Some things are just not funny â like an Assassination Attempt.
That is something NBCâs âSaturday Night Liveâ is realizing as the show is getting slammed for making jokes about the two assassination attempts against former President Donald Trump, Fox News reported.
SNL started its 50th season Saturday with James Austin Johnson playing Trump in a skit that parodied the first Assassination Attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a supporter in the audience was killed by gunfire.
âWhere the hell is everyone going? Where are you going? I see you trying to leave, but the doors are locked. Come on back â weâre having fun. We love my rallies, except when someone does the âbing, bong, bing, bing, bingâ right at me,â Johnson said as he was portraying Trump. He was referring to the sound of bullets.Â
âYou know that happened because of the rhetoric of the radical left. They say that me blaming the Democrats for inciting violence is the pot calling the kettle black,â he added.
Mike Sington, a former NBCUniversal senior executive who now calls himself a pop culture expert, could not believe what he was seeing.
âI was watching it live, and actually cringed when they mocked the assassination attempts in an effort to be funny. Iâm no fan of Trumpâs, but I thought it was in extremely poor taste,â Sington said.
Fox News host Jimmy Failla wasnât surprised since âSNLâ has moved from comedy to âactivism masquerading as comedy.â
ââSNLâ has basically devolved into a group therapy session for liberals who are wildly out of touch with the zeitgeist,â Failla said.
The audience for such skits is limited, he said.
âThey go after things that work well in a liberal bubble, but look stupid to the rest of us, because it looks like activism masquerading as comedy,â Failla said.
âThe things they made fun of with (President Joe) Biden are the harmless things, whereas the things they make fun of with Trump always have the undercoating thatâs looking to steer the conversation towards how their viewers are going to vote,â he said. âItâs beneath the show that really forged an identity by dabbling in politics, but in an accessible way, which is what we try to do on my show.â
Political satirist Tim Young said âSNLâ basically âjumped the shark politicallyâ a while ago, pointing to when Kate McKinnon sang âHallelujahâ on a darkened stage after Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016.
âFrom that point forward, itâs been full-on leftist propaganda. Their mocking of Trumpâs assassination attempts was completely inappropriate,â Young said.
Young said he believes that making fun of the assassination attempts âfeeds leftist conspiracies that it never happenedâ and âdownplays the seriousness of the threats on Trumpâs life.â
âWhich I believe encourages more lunatics and foreign adversaries to try,â Young said.
In response, the Trump campaign posted on X, formerly Twitter, âThere were two assassination attempts against President Trump within a span of seven weeks. @nbcsnl apparently finds that funny. Disgusting.â
The assassination attempts were also mentioned in the âWeekend Updateâ segment.
Colin Jost said, after playing a clip of Trump saying he had a better âbodyâ than President Biden, that he was âstarting to worry that bullet got a little more than just the ear.â
