“Saturday Night Live” was at it again last night, turning its satirical sites on the GOP rather than the fellow currently abiding in the Oval Office.

Here, the NBC sketch show mocks former House Speaker and current presidential candidate Newt Gingrich for his lofty plans to colonize the moon.

Will Ferrell should still be apologizing for “Land of the Lost.”

Instead, he’s making excuses for President Barack Obama’s first term.

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The increasingly political “Saturday Night Live” alum is co-chairing a Feb. 15 fundraiser for the president’s re-election campaign. But you have to be a one percenter to afford the entrance fee – $35,800 each. Let’s hope that includes Ferrell wearing his cheerleader outfit for some high-energy kicks and jumps.

The bigger issue is getting Obama re-elected, and Ferrell argues the president’s case with a little fuzzy math.

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The Comedy Central series “Key & Peele” doesn’t debut until Jan. 31, but a sneak peek at their content suggests it’s yet another humor program protecting The One.

“Key & Peele” stars comics Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele in a new sketch comedy series that fills a void left by the old “In Living Color” series. “Saturday Night Live” has featured a mostly white cast for decades, but having two black performers front and center could open up some new comedic possibilities.

But how will the show treat the first black president?

If this clip is any indication, the answer is – with deference and defense. [warning: offensive language]

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Last night’s “Saturday Night Live” kicked off the show mocking the Republican of the moment – Rick Santorum.

Cast member Andy Samberg, sporting the now-signature Santorum sweater vest, shares how he plans to overtake former Gov. Mitt Romney and win the GOP presidential nomination.

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“I’m going to skip the slick TV ads and take my case directly to the people,” Santorum says, promising to visit every county across the nation in the process.

“Some of these counties are quite dangerous … San Francisco County, California is home to literally thousands of angry pillow biters and doughnut lovers  … ’nuff said.”

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Alec Baldwin rushed to the cyber-pages of The Huffington Post earlier this week to try and explain his boorish behavior on an American Airline flight.

Last night, Baldwin found another cozy spot for his damage control effort – “Saturday Night Live.”

Baldwin, a frequent and hilarious guest on the sketch comedy show, appeared as the fictional captain of the flight he was booted off of on Dec. 6. The bit, part of the show’s Weekend Update segment, found the captain singing Baldwin’s praises and apologizing for the airline’s treatment of him.

All the while, a confused Seth Meyers, the Weekend Update anchor, breaks character to tell Baldwin this approach might not be the best way to make amends for his actions.

David Koechner didn’t become a superstar from his stint on ‘Saturday Night Live’ like fellow alums Eddie Murphy, Chevy Chase and Will Ferrell. After all, Koechner only lasted one season on the sketch show and didn’t forge any indelible characters, the kind Hollywood desperately tries to spin into comedy franchises.

Instead, Koechner emerged as one of Hollywood’s more trustworthy comic supporting players in films like ‘Anchorman,’ ‘Extract’ and ‘Thank You for Smoking.’

He may not see his name above the marquee, but chances are if he’s co-starring in a comedy it’ll contain a few extra laughs. Together with fellow comic actors Joe Lo Truglio (‘I Love You, Man’), Thomas Lennon (‘Bad Teacher’) and Ken Jeong (‘The Hangover’), Koechner is one reason why the state of modern movie comedies is as robust as it is.

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Maybe Saturday Night Live, Jon Stewart, and all the others who lie to us about how difficult it is to mock this President can watch this and take some notes:

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It would be ridiculously easy for our so-called political satirists to use Obama’s teleprompter addiction as a way to define him for the fool he really is…

Which is why our so-called political satirists refuse to do so.

It ain’t about the funny. It’s about the politics.

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The Presidential race is on. We’ve already seen the first Presidential Debate, and political comics are chomping on the bit. For the past three years, political correctness has forbidden Presidential humor, so when Fox News announced the first Republican debate, “Saturday Night Live couldn’t” resist the urge to satire.

Unfortunately, their enthusiasm might have caused them to jump the gun. Since last Thursday’s GOP debate was devoid of A-list candidates, “Saturday Night Live” didn’t have any solid characters to parody. So rather than make the late night ensemble work, the writers just fictionalized a debate between the more famous undeclared candidates; using characters they will probably be able to recycle during the upcoming campaign.

