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The Blogfred armisensaturday night liveSNL


SNL'S LAME HILLARY PLUG

I was in the audience at last weekend's taping and I was embarrassed for the
saps onstage. If there was a signal moment of the campaign when pop-culture got
too schmoozy with politics, this was it.
By Lionel Beehner, Contributor


Assistant Professor, U.S. Military Academy at West Point

Assistant Professor, U.S. Military Academy at West Point
Mar 3, 2008, 01:16 PM EST
|Updated May 25, 2011
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform.
Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need
to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.


I was in the audience at last weekend's Saturday Night Live's taping and I was
embarrassed for the saps onstage. If there was a signal moment of the campaign
when pop-culture got too schmoozy with politics, this was it. Not because the
opening sketch of the Democratic presidential debate was not funny (it wasn't)
or was recycled from the previous week (it was), but because this skit lacked
any bite at all (worse, cue cards notwithstanding, they still managed to mangle
the pronunciation of Dmitri Medvedev). This was all the funny-pushers at SNL
could find to poke fun of? That she's kind of pushy? What about the "it's 3 a.m.
and your child is asleep" ad by Hillary (Suggestion: "It's 3 a.m. -- do you know
where your husband is, Hillary?")?

Strangely the skit depicts Barack Obama as stupid and monosyllabic -- akin to
Trey Parker and Matt Stone's depiction of Matt Damon in the movie Team America.
Moreover, normally funny Fred Armisen does an atrocious impersonation to boot.

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The sad fact is, both SNL and Hillary's campaign are on the skids and so they
both need and self-promote each other, regardless of the nausea and lack of
laughter produced from the audience. Hillary loves it when she is lampooned. SNL
loves it when she name-drops them at a debate. Both sides win. The loser, of
course, is us, the schmucks who have to sit through this crap, but also the
media, who feel they should report this as news for some reason (the only
newsworthiness of the event, as I was told by one of SNL's writers, was that
Hillary awkwardly bumped into Rudy Giuliani backstage). Even post-Soviet
Russia's puppet shows produced more biting political satire than SNL. The knock
on the Washington press corps is that it's too close to the powers that be in
the White House -- seems the same could now be said for our pop-cultural
establishment.

Watch: Live, From New York...It's Hillary Clinton!

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LIONEL BEEHNER, CONTRIBUTOR

Assistant Professor, U.S. Military Academy at West Point

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