Censorship Criticism: Last Night's SNL Proves Yet Again How Thin-Skinned Certain People Are

 

This isn’t by far the most important of all the criticisms of the left has ever made about Donald Trump and all of MAGA but in my opinion it is one of the ones that shows both their lack of self-aware, irony and really anything else. We’ve heard this criticism so many times since 2015 and we’re no doubt going to keep hearing it.

“Donald Trump and the MAGA movement have no sense of humor. They can’t take a joke which means they’re too sensitive. They’re too thin-skinned.”

To quote Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers from Saturday Night Live, for reasons that will become very obvious soon: Really?

The right is the one that is too thin-skinned? You’re the people who created cancel culture saying that what people say can be as impactful and hurtful as what they actually do? Really?

I mean, Really?! Have you forgotten what the entire history of comedy is like and how much of it has been attacks by so many marginalized groups about jokes over the last half-century? Andrew Dice Clay told one joke that was construed as offensive and he lost twenty years of his career. Because SNL decided to let him host Nora Dunn resigned because his presence was an insult to her fragile existence? I mean, really?

Really? You’re the guys who yell the loudest about freedom of expression and speech when one of your own is under attack but when guys like Bill Maher and Don Imus makes jokes about subjects you find offensive, you raise a stink and demand they lose their livelihood? You’re on the side of Dave Chapelle when he’s making jokes about institutional racism but the moment he starts making jokes about the transgender community he has to be labeled as out of touch? I mean, really?!

Really! How much of this is about your own projection? Trump and MAGA act all-sensitive and harsh to the kind of jokes of liberal America and you say it proves their unfit to lead? Are you pissed or is this about wanting to sue for copyright infringement?

There are so many examples of the way the left has been arguing about humor and the arts being part of a line of attack against Trump and his movement has been the definition of hypocrisy but for this article I’m just going to talk about Saturday Night Live and much of the last five years in particular.

For the record during the lead-up to the 2016 and all the way through Trump’s first term Saturday Night Live was hailed by the far left as being one of the major parts of the battle in ‘the Resistance’. In hindsight that no doubt had more to do with the attacks Trump and the administration was making on SNL as President then their actual comedy. Strictly speaking while they might have had more famous faces playing key parts of the people in Trump’s circle – Ben Stiller as Michael Cohen, Matt Damon as Brett Kavanaugh, Robert DeNiro as Robert Mueller – at the most basic level, none of their approach to Trump had changed that much. If anything, it was less subtle and nuanced than so much of their comedy during previous Republican AND Democratic Presidencies over the years. The only reason it resonated the way it did was out of the reaction of what was happening in America, compared to their glory days during the 2000s it wasn’t particularly radical.

The change may have come when the 2020 election was called. That happened on a Saturday and when it played out Dave Chapelle, who had been the host the Saturday after the 2016 election occurred, returned. During that famous monologue he had not used his voice to rage against Trump but rather to argue for unity and decency. This time he basically did another monologue that was even more controversial and got fewer laughs because he was poking at so many of the left’s sacred cows during this period – particularly the LGBTQ+ community. There’s a part of me that can trace the backlash against him to that host; he’s certainly never been considered the groundbreaker he was during the 21^st century.

SNL took a considerable amount of heat from the right when it spent far more time during the Biden administration continuing to attack the Republicans and Trump then it did the incumbent President. To be fair, there was more than enough to make fun of during this period but it’s worth noting it was a pattern in keeping with so many late night comedians who were more than willing to give the Democrats a free pass and argue the GOP was the enemy.

The problem really began for SNL when it started to allow people to host the show that the left prominently didn’t like. They took a lot of heat for allowing Elon Musk to host in May of 2021 but they took a similar attack when Chappelle returned in 2022. The real trigger came when Shane Gillis hosted in 2024. Even before his appearance Gillis had been a figure of controversy because he was known for being a successful right-wing comic and by this point so much of the left had taken the argument that anyone who had right wing point of view didn’t deserve the dignity of being allowed to talk beyond the confines of Fox News and Newsmax where they could be ignored. Gillis’s being allowed to host attracted almost the same level of vitriol as allowing Andrew Dice Clay or indeed Republicans like Steve Forbes and even Trump to host the show. But by this point the left had made it very clear “these people’ were not allowed to have a voice.

