‘SNL’ Calls Donald Trump Supporters “Crazy,” “Full-Blown Nut Jobs”

“As a woman, I like Donald Trump, but as a full-blown nut job, I freakin’ love him.”

Saturday Night Live wasted no time slamming Donald Trump this week, rushing right at the impossibility of defending his myriad bizarre comments. Cecily Strong played a ditzy Trump supporter tying herself in knots to defend the Donald, while Kate McKinnon played Kate Bolduan, who is, it appears, an anchor on CNN. Nice to meet you, Ms. Bolduan (pronounced Baldwin, apparently).

First, kudos to SNL for choosing a new media person to feature on this segment. I love SNL’s Fox & Friends morning crew, but they’re used frequently, and other MSNBC/CNN and network news figures are often so bland that it’s hard to find am impression that, well, makes an impression (who’s waiting for the return of Beck Bennett’s killer Jake Tapper take?)

McKinnon’s Bolduan is hardly more memorable, but Strong’s Scottie Nell Hughes, a real person affiliated with the also real Tea Party News Network and a Trump-supporting radio host who recently blurted out the phrase “bat shit” on CNN in an assessment of the Republican Party, deliciously ties herself in knots trying to make sense of Trump’s tortured bleatings.

Asked to answer for the candidate’s misogynist tweet about Ted Cruz’s wife, Heidi, she replies that Trump mis-typed because “Donald’s hands are just so big, he can’t see every little tweet his fingers retweet.” She also notes that Heidi Cruz was once arrested. She knows this because Trump told her that Mrs. Cruz was so fat, “she was arrested for having ten pounds of crack.” Bolduan informs her that Mrs. Cruz has never been arrested and that Trump told her a “Yo Mama” joke.

Later in the sketch, they cut to Darrell Hammond’s winning Trump impression, telling a crowd about his daughter’s hot rack, then leading his followers in a chant: “What I say women, you say ‘SUCK!’ Women, SUCK! Women, SUCK!” Hughes defends it by noting that some women do suck, citing Casey Anthony as evidence.

Hammond’s Trump antics  — he illustrates the candidate’s penchant for violence by having him repeatedly punch a supporter in the face — might feel obvious and over the top, but this illustrates an issue for comedians as we fall deep into the Trump era.

Trump might seem the ultimate candidate for comic mockery — and he is — but his campaign’s lunacy is also becoming a challenge for satirists. How do you parody something that’s already such a parody on its face? Comedy relies on escalation and exaggeration, but how much more nuts can you make a candidate who says women who have abortions should be punished (before doing a total about face on the issue days later), and who talks about eliminating $19 billion in debt while cutting taxes and massively increasing military spending?

At sketch’s end, Strong’s Hughes tells Bolduan, “You can’t break me, because I’m crazy. And crazy don’t break.” It’s as good an approach to Trump as any, and while it hardly innovates, it does work.

Weekend Update also began as the Trump show, as it generally does these days — which makes it no different from the rest of the news media, for that matter — taking the first minute or so with jokes about the candidate. Colin Jost started by recounting Trump’s abortion comment, then noting all the different ways he went back on it (there were quite a few) before concluding, “he has to be pro-choice, because he’s made all of the choices.” After Jost nailed him for his inconsistent (yet consistently awful) positions, Michael Che took him to task for the stupidity of his strategy, noting he made his abortion comment to MSNBC, a network where “their number one show is, ‘So What Do You Think About Abortion?’”

First-time host Peter Dinklage hit a Game of Thrones mention in the monologue, as, he tells us, it was written by Thrones author George R.R. Martin (Bobby Moynihan), who included an instruction for McKinnon to take her top off (she did not, though Vanessa Bayer was more than willing, as, “Screen time is screen time”), and Leslie Jones to appear in a dragon costume (she did).

The first sketch featured Dinklage, who proved a worthwhile, game-for-anything host, as birthday boy Winnie the Pooh, with Moynihan as Eeyore, McKinnon as Piglet, Kenan Thompson as Tigger, Taran Killam as Christopher Robin, and Jay Pharoah as a new addition to the Pooh clan.  He’s Denny the Real, “Pooh’s cousin from far away,” bringing Pooh a gift of pants because Pooh’s life is weird. When Pooh explains he doesn’t wear pants, Denny responds,“So you just gonna wear a T-shirt, looking like a black guy in a porno trying to hide his gut?”

Denny’s point is that, “We bears, baby, we gotta act like it. You supposed to be growling and eating half the things in this room right now. These animals shouldn’t be around you. They should be in your stomach.” After all, he points out, Pooh does nothing with his life, while their cousin was just in The Revenant. He’s also worried about Pooh because all he eats is honey, and their uncle got that sugar. The sketch was a fun excuse to gently roast the Pooh clan. Not a killer, but a steady laugh.