It was like watching a focus group, each actor trying out catch phrases they hope to use over the next year and a half. They even had Keenan Thompson resurrect his Jimmy “Rents 2 Damn High” McMillan character (personally I would think they could have gotten the real Jimmy McMillan, at or below AFTRA rates, which would have had the added bonus of making the skit funny). (more…)

We’ve all watched well-known, highly regarded actors for the umpteenth time on screen — perhaps even raucously enjoying both their performance and the movie — and thought about how painfully derivative and self-referential they’ve become. Somewhere along the way, over a period of many years, these talented thespians stopped surprising us. They ceased bringing to life fleshed out individuals and  began using and reusing tired sets of predictable quirks and tics.

Mind you, they’re still charismatic and entertaining to watch, but in an almost clownish way. We now go to see them not to be wowed by their acting, but to be entertained by their chewing the scenery and hamming it up. Whereas in the past they lost themselves in a part, now their well-known, theatrically overblown personalities overwhelm everything else on screen.

Who are the worst offenders? My own Top 5 list was compiled with two ground rules: each candidate had to be alive (so James Dean and Marlon Brando each get a reprieve), and they have to have won at least one Academy Award for acting (which spares modern, less-laurelled hams such as Robert Downey Jr., Johnny Depp, Woody Allen, Jeff Goldblum and Mel Gibson.) Again, the following actors are not necessarily unpleasant to watch — raw charisma goes a long way — but they have become predictably one-note parodies of themselves. (more…)

Several weeks ago, the “Right Network” premiered with many conservative programs in its lineup. I recently watched  an episode of one of the network’s new shows entitled “Right 2 Laugh.” The stand-up comedy program featured a few strong conservative comics and highlighted the fact that there are so few right-leaning comedians in the mainstream media today.

From Bill Maher to Jon Stewart to David Letterman, the television airwaves are full of comedians with their own programs who lean to the left and love skewing those on the right. Many of these comedians have attracted widespread praise and admiration for their talents. Comedians on the right, however, often haven’t had a television forum to criticize those on the left.

Hopefully, that will change with “Right 2 Laugh.”

Comedian Evan Sayet hosts the new show. At the beginning of the episode I screened, Sayet opened the show with a few jokes and introduced the featured stand-up comics.  (more…)

“MacGruber” is an awful film. It’s the worst film that I’ve seen in a movie theater this year. Based on an intermittently funny Saturday Night Live” sketch, “MacGruber” ultimately falls flat and is often both unfunny and obscene.

A typical “MacGruber” “SNL” sketch looks like this: MacGruber is tasked with disarming a time bomb within 30 seconds or so, he gets distracted by less urgent matters which causes him to fail in his mission, and the bomb explodes killing everyone. It’s a spoof of the show “MacGyver,” where the lead character was often an expert at getting out of tough situations and escaping from death traps set out for him. (For the record, if there is one thing that “MacGruber” should point to, it’s the fact that the show “MacGyver,” and not this limp satire of it, merits its own motion picture.) (more…)

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When you consider the fact that these are the only types of jobs our “economy” is creating today…

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Tina Fey returned to SNL last night to reprise her Sarah Palin character. Watch it here:

Fey and SNL’s caricature of the former VP candidate did some serious damage to Palin’s reputation and thus the McCain campaign in 2008, but if these stale punchlines are the best they can offer in 2010, maybe they should have just kept this character retired.

Jokes tend not to be as funny when it’s obvious the comic holds his/her subject(s) in contempt. There’s a fine line between “jokes” and “insults,” and when mean-spirited jokes aren’t funny, then they’re just… mean.

In 2008, SNL was able to affect the Presidential election with provocative original satire; you could debate what was in their messages, but not that the messages were delivered effectively. Now they’re just piling on with dated Palin-is-dumb jokes (such as a winking joke, a writing on hand joke, a death panel joke, a Katie Couric interview joke…). Yawn. Fake Sarah Palin has lost her edge.