By the time SNL reached its 50^th anniversary season this past fall there was now increased criticism on the side of the left that it was beginning to fail its mission statement of not going aggressively enough after Trump. That had never been the mission statement of SNL at any point: Lorne Michaels had long made it clear the show’s job was to make fun of everybody equally, regardless of political allegiance, gender, race or sexuality. But in a world where the left as much as the right was insisted that everything had to take a side and if you weren’t with us, you were against us that was no longer good enough for them. How SNL, a mere comedy show, was supposed to convince undecided voters to vote for Harris or Democratic was, as you’d expect, ignored in the discussion: the left was holding them to a curve and SNL had failed it.

But last night’s episode may have been the clearest demarcation as to why so many on the left have so often been the right’s greatest cudgel when it comes to winning the undecided. Now I didn’t see last night’s episode so I can’t comment on it specifically but one of the sketches that was prominent was The White Potus a sketch that put the Trump administration in the setting of The White Lotus. There was nothing radical about this; in fact one of the highpoints of the 2022-2023 season was a sketch called ‘The Black Lotus’ in which the entire show was satirized as if an African-American staff was running the famed resort. Aubrey Plaza was hosting  that week and she was more willing to appear as a Puerto Rican who had no patience for ‘this foolishness’.

Now immediately after the episode aired Aimee Lou Wood, who played Chelsea this past season, was attacked for being unfunny and arguing that Sarah Sherman’s take on the character had prosthetically front teeth. According to her it was a rant in which everyone else was political figure and she was the only one there who was ‘unprotected’. So she felt she was being singled out. So she went online and said how unfunny and painful it was and that the show was clearly attacking her which was, according to fans “c’nty and uncalled for”

Now to be clear everyone was fine with SNL attacking the Trump administration but attacking the one figure who isn’t political, that’s too far. According to her, there must be a cleverer, more nuanced, less cheap way. So it’s fine to take the piss out of the Trump administration, they clearer deserve and don’t deserve their protection, but if a woman feels offended, well that’s going too far.

So in other words everyone else who was a political figure and fair game, perfectly fine to attack them with no nuance or subtlety. You’d think Wood would have been flattered to be made fun of on Saturday Night Live – supposedly that was a badge of honor among some people. But apparently now her feelings have to be taken into account.

The thing is, SNL did apologize after the ‘backlash’ – which they absolutely should not have done but it’s completely understandable that they were forced too. But it illustrates the increasingly impossible box that so many comedy shows have been in the middle of. And it shows the kind of double-think that we always see with the left.

Wood, it’s worth noting, is a public figure and has been acting for more than eight years. She played Aimee on the Netflix hit Sex Education, has been starring in British TV for more than a few years. She’s over 30, which would seem to be past the age of being sensitive to criticism and you’d think at this point she would be used to ridicule. You’d also think, given the very real nature of how the GOP is impacting on so many people who are suffering in America – people not as rich, famous or prominent in social media – that she might be willing to allow for a satiric version of her character in an attempt to take the administration down.

But as is keeping with so many people of her age and the left in general all that mattered was how the sketch personally made her personally feel in the moment. Rather than take a breath and laugh it off, she posted her feelings on line. There was nothing about the sketch itself, only her portrayal of it which was relatively brief and irrelevant to the point of the sketch. And in keeping with the left in general they chose to not see the forest for the trees and take her side. That they didn’t see the fact that right wing politicians were being skewered far worse than Sherman’s portrayal is typical.

The idea of having a thicker skin in today’s society is overtalked but it has increasingly seemed that the left is more than willing to argue that it is only the right-wing people who have to be able to take a joke. Everything involving the sketch, Wood’s reaction to it and everything that happened afterward should have been the kind of thing that was teachable. That Wood can’t find it in her to laugh at herself is something that unsettles me; that the impact was such she couldn’t live even one day without demanding an immediate apology is even more so.

There has been no sign in the aftermath of Trump’s reelection that anyone on the left has even reconsidered the idea that their approach might have played a role. That the left continues to play far more into the idea of one’s feelings be important than actual events going on has been one of the reasons that the GOP has managed to rise to this position to this position in the first place. And how the left expects to argue about suppression of dissent and the crackdowns on free speech when there’s so much backlash to a satirical version of the Trump administration which one person took offense too and the world rallied to her is an illustration as to how they can make the right’s job so much easier. It was a given that someone on right-wing media would use this sketch as an example of liberal elitism; the fact that someone from Hollywood took offense to it and that SNL apologized to her – but not anyone else in the sketch – will give them something they almost never have: actual moral high ground.

When times are dark – and I won’t deny they’re not right now – we need the power of laughter more than ever and the ability to laugh at ourselves even more. L’affaire Wood demonstrates how the left is willing to make this already difficult task infinitely harder. And for those people who will frame SNL’s decision to apologize as some kind of victory, I say again: Really?!