How Saturday Night Live’s Liberal Bias Is Killing Its Comedy

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 Saturday Night Live built its legacy on fearless satire, skewering the powerful and absurd on both sides of the political aisle. But in recent years, the show has abandoned that balance, turning a blind eye to the growing absurdities of the Left. In this episode, we explore how SNL's partisan blind spot not only alienates half the country but weakens the very comedy it once mastered. 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Conservative Opinion Podcast
brought to you byConservativeOpinioncom.
Now here's your host, jordanRickards.
Hey everybody, thanks forjoining us.
Today we're talking aboutSaturday Night Live and, in
particular, how Saturday NightLive ignores the absurdities of
the left to its own detriment.
There was a time, believe it ornot, when Saturday Night Live

(00:24):
was the touchstone of Americanhumor, the show for which you
would stop everything.
It was where the nation's mostabsurd, most laughable moments
were skewered, where thepolitical figures of the day
were parodied to perfection andwhere the comedy of the week
could become the comedy of theyear.
But somewhere along the way,saturday Night Live lost its
compass.
Today it feels more like atired echo chamber of its former

(00:46):
self, a shadow of the vibrant,cutting-edge satire it once was.
It isn't that the cast issimply weaker or that the
writing lacks bite although bothof those are true but that the
show has become a victim of itsown self-importance, trapped in
a cycle of political correctnessand worn-out caricatures and
having developed a deliberateblind spot to where the true

(01:07):
humor in American culturepresently lies.
The political and cultural leftthat's not to say the cast is
without blame.
There is some real talent there, but by and large, the current
Saturday Night Live ensemble iswell how should one say this
charitably?
It's inadequate, and SNLtacitly admits this.
Consider that this season theircast boasts 17 members.

(01:30):
That's a staggering number.
And yet this group is solacking that SNL regularly
supplements its bloated rosterwith ringers in the form of
former cast members like DanaCarvey and Maya Rudolph and Andy
Samberg, along with repeatedguest appearances from Jim
Gaffigan playing Tim Waltz, andonce again, alec Baldwin, who
has transitioned from passableTrump impressions to a frankly

(01:52):
very lazy one.
For RFK Jr, what?
They couldn't find a singlewhite male cast member to
deliver lines with a raspy voice.
The show feels like it's stuckin a loop, pulling in outside
talent because the current castcan't fill the void.
But the real problem, the cruxof the issue, is something more
significant that Saturday NightLive has, for all of its history

(02:14):
, been a creature of the left,its humor fixated on a narrow
ideological target, thepolitical satire that once
zinged with the sharpness of aperfectly timed sketch now feels
dated, its jokes floundering ina sea of predictability.
Take the endless Trump jokes,for instance.
For years, donald Trump was thecomedic goldmine for the show's

(02:36):
writers.
His outrageous antics, hisbombastic style and tweetstorms
made him an easy target andtweetstorms made him an easy
target.
But these jokes are now staleand overplayed, and now we have
to endure four more years ofthis show pulling from a well
that has long since run dry.
The repetition of the sameTrump impressions, the same
tired gags, has dulled what onceseemed like an endless fount of

(02:58):
material.
The real target-rich environmentfor comedy lies not on the
right, but on the left.
The left is where theabsurdities of modern life have
truly taken root, where thecontradictions, the hypocrisies
and the outlandish behaviorpractically beg to be skewered.
There's humor in the left'sunflagging commitment to
identity politics, in itsobsession with ideological

(03:21):
purity and in its endlessreinterpretations and outright
denials of reality.
The left, it seems, is tryingto outdo itself in an
ever-escalating game of who canbe the most ridiculous, a game
that's rife with opportunitiesfor satire.
Conservatives and the averagemiddle-class Americans from
which we draw our ranks areactually kind of boring, aren't

(03:42):
we?
We don't identify as cats ordemand mental health counseling
after elections.
But the left, oh the left, iswhere the comedy is.
It's there that you find thepolitical correctness gone mad,
the college students who can'tdecide whether a man can have a
period or a woman can have anerection, the influencers who
try to outdo each other inself-righteousness and the

(04:03):
incredibly privileged socialjustice warriors who see
themselves as victims.
It's an environment thatdemands ridicule, and yet, with
only rare exception, saturdayNight Live seems bound by a
sense of obligation or blindallegiance, and it's failed to
mine this fertile ground forcomedy.
Instead, it continues to beatthe same dead horse of sketches

(04:24):
aimed at Trump in middle America, oblivious to the goldmine of
material sitting just across theideological divide.
If only SNL would turn its gazeon the left, we would find
comedy that writes itself.
Consider, for example, the workof non-comedian Matt Walsh,
whose riotous documentaries Am Ia Racist?
Which examines the DEI movement, and what is a Woman, which

(04:46):
asks those supporting genderreassignment surgery for
children this very simplequestion, much to their
frustration.
These are prime examples of asimple but effective approach to
comedy, revealing absurditywhere it already exists.
Walsh's method is hardlysophisticated.
He doesn't write jokes or tellthem, he simply interviews
individuals who are eitherhopelessly mired in identity

(05:07):
politics or cannot answer basicquestions about the reality of
gender.
The resulting conversations areso painfully out of touch with
common sense that theypractically beg for comedic
treatment.
It's not hard to make somethingfunny when the world is already
so absurd, but it's almostimpossible to make something
funny when trying too hard to beimportant In the end.

(05:28):
What's most frustrating aboutSaturday Night Live is that it
doesn't seem to understand thisbasic principle.
It used to skewer power.
Now it struggles for its own.
It used to lampoon theestablishment, but now it sees
itself as part of the liberalestablishment, on par with the
legacy media, and in so doing ithas become a victim of its own

(05:48):
ideological echo chamber, soconcerned with political
correctness that it has become avictim of its own ideological
echo chamber, so concerned withpolitical correctness that it
has forgotten how to find humorin the real absurdities of the
world.
The answer isn't to abandon theleft altogether or to go in
search of a new target.
It's simply to embrace thecontradictions, the excesses and
the outrages of contemporaryliberalism with the same verve
and energy that made the showgreat in the first place.

(06:10):
Instead of recycling the sameold jokes, saturday Night Live
should be looking for the realcomedy that exists right in
front of its own eyes.
If only it would dare to look.
This has been Jordan Rickardswith the Conservative Opinion
Podcast.
Thanks very much for listening.