In the run-up to the weekend, news reports indicated the cast members of “Saturday Night Live” were divided over the decision to invite comedian Dave Chapelle back for a third hosting stint, given the “transphobic” remarks in his last comedy special.
One thing they weren’t divided over, however, was a sense of victory over the failure of the “red wave.”
The cold open, for example, was a faux segment on “Fox & Friends” in which the hosts blame the former president: “Seems like everybody is turning on Trump!” said fake Ainsley Earhardt (cast member Heidi Gardner).
“And, per a company-wide email we got this morning, he’s dead to us,” chimed in fake Brian Kilmeade (cast member Bowen Yang).
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It was back to the show’s Trump-bashing-business-as-usual mode, in other other words. And one more reason that even with a star like Chappelle hosting, 11:35 p.m. on Saturday night remains where hope and/or laughter goes to die on NBC.
However, if we remember any political skit from this season of “SNL” 20 years from now — and that’s being incredibly charitable — it might have come two weeks ago, in which the show revealed why the Democrats are still in trouble while trying to prop up President Joe Biden.
The ill-considered defense of Biden began as a riff on how predictable horror movie trailers are, with a twist: The horror? That Biden intends to run again.
“You trusted him once,” the voice-over on the trailer said. “Can you trust him again?”
At the very announcement that Biden was running again, a typical liberal couple freaked out.
“I know he’s a little old, but … he can still win,” says the male half of the partnership, played by Mikey Day. “Right? He beat Trump!”
“But can he beat DeSantis?!” his freaked-out partner, played by Chloe Fineman, responds.
“I don’t know,” he says, ominously.
Then, cast member Punkie Johnson turns to Google to find out how old Biden will be in 2024 and lets loose a curdling scream: 81 years of age.
However, the joke isn’t meant to mock Biden himself (it’s not his fault he’ll be 81, after all). Instead, the target is liberals who, for whatever reason, aren’t convinced that the president is doing a good job. Witness the narrator, who says, “When it feels like nothing’s going right … even though it kind of is.”
Oh, really? How is it going right?
“Why are we so worried?” Fineman says. “He’s done so much! Student debt relief, holding NATO together, the infrastructure bill.”
“But he fell off a bike once!” a sniveling Day says.
This is how insulated the writer’s room at “SNL” is. Biden’s illegal, unilateral student debt relief plan, currently on hold after a judge blocked its implementation, forces Americans who didn’t take out a student loan or who paid theirs off to foot the bill for the Democratic Party’s overeducated millennial liberal-arts-degree base.
The infrastructure bill, like all of the administration’s massive spending packages, is puffed up with waste and is helping drive inflation. And as for “holding NATO together,” the only reason that’s important is because Biden’s weakness and ineptitude helped lead to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the first place.
As for the president’s mental and physical decline, the only thing the “SNL” team can think of is that “he fell off a bike once!” If the writer’s room is having serious trouble with coming up with other examples, here’s a compendium of recent greatest hits, including the one time he literally forgot a dead congresswoman was dead.
“Jackie, where’s Jackie?,” Joe Biden says about Rep. Jackie Walorski who died in a car accident a few months ago. pic.twitter.com/khdiesmEsx
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 28, 2022
BIDEN: “Help turbocharge the emer—the ener, the, the—excuse me—turbocharge the emerging global clean ener—clean energy economy.”
“I was reading their quote. Sorry.” pic.twitter.com/3XFbJN9BqU
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) November 11, 2022
Joe Biden finishes reading a sentence from the teleprompter with “…end of quote. Repeat the line.”pic.twitter.com/haS5pIldDh
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) July 8, 2022
What just happened? pic.twitter.com/gs6keZbihE
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) November 9, 2022
Even the interviewer sounds worried that Biden was falling asleep or having some kind of medical event. Insanity. ?pic.twitter.com/syy1gtWisf
— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) October 22, 2022
Oh, and “he fell off a bike once!” That, too.
The one thing “SNL” did get right is the lack of other candidates who could plausibly replace a very replaceable president whose approval rating remains stuck in the low 40s. When one of the scared Dems suggests Vice President Kamala Harris take over, Fineman slaps him: “Wake! Up!” she exclaims.
New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker? “He’s corny!” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg? “Listen to yourself!”
And then there’s a knock at the front door. As the terrified cast in the house gaze at the entryway, someone slips a card underneath it: “Beto 2024.”
Screams ring out. As they rightly should:
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In the end, the characters agree that they should just go back to Joe Biden, the worst choice for the country aside from literally every other plausible choice they could come up with. And, while “SNL” meant this as a defense of the president, it’s more proof that blind squirrels and stopped clocks aren’t always, always wrong.
Even as it stands on Monday morning, with a handful of House races still out and control of the lower chamber of Congress still up in the air, the Democrats can, at best, claim to have not done as badly as they thought they were going to. Considering how much time and effort the establishment media spent amplifying the left’s message on abortion, election “denial” and a chimerical Republican “threat to democracy,” this is hardly an upset of a “Dewey Defeats Truman” magnitude.
Two years from now, the Democrats will either a) have to run a tired, confused octogenarian for a second term or b) pick another of their poxed second-tier candidates to replace him.
Sure, the “Fox & Friends” cold open might get emailed around by your liberal relatives for a week or two. However, “Horror Movie Trailer” will provide a whole lot more insight into the Biden administration and its impact on the country to those still watching “Saturday Night Live” clips a decade from now.
As the old slasher movie trope goes, the call is coming from inside the house — even if the libs inside the “SNL” writers’ room didn’t even know they were making it.
CORRECTION, Nov. 14, 2022: An earlier version of this article had an incorrect figure for the number of years until the next presidential election.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
