Sunday, November 5, 2000
Laredo Morning Times
ENTERTAINMENT
Politics, show business in
meeting at punch line tonight
BY CARYN JAMES
c.2000 N.Y. Times News Service
NEW YORK — The line between show business
and presidential politics has never been thinner
than in this campaign, and the best evidence
comes at the start of a prime-time special called
“Saturday Night Live’s Presidential Bash 2000”
(Sunday from 9 to 11 p.m. on NBC).
In separate appearances taped recently, the
candidates themselves appear on a split screen.
George W. Bush says he is “ambilavent” about
the appearance because some of the show’s
material has been “offensible.” Al Gore responds,
“I was one of the very first to be offended by material on ‘Saturday Night Live.”’
What is most notable about these self-mocking
appearances is that they do not represent some
mind-boggling shift, just politics as usual today.
The candidates turning up on a show that has
savaged them for months is simply an extension
of doing Top 10 lists with David Letterman.
They have their reasons. By joining in, Bush and
Gore can try to defuse criticism by embracing it.
Because satire deflates pretensions, they can
appeal to the public on a regular-guy level,
engaging in this campaign’s all-important personality contest
The “Saturday Night Live” special is hilarious in
itself, drawing on political sketches from the past
two decades, leaning heavily on those from
recent years. But it also reveals how satire and
“SNL” in particular define the cartoon outlines that
sterotype politicians, from Reagan-the-emptyheaded to Clinton-the-womanizer. The special,
along with a documentary called “Hollywood,
D.C.,” (Monday night at 8 on Bravo), brings the
election season to an end by charting the remarkable mingling of political fiction and news.
Other real-life political figures, including former
President George Bush and Barbara Bush, pop
up in brief new segments on the “SNL” special,
but the sketches are its essence. The most pointedly funny of them has had great resonance in
this campaign. It is the parody of the first BushGore debate, which the vice president’s staff
reportedly made him watch to correct his performance mistakes.
Darrell Hammond plays Gore as heavy-sighing,
pedantic, wedded to the concept and the word
“lockbox.” Hammond, who has mastered a Bill
Clinton impersonation that presents him as a
gleeful womanizer, has the drawling Gore intonation down but hasn’t yet found the single personality trait that makes for a brilliant satiric portrait.
Will Ferrell, as Bush, has. In the debate sketch
he displays an entire range of baffled looks in
response to a single question, as his eyes squint
and you can see the wheels churning in his head.
Asked for a single word that sums up his candidacy he says, “Strategery,” then gives a smug
smile. (The Gore response: “Lockbox.”) The
sketch, written by James Downey, seems wittier
with each viewing. The humor also depends on
Chris Parnell’s performance as the debate moderator, Jim Lehrer, with his wide-eyed look and
uninflected tone.
Though “Saturday Night Live” has presented this
campaign’s most potent political satire, it is not
alone. Similar images have been echoing through
the landscapes of both pop culture and news. A
candy-bar commercial shows an undecided voter
with a Republican elephant on one shoulder and
a Democratic donkey on the other. The elephant
says he wears his Daddy’s pants; the donkey
says, “I invented pants.” Last week Gore told Ted
Koppel on “Nightline,” “I’ve put all my sighs in a
lockbox.”
The blurred line between comedy and news is
startling in a 1988 “SNL” sketch about the debate
between Vice President George Bush and
Michael Dukakis. Dana Carvey as the senior
Bush responds to a question with fractured phrases, and he looks distressed when he finishes an
answer and is told he has a minute and a half left.
The joke brings to mind George W. Bush’s performance in this campaign’s Republican primary
debates, as the old sketch anticipates a genetic
connection between the fictional George H.W.
and the real George W. That sketch has also
been mentioned recently by commentators who
see the words of the fictional Dukakis (Jon Lovitz)
echoing in the Gore campaign: “I can’t believe I’m
losin’ to this guy.”
In another sketch that suggests the indelibility of
caricatures, Phil Hartman plays Ronald Reagan
as a wizard of mental acuity behind the scenes,
doing complicated math in his head and snapping
at his advisers for not keeping up with his mastery
of world politics. Only in public does he become
the familiar doddering Reagan.
While “Saturday Night Live” displays the flow
between entertainment and politics, “Hollywood,
D.C.” faces it head-on, much less effectively. Most
of this two-hour documentary is obvious as it
traces the history of the Hollywood-Washington
connection, back to the days when studio moguls
sought respectability by cozying up to Herbert
Hoover. The documentary becomes provocative
and intriguing, though, when it arrives at recent
history.
Countering the idea that Hollywood today is
overwhelmingly liberal, the outspokenly liberal
actor Martin Sheen says the industry still produces “the most nationalistic films you’ve ever
seen.” His comments are among the documentary’s most cogent. Discussing Jane Fonda’s
protests against the war in Vietnam, he says, “The
reason Hollywood could not get behind Jane
Fonda is that Hollywood is predominently male
and she made us realize what sissies we were.
She had more guts.”
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