Saturday Night Live and the Election Cycle
May 9, 2008
The veteran comedy show has always taken aim at presidents and presidential wannabes. But in the 2008 race, campaign satire began to bleed into the campaign itself. SNL did a debate parody depicting the media as soft on Obama and hard on Clinton, and Clinton took this up as her rallying cry; the sketch ended up framing public discourse on the issue. Host Tina Fey delivered a women-powered, tongue-in-cheek monologue supporting Clinton, and SNL alum Tracy Morgan fired back with a pro-Obama counterpoint.
Suddenly the candidates are in on the entertainment game — Clinton and Obama appeared on SNL, and candidates are popping up all over the dial, from The Daily Show to WWE Raw.
We asked Joe Saltzman, primetime TV expert and a professor in the USC Annenberg School for Communication, why candidates are paying such attention to their comedy doppelgängers, and what they hope to find in Studio 8H that they can’t get on CNN.
Q: How are Saturday Night Live sketches reverberating in this election cycle?
A: Memorable comedy can have an influence. Chevy Chase’s impersonation of Gerald Ford as someone always falling down became a national joke and did influence the public’s perception of Ford. The SNL sketches, when they hit a generalized feeling about what is going on with the news media and the candidates, can have an influence in substantiating a prejudice or a hunch that the citizen has about a candidate.
The perception that the news media was being particularly harsh on Clinton and easier on Obama was given more credence by the SNL sketch implying that the news media was coddling Obama and overly critical of Clinton. It hit a nerve and had more influence because of it — especially among voters under 40, who watch that program on a regular basis.
Q: What effect is entertainment TV having on the presidential election?
A: Entertainment TV is having more of an impact on public issues than ever before. Many young voters claim they get their news from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Jay Leno’s Tonight Show opening monologue. There is anecdotal evidence of this, although nothing official. The perception is that there’s an audience that cites its primary news source as predominantly entertainment shows and, if valid, this certainly would have an impact on the presidential election. The fact that the candidates go on The Daily Show, SNL and the Tonight Show means they believe the shows have impact on the voters.
Q: It this something different than what we’ve seen with SNL — or entertainment TV in general — in past election years?
A: It seems more dominant this year, as entertainment and information merge even more than in the past. The audience doesn’t seem capable anymore of distinguishing between infotainment and information/news.
Q: Why are candidates eager to embrace these sketches and what they say about their candidacy?
A: Going on a non-news program such as The Daily Show or SNL shows the public that the candidate is a “regular person,” someone with a sense of humor, and the public likes that quality in its public officials. It shows humility, and the public likes that quality in its public officials. It takes away from the perception that a candidate is arrogant or uncaring or unfeeling. It shows that the candidate is just like the rest of us, someone we can vote for with confidence.