remember when the jokes didn’t write themselves
Matt Damon came back to SNL and I realized I haven’t watched since the last time he was on, one Trump presidency ago.
The only time I’ve been an active viewer of Saturday Night Live (and by active I mean watching the cold open or Weekend Update segments consistently on YouTube) was when the chaos they were poking fun at felt like a bunch of false alarms. These things were happening, yes, but they didn’t seem that serious because we had failsafes. We had checks. We had balances. There were brakes on the car, and they were working.
Matt Damon popping up on my computer screen seven years ago as the belligerent Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on the popular sketch show was genuinely funny. Kate McKinnon as the bootlicking Lindsey Graham who demanded we “put this man on the Supreme Court now. No vote. No discussion,” was a great schtick. Tobin, PJ and Squee were just some guys with the most white-guy-sounding names ever on a calendar that no one really bought. We were laughing because it was ridiculous, and also because it felt inconsequential.
When that sketch aired, we were nearing the end of our first Trump term. It was the latter half of 2018 and the light at the end of the tunnel was growing brighter and brighter every day. We let ourselves laugh because it surely couldn’t get any worse. We wouldn’t let it. All of the levers Trump and his people flipped would get flipped right back with the next Democrat in the White House and we’d be set on the right course. It would be a blip in the radar. A soon-distant memory that we would all forget about. And, while we rested assured of that future, we allowed ourselves to laugh at just how batshit crazy all of this was. The jokes wrote themselves, really.
We find ourselves, eight years later, tapping into the same well and coming up short. Matt Damon reprised his role as the now Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh in another SNL cold open this past weekend, and when my sister sent me the link, I realized I hadn’t watched any SNL clips in years. And I knew why: extremely current political jokes about this administration only land when it feels like there’s an escape hatch. There is no quick fix or lever flip that’s gonna get us out of the hole we’re in.
In 2018 we had a clear out: the 2020 election. We were halfway through what we believed to be the one and only Trump presidency. And more than that, we felt that surely, after experiencing four years of that, no one would ever vote for him again. Or that the systems and regulations put in place to stop tyranny and prevent felons from being elected to the highest office in the land, would work. That they were more than just suggestions that could be ignored if desired. Turns out, they’re not!
Before we peeked behind the curtain, we could laugh. We could jest about how insane this “episode” in American history was. And that continued through a Biden win, the announcement of a third run for President by Trump, and was buoyed by the arrival of Kamala Harris as the new Democratic nominee.
We laughed with the confidence––and arrogance––of a senior in high school, who sits on top of the totem pole taking pity on those who still have to work their way up. Only to arrive at college and realize that they’re right back to the bottom, but now the water is deeper, the stakes are higher, and their power doesn’t transfer.
That’s where we are now, 981 days (or 2.69 years) from the end of Trump’s second (and final?) term as POTUS, and I have to trust that light at the end of the tunnel is there because I can’t quite see it. So it pained me, frankly, to see that link to Matt Damon’s reprisal of the Brett Kavanaugh role in my sister’s text thread, but I watched it anyway. It should’ve been funny to watch Colin Jost as Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Damon as Kavanaugh and Aziz Ansari as FBI Director Kash Patel. But it wasn’t, because they weren’t kidding.
Maybe we’re the fools for ever thinking it was a laughing matter, but when Ansari says in the middle of the sketch that the FBI-branded bourbon he brought is “[somehow] a real thing that I, the FBI Director, have made. This is real,” then you know we’re in some deep shit. The jokes are quite literally writing themselves now.
In 2026 we still have a way out—though that way out looked a little stronger before the Voting Rights Act was limited—but we have more Trump 2.0 ahead of us than behind us, and the consequences don’t feel even a little bit temporary or inconsequential.
So while I would love to unwind with other people who are laughing about just how insane the politics of our time is, I can’t really stomach it in the same way. I’m totally fine with scary or morally questionable characters or plot lines in movies or shows, but there always has to be a degree or two of separation. For example, I’ve been thinking about rewatching The Last of Us a lot recently, despite the fact that it’s stressful, because for all the shit we’re living through, the infected feels a little out there even for this timeline (*knock on wood*).
So in this Gilded Age of oligopoly and voter suppression and endless war, I can’t really watch shows like Industry where, despite knowing it’s probably good, I have to pretend to care and root for people who work in an industry that is about helping wealthy people accumulate more wealth; or listen to too much political discussion, especially when it tries to end on a positive note to placate us; or watch parody sketches of conversations that are very much happening in that Big White House with the Pillars Out Front. I gotta keep my mood up!
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"i gotta keep my mood up" -smash williams; truer words were never spoken