The Media Research Center’s meltdowns over “Saturday Night Live” continued with a May 18 post by comedy cop Alex Christy:
Season 51 of NBC’s Saturday Night Live recently came to an end, and it was considerably more liberal than Season 50. A new NewsBusters study has found that 91 percent of the season’s Weekend Update jokes were directed at conservatives, while 83 percent of its cold open political characters were conservatives or Republicans.
[…]MRC analysts found that Weekend Update anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che combined to tell 217 out of 238 jokes (91 percent) about conservatives during Season 51. They also told 18 about liberals and three non-partisan jokes. This included 32 separate conservative, 13 liberal, and three non-partisan targets.
Jost and Che’s top ten targets included only one liberal.
[…]MRC analysts also looked at the cold open skits at the beginning of every episode and found that conservative or Republican characters appeared 54 times, or 83 percent of the time. By contrast, liberal characters appeared only 10 times. Finally, CENTCOM Commander Adm. Brad Cooper made an appearance as the only non-partisan character.
In addition to Cooper, this included 23 unique conservative and 9 unique liberal characters. The last liberal character to show up was on season’s eighth episode on December 13.
Christy also gave a shoutout to his nepo-baby boss:
MRC President David Bozell said in a statement, “Michael Jordan famously said, ‘Republicans buy sneakers, too.’ Entertainment companies once understood that alienating half the country was probably not a great business model. Nobody is asking SNL to become conservative, but when every political punchline is nothing more than all Trump Derangement Syndrome all the time, SNL risks turning itself into a caricature of their own political obsessions.”
Actually, Bozell and the MRC are demanding — not just asking — SNL to become conservative. Christy shouldn’t pretend that’s not true.
Christy came back to whine the next day:
Season 51 of NBC’s Saturday Night Live concluded with Weekend Update anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che hitting all the usual beats, including people loathing Vice President JD Vance so much that they want him or themselves dead, suggesting the country is racist, and Jeffrey Epstein.
Earlier in the season, Jost raised the possibility of Second Lady Usha Vance killing herself to get away from JD, but this time Jost claimed that President Trump wants Vance himself dead, “According to a senior official, President Trump keeps a letter in the Resolute Desk addressed to Vice President JD Vance in the event he dies or is assassinated. The letter reads simply, ‘I wish it had been you.’”
Christy offered no evidence this is not the case. He whined further:
Like the other late night comedy shows, SNL loves some Trump-Epstein jokes. The show has accused Trump of starting the war with Iran to distract from the Epstein files, and on Saturday’s show, David Austin Johnson’s Donald Trump character asked Epstein’s ghost (Will Ferrell) what heaven is like. When Weekend Update rolled around, Jost quipped, “Texas Senator John Cornyn has introduced legislation to rename a state highway ‘Trump Interstate’ because for some reason people associate Trump with traffic across state lines.”
Routines like that are how Jost and Che ended up telling 91 percent of their political jokes about conservatives throughout the whole season, but that does not necessarily convey how nasty Weekend Update can be. SNL may be seen as an American institution, but from an unhealthy obsession with deaths in the Second Family to unfounded allegations of racism, SNL is just another outpost of late night liberalism.
It was Tim Graham’s turn to whine in a May 20 post:
Dave Itzkoff is a former culture reporter for The New York Times, but he’s still dabbling as their Saturday Night Live correspondent. At the end of Season 51, “Ditzkoff” (his X handle) naturally loved the liberal-pleasing comedy bits in his “Best of SNL” list.
First, Ditz loves the horrendous Colin Jost impression of Pete Hegseth, which has all the comic panache of a guy who’s watched Revenge of the Nerds a few too many times. Jost probably screams “Boooger!” into the mirror eight times in his dressing room before heading to the stage.
Graham surprisingly serves up a little praise (however grudgingly) for “SNL’s” Trump impersonator:
Let’s agree that James Austin Johnson does a good impression of Trump and is actually funny doing it — he speaks in perfect Trump-speak, and not every sentence sounds like a Bluesky bleat. In other words, he’s the polar opposite of Alec “Shooter” Baldwin, who could only channel all his inner rage at Trump and call it an impression. That’s the same spirit that Jost seems to be using.
Then there’s Jeremy Culhane’s Tucker Carlson — it’s a good impression, but it’s performed from some sort of comedy time capsule, channeling the Fox News-hosting version of Carlson from about five years ago. Apparently, Team NBC doesn’t want to mock the current Tucker, the Israel-hating conspiracist that Mark Levin calls “Qatarlson.”
Bozell ran to yet about right-wing radio show to complain about “SNL” in a May 22 post:
Graham didn’t mention that it wasn’t until fairly recently that the MRC flip-flopped on Carlson, presumably because Levin made it OK for it to do so.
Ever feel like you’re watching a completely different movie than the mainstream media? You aren’t alone.
This morning on The Eric Metaxas Show, host Eric Metaxas sat down with Media Research Center (MRC) President David Bozell to dive deep into the cultural echo chambers ruining late-night television. From Saturday Night Live to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, comedy has traded universal laughs for predictable partisan lectures.
The numbers are staggering. Bozell highlighted a recent MRC study on Saturday Night Live’sWeekend Update, revealing that an egregious 91% of their political jokes targeted Donald Trump and conservatives. But the issue goes far deeper than punchlines; late-night hosts have completely abandoned their duty to entertain the whole country.
[…]With network affiliates pushing back and ratings cratering, is the classic late-night format dead for good? Can Hollywood ever recover its sense of humor, or are we stuck in the “Trump Derangement” loop forever?
in fact, the MRC couldn’t even bothered to fact-check CBS’ claim that it canceled Stephen Colbert’s late-night show because of low ratings (and not because CBS’ parent company paid Trump millions to settle a lawsuit). Bozell appears to be less than truthful here.