I'm not recommending this SNL clip because it's funny. In a sense, I'm recommending it because it's not.

Yes, I know. Complaining that Saturday Night Live isn't funny anymore has been a cliche for longer than most of the cast members have been alive, but that's not really where I'm going with this. For one thing, it's not a question of anymore. The show never was consistently amusing or even interesting. That was never the point.

For a few years back in the 70s, Saturday Night Live did hit a very sweet spot, being on the intersection of the conceptual comedy movement of people like Steve Martin and Andy Kaufman on one side and the rise of the Second City school of sketch comedy on the other. It also benefitted from an early association with talents like George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Buck Henry.

Lorne Michaels’ initial idea was to rip off National Lampoon's stage and radio shows keeping much of the cast and many of the writers. The material was toned down for television (including adding the Muppets to the original line-up), but it was clearly an unlicensed Lampoon TV show. That initial concept burned itself out fairly quickly and was definitely showing its age even before the 1980 reboot, which more or less introduced the current incarnation of the show.

SNL has been an institution for most of its run, and as a rule, intentionally funny institutions are rare. It's true that lots of incredibly talented people have worked for there, both in front of and behind the camera (Michaels has a good eye) and they do hit paydirt now and then, but that's not really what the show's about. 

Almost since its inception, people watched SNL so they could talk about what other people were talking about, and since at least second or third season, the producers have built the show around this. In addition to catchphrases and recurring characters who often didn't need to recur, this has led to increasing reliance on topical sketches that check off familiar figures and events, where the laughs come less from the jokes and more from the sense of recognition.

Sketches like this.

This follows a very old tradition. Don jr. rubbing his nose and looking for a bathroom with a mirrored countertop is the 2022 version of the famously drunk character walking out with an ice pack on his head. 

We've talked before about how bad art can often be more useful than great art.  Someone like Shakespeare will see things that their contemporaries miss which pretty much by definition makes she or he unrepresentative.

This sketch by comparison is the exact opposite, bad but representative of its moment. Some talented performers manage a few real laughs, but on the whole, it's just a bunch of walk-ons close-captioned for the comically impaired. The jokes are simply characters saying out loud obvious things about themselves: 

Fox News has been pushing Russian propaganda about Ukraine and is now desperately trying to backpedal since the position has become toxic;

Tucker Carlson is a smug, preppie racist;

Trump is a babbling idiot;

Fox viewers are old;

And so on.

There's no real imagination here, just a checklist of people and incidents associated with conservative media and the war in Ukraine, but it is that very lack of imagination that makes this useful. The writers made a list of things that they believed their audience would recognize and agree with. They seem to have been successful. The cold open without anything to recommend it other than the topic has gotten buzz, write-ups and over three million views on YouTube.

There is, of course, the bigger question of to what extent we can generalize from the SNL audience to the wider population, but that's a conversation that requires a different set of tools.