Biden was on cocaine while delivering the State of the Union Address.
Yes, with a little fine-tuning, Fox News could do SNL-style comedy all day. All they need are a few musical guests. For openers, how about Taylor Swift? |
