The Media Research Center has spent the past couple of years raging against “Saturday Night Live” for not being right-wing enough. For example:
- NewsBusters Podcast: ‘SNL’ Thinks Dumb Trumpers Get Their News from T-Shirts
- Late Night Shame: ‘SNL,’ Colbert Can’t Condemn College Antisemitism
- Lorne Michaels In Shocking Denial About ‘SNL’s’ Liberal Bias
- SNL Claims ‘Real American Dream’ Is For Immigrants To Say ‘White Guys Only’
- SNL, Colbert Welcome Harris And Walz For Last Pre-Election ‘Pep Talk’
- The Huge Upside to ‘SNL’s Extreme Bias
- ‘SNL’ Boss Lorne Michaels Insists: ‘You Can’t Be Samantha Bee’ (Bee Hardest Hit!)
- NewsBusters Podcast: ‘Saturday Night Live’ Lets Shane Gillis ROAST Biden, Ken Burns
- SNL Attacks Biden Staff for Talking to Tapper, Makes Lewd Catholic Priest Joke
Comedy cop Alex Christy made a joke-count contribution in an Oct. 2 post:
Season 51 of NBC’s Saturday Night Live is set to premiere on October 4, but before that a new NewsBusters study looked back and found that 82 percent of Season 50’s Weekend Update jokes targeted conservatives and that 60 percent of its cold open political characters were conservatives or Republicans.
[…]Co-anchored by Colin Jost and Michael Che, the Weekend Update segment is the part of the show that is most like the nightly comedy shows that NewsBusters analyzes elsewhere. In fact, SNL’s 82 percent matched the figure for the combined totals of ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, CBS’s Stephen Colbert, NBC’s own Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show in 2024.
In Season 50, Jost and Che combined to tell 249 political jokes, 203 of which were about right-leaning people, groups, or things. That left 45 against left-leaners and one for non-partisans.
In the five episodes before the election, Jost and Che told 3.4 liberal jokes per episode. After the election, they told 1.8. By contrast, they told 9.6 conservative jokes per show both before and after the election.
We’ve previously noted how Christy complained that the show didn’t sufficiently hate Zohran Mamdani.
Christy spent an Oct. 7 post raging that “SNL” failed to be transphobic:
NBC’s 51st season of Saturday Night Live got off to a rough start as cast member Bowen Yang dressed up as Dobby the house elf from Harry Potter for a heavily sarcastic Weekend Update segment that mocked British author J.K. Rowling for dissenting from the left’s trans orthodoxy.
The genesis for the skit was Rowling expressing her displeasure at a podcast appearance by actress Emma Watson, where she refused to defend Rowling’s defense of women-only spaces. It’s a feud that dates back a few years to the 2022 BAFTA Awards, when Watson not-so-subtly condemned Rowling at a time when the vitriol and threats being directed against Rowling were at their highest.
Co-anchor Michael Che kicked off the satirical interview by noticing Yang appeared afraid, “Dobby, you okay? You don’t have to be scared.”
Yang downplayed any threat Rowling might be facing, “Why would Dobby be scared, sir, Dobby’s just about to publicly weigh in on trans people, that’s all… master sends Dobby to go on the telly and define once and for all what a woman is, sir.”
[…]Two men making fun of the woman concerned about the erosion of the safety found in women’s-only spaces does not seem like the way to win over converts. However, that was the pattern for Che. Earlier during Weekend Update, he thought it would be a good idea to imply the country is racist when he quipped, “Kamala Harris has released a new book that explains how she lost the 2024 Election. It’s called I’m a Black Lady.”
Christy offered no evidence that America hasn’t become more racist under President Trump.
Christy made more excuses for Trump in a Nov. 11 post:
NBC’s most recent edition of Saturday Night Live crossed the line from satire into straight-up fake news as James Austin Johnson’s Donald Trump character confessed to being a sociopath after the recent incident in the Oval Office where a man fainted. Additionally, Johnson claimed to be pleased that the Supreme Court allowed him to “stop feeding poor people.”
After Jeremy Culhane played the part of the fainting man, Johnson appeared and looked totally uninterested in what had just happened, “Oh, hi. Didn’t see you there. Someone was dying in my office. I think I’m playing this very normal. Just stand there and stare like a sociopath. Didn’t even pretend like I was going to help, someone drops something and you do the fake bend, you know, ‘oh, let me help you pick that up, oh, you got it? You got it?’”
[…]The truth is Trump initially did look concerned, but backed away from the crowd surrounding the man because he almost certainly felt that he would be of no help because he is not a doctor and instead chose to just get out of the way.
How does Christy know that? Can he read Trump’s mind? Or is he just making stuff up to deflect deserved heat from the president? We suspect it’s the latter.