The Moment When News Outlets Began Reporting on ‘SNL’s Political Sketches

These days, it’s not uncommon for Saturday Night Live’s habitual political sketches to make headline news — but this wasn’t always the case. After all, it’s not like the Washington Post reached out to the Ford administration for comment every time Chevy Chase fell on his ass on live TV.

When did American journalists start treating SNL as if it were the nation’s go-to source of political commentary, rather than just a wacky variety series that touched upon politics just as often as it explored the inner workings of a family of phallus-headed aliens?

“There were pieces that you could call explicitly political only maybe three or four times a season,” legendary SNL writer Jim Downey said of the show’s early days during an interview with The Ringer. But in the late ‘80s, SNL began poking fun at the president more and more, partly because the sketches were so unchallenging to pull off. 

“Lorne loved doing political openings,” Downey explained. “We must’ve done a dozen just with Dana as George H.W. Bush. Part of it was that there was a very simple set, the Oval Office desk. They were fairly easy to write, and Dana was always great. Sometimes the ideas were a little thin, but they were simple to do. And it came to be expected.”

But the show’s topical humor only caught the attention of the mainstream press during the Gulf War, thanks to a Downey-scripted sketch that opened a February 1991 episode. In it, Phil Hartman’s Dick Cheney and Kevin Nealon’s Lt. Colonel William Pierson host a press conference and end up fielding questions about blatantly classified topics from reporters. “I just saw it as a silly piece,” Downey recalled. “I remember Lorne saying that was the first time we’d ever made the front page of The New York Times.” 

Not long after that, SNL’s political sketches were regularly shared by cable news channels. “We developed kind of a symbiotic relationship with it,” Downey noted. “They would mine our stuff. So every Monday, MSNBC or CNN or even Fox would use clips of the political pieces we were doing. It did help us. It gave them, of course, free, fair-use stuff. It sort of attracted, I suppose, a segment of our audience which wanted to see political satire. We certainly did a lot more of it than we ever had. It just kept growing and growing as a feature of the show. And then by the 2000s, it began to be almost a requirement.”

It’s a good thing too — if it wasn’t for the worldwide attention that was brought to Alec Baldwin’s scathing Trump impersonation, that guy might still be president.

Thanks again, Alec.