Dick Wolf has fallen from the heights as a writer on “Hill Street Blues,” a supervising producer of “Miami Vice” and the creator/producer of the once-excellent “Law and Order” trilogy.  The flagship of the “Law and Order” series is “Law and Order,” the two other shows being “SVU” (Special Victims Unit) and “CI”(Criminal Intent). Perhaps 20 years is too long for any series, but “Law and Order” has devolved into the cheapest form of left-wing paranoid delusion. It is so obvious, it gives left-wing propaganda a bad name. Maybe Karl Rove planted a mole.  I now watch it for its comedic satirical value, as one would watch “Saturday Night Live.”

Dick Wolf

The last episode was “Fed.” It’s a story about an ACORN-like community organizing group called “Rights Alliance.” The founder of the Rights Alliance has a conservative infiltrator murdered to “cover up a cover-up.” The cover up is an affair the founder was having with one of its members. The “cover up of the cover-up” was the money being paid by the founder to his mistress’s husband to keep the affair quiet. The right-wing infiltrator was murdered because he had been secretly video taping a sting he was arranging unrelated to the affair–clearly meant to be reminiscent of the O’Keefe/Giles real life ACORN investigation. The founder feared this tape would open the organization up to scrutiny, thus exposing his affair and the subsequent monetary extortion to his girlfriend’s husband. We are not supposed to be shedding too many tears for our murder victim, given he was “tricking a few dumb kids in an ambush video.” (more…)

“I am noticing that each of your plans to save money involves spending even more money.”

Remember this moment, folks.  November 21, 2009 at 11:30pm.  Over one year after Obama’s election and just more than ten months into his administration, “Saturday Night Live” takes its first crack at Obama for something other than not being left enough.  Splash of ice-cold water here:

The sketch really isn’t pro-conservative as much as it’s anti-Obama.  SNL mocks the stimulus, Cash for Clunkers, the debt Obama is increasing exponentially, and Obamacare’s bogus accounting, not to mention the fact that Fred Armisen’s too-cool-for-school Obama took the night off, but the writers are careful not argue for an alternative.  SNL deftly takes a crack at one side without directly supporting the other side, a tactic “South Park” has down to a science.  The sketch isn’t rock-solid from a policy standpoint, so we will post the clip of the CNN fact check once they air it.

SNL’s “Palin 2012” trailer after the jump: (more…)

So, fresh from their previous idiocy analyzing Saturday Night Live, CNN has now turned their goofy gaze toward talk radio, in a series of segments designed to examine the psychology behind a phenomenon that gives them fits. In short, they just can’t figure out why conservatives rule talk radio, and why the left is left out in the cold.

Now, only CNN could do this with a straight face. According to the network, some say talk radio is “viciously partisan,” without of course defining “some,” as “people who work at CNN.” And so the segment began, with CNN using a shrink to examine the typical listener, as though he belonged to a rare breed of lizard that dines only on feces.

Check it out, check-it-outers. 

October 6th, 2009 –the Comedy Fairness Doctrine was conceived.  A liberal civil war was declared.  CNN versus Saturday Night Live.  The cable news network turned their heat seeking missiles of truth detection on the laser-guided precision of punchlines delivered on a variety show.  The weekend preceding this historic day, Saturday Night Live returned for a new season of shows.   Their signature opening sketch featured President Barack Obama (played by Fred Armisen) reading off a laundry list of agenda items he pledged to do, and has yet to accomplish since winning the presidency. 

The list was comically, painfully long and the audience applauded and laughed at the real-life, obvious absence of leadership the sketch had captured in President Obama.  It is key to remember this is the work of comedy writers who could not find something funny about candidate or President Obama for nearly two years.  They did all they could to mock anyone and everyone around the man as to avoid skewering the “One” bearing gifts of “hope and change.”  But we’re coming up on a year in elected office and the liberals have grown restless.   (more…)

SNL finally took on Obama in earnest this weekend:

This sketch wasn’t aimed at Rahm Emanuel, Joe the Biden, or Tim Geithner… it was targeting the Man himself.  But did SNL really turn over a new leaf?  Nope.  The criticism leveled at Obama was that he is failing to execute the brilliantly conceived left-wing aspects of his agenda as stated in his campaign.  Of course, there is no casting judgment on those ideas and no mention that most of America doesn’t actually support them.

This is a tactic Bill Maher has mastered.  He has repeatedly leveled humorous critique at Obama, but the arguments always hinge around Obama not behaving like the left-winger we thought we elected. (more…)