‘Saturday Night Live’: Michael Che gives interesting take on Donald Trump criticism
Given what they’ve brought to the table as of late, it’s not much of a surprise that Donald Trump wouldn’t be happy with “Saturday Night Live” given some of what they’ve done lately. he’s accused them of being biased, while also wondering why there was not equal time spent mocking liberals. The show does have a fairly-rich tradition of mocking both sides of the political spectrum, but that’s not something we’ve necessarily seen a great deal over over the course of the season so far.
What we love about what Michael Che said to Esquire on this subject, while promoting his upcoming Netflix special “Michael Che Matters,” is that so much of it is honest. What he said is that in theory, the show really should give equal time to mocking both parties; however, there are certain things that Trump does that make it almost impossible:
“I honestly agree with him. Oddly, I agree with him. We try to write that way. But the thing that Donald Trump doesn’t understand is that when you’re that ridiculous, it’s kind of hard to talk about anything else. You have this ridiculous orange billionaire doing stranger and stranger things, what else is there? But I do agree with him. I think the show should show all views and we make a conscious effort to do so. That’s why I loved “The Bubble” sketch. That was a great sketch poking fun at ultra-liberals. We put him on the show when he was the most controversial man, and people said that wasn’t fair. I don’t think he has much grounds to speak on that because, if anything, we’ve been the most friendly show to him. We’ve been accused of that. But comedy should take both sides. No matter who is in power, we should be making fun of them.”
Che is also right that “SNL” took an enormous amount of heat for having Trump host the show, which we’ve used further to proclaim that the series should permanently refrain from having politicians host while in the thick of an election. Cameos, meanwhile, are a different story since that’s just a quick appearance. (One of our other criticisms of the Trump-hosted show is simply that it was terribly unfunny.)
Ultimately, comedy goes where the material is, and if there is one person who is giving you a substantially greater amount of material than the other, you go in that direction more.
“SNL” returns next weekend for a new show hosted by Emma Stone. If you head over here right now, you can see our official archive stocked with the latest updates. (Photo: NBC.)