Saturday Night Live has been around forever. The first season wasn’t even on TV, it was performed in the fields, where people lived for millennia prior to the advent of structures. Since then the NBC sketch show has experienced hills & valleys in terms of both relevance and quality. Though the jury on the latter is still deliberating, with regard to the former it seems pretty safe to say 2017 is a peak. Everyone watches because of Trump & co, a clownish bunch who are often hard to distinguish from satire in life but somehow still laid bare in comedy.
The internet has done lots of fun and wonderful things but it’s also done bad and terrible things and, most confusingly, things that are both good and bad. Facebook has turned the world into news consumers. That is both good and bad. Good: More readers of news! Bad: No one can escape the news. So these weeks we’ve had of breaking news interrupting developing news interrupting holy shit omg news, and all of it very serious and terrible and dramatic and unreal, make everyone exhausted. They’re exhausting. So we all gather around basic cable together, like our parents and their parents before us, for some cathartic jokes about Trump and his merry band of incompetent kleptocrats.
One of my favorite lines is from the Hayden Carruth poem Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey. “Here we are now in the White Tower, leaning on one another, too tired to go home.”
It us.
Anyway, tonight is the season finale!
The Rock is the host and Katy Perry, who I still can’t hear without getting sad about the election, is the musical guest.
The cold open had the Trumps (and Death?) singing Hallelujah.
It was a call back to this:
Then the Rock said he was going to run for president with Tom Hanks.
Remember a few inches above this when I was like, “Death?” That was supposed to be Steve Bannon in the cold open. It’s a recurring thing. I forgot!
Here’s an earlier skit with Bannon as Death:
Then Alec Baldwin really took his Trump impersonation to a whole new level:
Just kidding. That is a scene from the 90s thriller Malice.
This is the real clip from tonight. Alec does a perfect Trump impersonation.
This post is being updated.
