For the third week in a row, Saturday Night Live opened with a sketch featuring the brilliant Tina Fey as the less-than-brilliant Sarah Palin.
It’s getting to the point that we all wait breathlessly for Saturday night to see how they’ll lampoon the events of the week, so we’ll finally know exactly how to feel about them. It can be a difficult wait. Of all the emotions I felt watching the sketch — mostly mirth peppered with pangs of depression — the most palpable emotion was relief.
I was relieved to see the SNL sketch just like I was relieved to read the New York Times editorial waking us up to the reality of Palin’s poor performance — both gave voice to exactly what I was feeling about the debate, showing that not everyone was watching the win/win event the pundits saw.
Before that, I was frustrated by the media’s reflecting a reality that I wasn’t subscribing to, but I had no outlet for that unarticulated frustration until reading the Times editorial and then, come Saturday, watching SNL.
I bet a lot of other people were feeling the same frustration I was. But many more of those people probably saw the SNL sketch than read the Times editorial.
I think people are turning on SNL in record numbers not just because the sketches are funny, but because they fulfill an essential social role: The Fey-as-Palin phenomenon — now Palin wants to appear on SNL impersonating Tina Fey! — has me reminded just how powerful pop culture can be as our collective voice — in this case, establishing by Sunday morning the accepted narrative of the preceding week’s events; and, in general, reifying to society as a whole what each of us might be feeling and thinking.
Indeed, SNL was so powerful in shaping the narrative of media’s biased coverage of Obama during the primaries that Hillary Clinton actually started sounding like Amy Poehler’s parody.
I talked about this phenomenon already in one my Crimson columns, here, and identified it — with the help of Steven Pinker — as akin to the boy in the story of the emperor’s new clothes. When he laughs at the naked emperor, he is vocalizing the unarticulated knowledge of everyone too shocked and nervous to speak up about their leader. As Pinker writes in “The Stuff of Thought”:
Crucially, the boy was not telling a single person anything he didn’t already know. But his words still conveyed information. The information was that all the other people now knew the same thing that each one of them did.
SNL is speaking up, laughing, telling the emperor she has no clothes — and telling all of us that it’s okay to laugh along.
