Saturday Night Live takes on President Trump as it has all presidents

Saturday Night Live and late night talk hosts have always had fun at the presidents expense

Comedy and the president of the United States goes all the way back to Will Rodgers who once said that, “I don’t belong to an organized political party. I am a Democrat.” More recently NBC’s Saturday Night Live has gone after every President Gerald Ford and now it is President Donald Trump is getting his turn not just on SNL but other outlets as well.

President Trump has hosted the show twice before was in the White House and has been a guest ob the show another four times. So, while he may Tweet nasty things about the program he knows the team over at 30 Rock very well.

HBO’s ads promoting John Oliver on “Last Week Tonight” depict him cowering behind a desk, with the tag line, “Scary times call for a scared man.”

Be not afraid. Between Oliver’s return Sunday from a three-month hiatus and Donald Trump impersonator Alec Baldwin’s stint hosting “Saturday Night Live,” this is shaping up to be a big weekend in what has already been a promising start to the Trump era in late-night comedy.

Melissa McCarthy’s impersonation of White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Saturday Night Live,exploded on social media last weekend. Seth Meyers and Trevor Noah are nightly newscasters of the absurd, Samantha Bee is continuing her biting work and Stephen Colbert’s opinionated topicality has rejuvenated his CBS show in competition with NBC’s Jimmy Fallon.

“We have to live in (Trump’s) world now,” said Steve Bodow, executive producer of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central. “We used to be able to observe him, but now we have to live in his world. He’s taken the country hostage, in a way.”

The mountain of material has been daunting. Bodow’s fellow executive producer, Jen Flanz, likens the pace to cramming for a different test every day. Bee seemed breathless recently telling viewers, “Believe me, we are not done,” and beseeching them to stick with her through a commercial break after comparing confusion surrounding Trump’s immigration order to the “healthcare.gov of Islamophobia.”

Once an occasional feature, Meyers’ “A Closer Look” segment is like a newspaper opened every day at the top of his show. There’s so much to work with that he said he toggles between “multiple Constitutional crises” and “mundane, every day weirdness,” like confusing comments Trump made about historical figure Frederick Douglass.

“The Daily Show’s” Noah did a “Profile in Tremendousness” about Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, mocking the jurist’s story about crying when he first learned of the death of former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as “the whitest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Daily Show” correspondent Hasan Minhaj has also emerged as an important voice, a Muslim comedian at a time many Muslims feel under attack.

Into this maelstrom steps Oliver. He’s made it a point in past years to say he wanted to avoid the day-to-day tumult of politics, believing it best suited to those with a nightly platform while he concentrates on his investigative comedy. But some things are hard to resist, and his show about Trump’s family name change from “Drumpf” was one of last season’s highlights.

How much will Trump dominate his upcoming round of shows?

“We’ll work it out,” he said. “I could lie to your face again. I don’t know. We’re very anxious to not make it all Trump all of the time, both for the level of interest and on a level of what the human soul can sustain.”

Oliver said that “there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit with an administration like this and you kind of have to reach past that.”

Bee and her staff had a “what now?” meeting after an election they weren’t alone in thinking would turn out differently.

“We thought, OK, we all need to think about being in a place where we’re probably going to be quite critical of a sitting president,” she recalled. “What does that mean for us? I don’t know if it’s going to change anything particularly, but it’s important for us to think about.”

Bee hasn’t soft-pedaled her comedy, and she recently announced plans for a non-Trump alternative to this spring’s White House Correspondents dinner, an annual gathering of Washington media with the president and other elected officials. But she has recognized other views, like her bid to find some common ground with conservative commentator Glenn Beck.

The show also has to make a special effort to find some moments of joy each week, she said.

“There is so much happening, so much coming at us on a daily basis, that we do have to think about what we can do that’s just plain silly,” she said.

Colbert, whose show had been floundering so much that early last year there were whispers it wouldn’t last, sharpened his focus during the campaign to become pointedly topical. He’s not been afraid to bring back his former Comedy Central character and former Comedy Central colleague, Jon Stewart. When he returned from a vacation following Trump’s inaugural, more than 4 million people sought out his first monologue on YouTube.

Last week, Colbert also beat NBC’s “Tonight” show host Jimmy Fallon in the ratings for the first time since the week Colbert took over for David Letterman on the “Late Show” in September 2015.

Colbert walks a careful line, since CBS is dominant in the parts of the country where Trump has his strongest base, but he’s been careful to mock Trump, and not necessarily the people who supported him.

Fallon, who’s been the late-night comedy king from the instant he took over from Jay Leno in 2014, is the one comic clearly struggling in the new era. Critics and Trump opponents criticized him last fall for a cringeworthy interview with the Republican candidate where Fallon playfully mussed his hair. When Fallon brought back his Trump impersonation recently, that fell flat, too.

“Being soft in an era when Fallon competitors like Samantha Bee, Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah are delivering strong critiques of the president could hurt Fallon and his ‘Tonight’ show in the long run,” critic Laura Bradley wrote in Vanity Fair.

Fallon’s form of breezy comedy felt right for the times three years ago, much less so now. He’s evidence of how things can change – and may change again still.

It’s a blistering pace to keep up with. As Meyers noted, “two weeks into the Trump presidency, and already it feels like two year

The quotes used in this story came from ASSOCIATED PRESS and the video is from NBC Saturday Night Live.  

Jim Williams is the Washington Bureau Chief, Digital Director as well as the Director of Special Projects for Genesis Communications. He is starting his third year as part of the team. This is Williams 40th year in the media business, and in that time he has served in a number of capacities. He is a seven time Emmy Award winning television producer, director, writer and executive. He has developed four regional sports networks, directed over 2,000 live sporting events including basketball, football, baseball hockey, soccer and even polo to name a few sports. Major events include three Olympic Games, two World Cups, two World Series, six NBA Playoffs, four Stanley Cup Playoffs, four NCAA Men’s National Basketball Championship Tournaments (March Madness), two Super Bowl and over a dozen college bowl games. On the entertainment side Williams was involved s and directed over 500 concerts for Showtime, Pay Per View and MTV Networks.