Then, a bolder premise: “Naked & Afraid, Celebrity Edition,” featuring Dinklage and Jones as themselves. Let the image of Dinklage and Jones naked together in the woods percolate in your mind for a moment. The challenge: survive together for 21 days, with each allowed to bring only one survival item. Dinklage brought a fire starter kit. Jones brought hot sauce. After twelve days, Dinklage believes she’s insane, because “all she does is talk about keeping it real.” She is also exceedingly horny, to Dinklage’s chagrin. By the end, Jones is penalized for breaking the show’s “no drug” policy (weed), and for “trying to eat her partner,” which we see as Jones dribbles hot sauce on him. If no one’s working on a Jones/Dinklage sitcom or buddy film, then someone’s sleeping on the job.

Next, we see Moynihan as a mob boss in a club pressing Pete Davidson and Jon Rudnitsky for money they owe him. But the sketch is not going where we expect. Turns out Dinklage is the club’s entertainment, and rather than rolling out the Sinatra crooner like a stereotypical mob boss, Dinklage is a Devo-meets-the-B-52s wannabe in a platinum blond bob cut wig, silver jacket, and parachute pants with images of the planets on them, and he’s singing a new wave song about his “Space Pants.” It’s a sketch enjoying weirdness for weirdness’ sake, and it totally worked for me. Moynihan et al try to solve their dispute while Dinklage presses for audience participation. I suspect some will hate this sketch — it seems the ultimate YMMV. But I loved Dinklage’s commitment here, and he does one hell of a robot dance. They ended by bringing out musical guest Gwen Stefani to join him in the Space Pants dance, and no knock to Stefani, but this took all the wind out of the sketch. Nothing derails transcendental strangeness like reminding the crowd they’re watching a celebrity. Stefani, in Space Shorts, brought complete conventionality to the stage, and Dinklage’s otherworldly performance art came screaming back to earth. Sometimes, the celebrity cameo’s not worth it.

Next came both an impressively bold visual sex joke and a slam at New York’s foodie culture. Bayer and Bennett are visiting friends Dinklage and Aidy Bryant in New York, and the couple have brought them to the city’s hottest new restaurant. To telegraph the “hip” factor, Dinklage and Bryant are dressed in dark colors, while the tourists wear matching peach/pinkish sweaters. The writers didn’t name the restaurant, but if we had to guess, the name is probably “The Glory Hole,” since that’s the premise. The place was a free love orgy house in the seventies, and it’s been converted to a restaurant with one of its erotic peculiarities left intact – the glory holes, which are now used to serve food through. Dinklage and Bryant are the veterans, eating meal by meal — white bread, then a much longer pumpernickel, or darker bread, ha ha — served through the hole. If you know what a glory hole is, then you can imagine the shock of Dinklage and Bryant going to town on their phallic food through the hole. If by some chance you don’t…well, whatever you do, don’t Google it at work, or on any computer children have access to.

Then, the inevitable Game of Thrones parody, with Moynihan as the fussy, not-always-professional actor playing a dragon in a motion capture suit in a behind the scenes video. It’s a great showcase for Moynihan’s brand of silliness, as the dragon, when not flapping his wings and screeching, finds Moynihan interjecting useless dialogue, wetting his mo-cap suit, and kicking open a window to exit, something a dragon would never do.

Weekend Update desk pieces included Davidson on the Hulk Hogan/Gawker verdict, noting that the $140 million award to Hogan makes him the “highest paid porn star in the world, by $139 million,” and that the concept of having to compensate him for lost earnings is ludicrous, since he’s “a senior citizen who used to oil himself up and fight immigrants in his undies.” Thompson then returned as Red Sox player David Ortiz, to talk about his favorite baseball tradition — lunch — and his favorite companies to endorse, like BeeWorld, which is “like SeaWorld, but it’s just bees.”

Other sketches included Bennett and Strong as a couple staying in a glamorous hotel where the wall of their hotel room connects to an aquarium – with dead hotel employees floating by. Strong and Killam then play a couple recalling a horrific crime on a cheap re-enactment show that couldn’t afford good actors. Bryant and McKinnon play the two large Danish men who attacked them, and they play them badly. As host Dinklage recalls, “they were a nightmare.” The final sketch found Dinklage as a corporate boss at a company party taking a magician’s routine way too seriously. Each of these were good for a few laughs. None were special. But overall, Dinklage excelled as a host, relishing his break from his dark and heavy show, and diving into comedic possibilities with full force.

[You can stream Saturday Night Live on Hulu]

Larry Getlen is the author of the book Conversations with Carlin. His greatest wish is to see Stefon enjoy a cheeseburger at John Belushi’s diner. Follow him on Twitter at @larrygetlen.