“I know it, you know it and the people here tonight know it; the American people know it, we all know it. Bob Dole, Republican candidate, is gonna be the next President of the United States. So why don't you just go back home to your summer home in Maine, your automatic garage door opener, your electric steak knife and run around Kennebunkport, Maine in your powerboat, while I take care of real issues in the White House.”
— Dan Aykroyd (below) channeling Bob Dole, debating Dana Carvey (below) as George H.W. Bush, in a sketch from Saturday Night Live, Feb. 13, 1988.
Live from New York, on tape in West Coast time zones, it’s Saturday Night Live this weekend.
As live TV goes, nothing can compare with game 7 of a World Series, of course — not when that game involves extra innings and a 12-midnight rain delay, not to mention a team that hadn’t won the World Series since 1908.
Even so, SNL can expect to draw a crowd this weekend. It’s the last live show before the Nov. 8 election, and this craziest of election seasons has provided SNL with some of its funnier moments of 2016, thanks in no small part to Larry David’s uncanny impersonation of Bernie Sanders and Alec Baldwin’s eerily on-point channeling of a certain Donald J. Trump. (Perhaps you’ve heard of him.)
And if there’s one thing SNL’s brain trust has prided itself on in the show’s 42 seasons on the air — before many of the people voting Tuesday were even born — it’s the way SNL has managed to marry sketch comedy with politics.
That’s not a comfortable marriage. The Smothers Brothers tried it in The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and in large part succeeded, in that they managed to stay on the air for three seasons between 1967-1969. Smothers Brothers was not the mainstream sensation its makers perhaps hoped it would be, despite solid reviews and tapping into a younger audience — ages 15-25 — that would later be dubbed “the key demographic” and morph into the be-all and end-all of network bean counters and advertisers. Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In went there on occasion (Richard Nixon’s, “Sock it to me!”), but Laugh-In is not generally remembered for its political sketches, at least not in my household.
From the beginning, SNL was different. No other sketch-comedy program, not even temporary rival SCTV, had the moxie to tackle actual debates, let alone primary debates.
There was Dan Aykroyd, an original Not Ready for Prime Time Player, channeling Bob Dole in 1988, in one of SNL’s most memorable debate parodies, in which a bad-tempered Dole clashed with George H.W. Bush (Dana Carvey), Jack Kemp (the late Phil Hartman), Pat Robertson (Al Franken, faking politics before he became the real thing), Pete Dupont (Kevin Nealon) and moderator Pat Schroeder (Nora Dunn, who snapped off one of the evening’s more memorable introductory lines with her, “Please, hold your applause until the end, in fairness to Pete Dupont”).
Aykroyd, one of the original Blues Brothers and the elder statesman of the Coneheads, stole the hour with his bellicose Dole-isms like, “I don’t believe my good friend George Bush; he’s lying, he knows it, you know it, I know it, the people at home know it, the American people know it, we all know it,” and, “It’s one thing to attack an opponent’s record in the heat of a campaign. But when you come after an opponent's wife, well, to me, that's another thing.”
Sound familiar?
The difference between then and now, of course, is that Aykroyd was playing a character in a sketch, and he did it seamlessly — as when he channeled Bob Dole referring to Bob Dole in the third person: “Bob Dole grew up in Kansas in a small farm town. He didn't have the prep-school education, or the sterling silverware, or the bumper pool table in the basement. He didn't have the shower and massage with five-way adjustable heads or the sit-down lawnmower. Bob Dole didn't have these things.”
SNL has a tall order this weekend, and not just because so many eyes will be turned to a program that will air just days before the deciding election. Bill Maher is to sit down with outgoing President Barack Obama on HBO’s Real Time Friday, though to be clear the interview was recorded earlier in the week, at the White House, “live on tape,” which is not quite the same as Maher sitting down on live TV, face-to-face with his guest shoehorned between the opening monologue and the panel discussion (this time, ironically enough, featuring Canadian-born panelists David Frum and SCTV alum Martin Short).
SNL’s tall order includes the fact that guest host, Benedict Cumberbatch, is not one who immediately springs to mind when American political satire comes up. It may have seemed like a good idea at the time when the season’s early guest hosts were lined up — the undeniably talented Cumberbatch has a new movie opening, after all — but recent guest hosts Lin-Manuel Miranda and Tom Hanks may have been more apt choices.
SNL’s cold open will probably be political — how could it not be, unless of course Doctor Strange gets in the way — and the only question after that is whether Larry David will be back as Bernie Sanders (probable), Tina Fey as Sarah Palin (possible) and Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump (inevitable). It’s a safe bet that Kate McKinnon will channel Hillary Clinton once again; a longer bet that Clinton herself will make a cameo. Or Trump for that matter.
Then again, even the possibility that both Clinton and Trump could make appearances, so close to Election Day, speaks to the power and influence of SNL, and its history. It’s no longer just another TV show; it has become an indelible part of the culture.
Regardless of what happens this weekend — casual fans and die-hards alike just hope that SNL will be funny, as we could all use a laugh right about now — NBC will air an hour-long clip show, Saturday Night Live Election Special, on Monday following The Voice. On the theory, one supposes, that people just can’t get enough of this cray cray election season.
Provided it’s funny, that is.