Yes, Eddie Murphy came back to "Saturday Night Live" and reprised his old characters — Mr. Robinson, Buckwheat, Gumby, Velvet Jones — but...

... here's what I think is the most important segment from last night's episode, this part of "Weekend Update," where I think you can see that the show knows that Trump himself is doing better comedy than they are and chooses to edit in clips of Trump's hilarious routine:



Yes, they've surrounded his material with their material, but their material isn't as funny. It mainly functions as packaging to protect Trump-haters from their own reflexive aversion to the toxic President. Now, they can enjoy his comedy. They have access to the bad orange man.

Speaking of color, that Eddie Murphy material was full of racist stereotypes — Mr. Robinson, the criminal; Buckwheat, whose one joke is that he cannot articulate words; Gumby, the angry one; Velvet Jones, the pimp — and yet because these were reprisals of supposedly beloved characters by the show's biggest star from the distant past, they were apparently considered okay to present today. This too is packaging. Take something funny that you can't do, do it anyway, but swathe it inside of something that seems to say that this isn't really what it is.

The cold open was the Democratic Debate, and there was no room for Eddie Murphy in that. Well, they could have had him as Deval Patrick barging into the debate, because they had Fred Armisen as Michael Bloomberg barging into the debate, but what would the joke be? With Bloomberg, they could billionaire-bash. He bought his way in. Obviously, that's not too funny either. So what did they do? They had Trump (Alec Baldwin) crash the debate. The SNL audience wants Trump... wants Trump because they want to hate him some more? Or is this love, packaged as hate? Let me start you 7 1/2 minutes in as Trump swaggers onto the debate stage and trash talks: "You think I'm nervous? What are they going to do, impeach me? Hey, losers! Impeach me outside. Okay? How about that?"



By the way, the Velvet Jones material was full of sexist material. To Jones, all women are whores. One of his many books is about pole dancing. Incredibly, that segment ran right before the music guest, Lizzo, performed a song with dancers who were pole dancing.



I think Lizzo is trying to present a character who's a very independent woman, but Velvet Jones had just been sleazily advising women to find independence through prostitution. Doesn't Lizzo have people to protect her from that sort of extremely disadvantageous framing? Talk about packaging. She got mispackaged by Murphy.