Some things are just not funny — like an assassination attempt.
That is something NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” 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.
“Where the hell is everyone going? Where are you going? I see you trying to leave, but the doors are locked. Come on back — we’re having fun. We love my rallies, except when someone does the ‘bing, bong, bing, bing, bing’ right at me,” Johnson said as he was portraying Trump. He was referring to the sound of bullets.
“You 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,” he added.
Mike Sington, a former NBCUniversal senior executive who now calls himself a pop culture expert, could not believe what he was seeing.
“I was watching it live, and actually cringed when they mocked the assassination attempts in an effort to be funny. I’m no fan of Trump’s, but I thought it was in extremely poor taste,” Sington said.
Fox News host Jimmy Failla wasn’t surprised since “SNL” has moved from comedy to “activism masquerading as comedy.”
“’SNL’ has basically devolved into a group therapy session for liberals who are wildly out of touch with the zeitgeist,” Failla said.
The audience for such skits is limited, he said.
“They 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,” Failla said.
“The 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 that’s looking to steer the conversation towards how their viewers are going to vote,” he said. “It’s 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.”
Political satirist Tim Young said “SNL” basically “jumped the shark politically” a while ago, pointing to when Kate McKinnon sang “Hallelujah” on a darkened stage after Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016.
“From that point forward, it’s been full-on leftist propaganda. Their mocking of Trump’s assassination attempts was completely inappropriate,” Young said.
Young said he believes that making fun of the assassination attempts “feeds leftist conspiracies that it never happened” and “downplays the seriousness of the threats on Trump’s life.”
“Which I believe encourages more lunatics and foreign adversaries to try,” Young said.
In response, the Trump campaign posted on X, formerly Twitter, “There were two assassination attempts against President Trump within a span of seven weeks. @nbcsnl apparently finds that funny. Disgusting.”
The assassination attempts were also mentioned in the “Weekend Update” segment.
Colin Jost said, after playing a clip of Trump saying he had a better “body” than President Biden, that he was “starting to worry that bullet got a little more than just the ear.”
