Althouse: A great Anthony Fauci impersonation by Brad Pitt (on "Saturday Night Live" last night).

April 26, 2020

A great Anthony Fauci impersonation by Brad Pitt (on "Saturday Night Live" last night).

Who knew Brad Pitt could do impersonations? Some good satirizing of Trump rhetoric, as "Fauci" explains what Trump is really trying to say:

39 comments:

Mid-Life Lawyer said...: I like how he says "idear." It's a shame he didn't also thank President Trump along with Dr. Fauci and the medical workers at the end.; 4/26/20, 8:03 AM
roesch/voltaire said...: The whole SNL show last night was well done starting with Pitt. They got their groove back and much of it struck me, visually, like MTV..; 4/26/20, 8:04 AM
Equipment Maintenance said...: That right there is comedy gold. I don't know what they're paying the SNL writers, but it isn't enough.; 4/26/20, 8:04 AM
Josephbleau said...: The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.; 4/26/20, 8:14 AM
WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...: If all the leftists are liking it, I'll assume it's standard air-america for late nite TV boiler plate. as usual.
Watched a few seconds. I cannot stand SNL.; 4/26/20, 8:30 AM
Roughcoat said...: Well, here's my review. Watched SNL last night for the first time in many years. It was dreadfully unfunny, all the way through. The news segment especially. Even the non-political sketches fell flat. I felt like Homer Simpson in that episode where's he watching Garrison Keilor and yelling at the TV, "Be funnier!" I'm not saying all this because I'm a right winger. I wanted it to be funny.

Miley Cyrus has a very mediocre singing voice. Looked cute, though.; 4/26/20, 8:40 AM
Kai Akker said...: 1:17 my limit. Too obvious. Did I miss the Dylan reference?; 4/26/20, 8:42 AM
PB said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 4/26/20, 8:51 AM
PB said...: H2O2 is often used as a disinfectant. I came across an article on its use in nebulizers.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/hydrogen-peroxide-a-potential-treatment-for-coronavirus-infection/ar-BB12qktc

So, Trump mentioned internal disinfectants and UV light. That would be 2 confirmations; 4/26/20, 8:52 AM
David Begley said...: Did they lampoon Nancy and her ice cream?; 4/26/20, 8:53 AM
rcocean said...: Good impersonation - bad writing. Lucky for SNL they have an audience full of deadheads that will laugh at anything as long as it attacks trump.; 4/26/20, 8:56 AM
Roughcoat said...: David Begley:

No they did not. There was not one joke making fun of the Democrats. The news segment was especially egregious in this regard. All the jokes were smugly sophomorically anti-Trump. The black guy even made fun of non-New York City white people in the hinterlands. And he laughed at his own jokes.; 4/26/20, 8:57 AM
rcocean said...: SNL has ALWAYS been left-wing. The first sketches in 1975 constantly made fun of Gerald Ford. Al Franken didn't just perform on the show, he was one of their main writers. Now they've lurched far to the left, and they're completely unfunny and untalented.

People in the 80s said the show was funnier in the 70s and they were right. People in 2000s said the show was funnier in the 90s and they were right. Sometimes, things get worse as they age, and the past was really better.; 4/26/20, 8:59 AM
rcocean said...: Remember 2004 and Dan Rather and font-gate. Remember how he stonewalled and lied about the whole thing? Remember who pompous and egotistical "Dunga-Dan" was?

Perfect satirical material. But Dave Letterman, SNL and Jon Stewart REFUSED to touch it, except to joke about it lightly and couple it with an attack on Conservatives/Bush.

That's when I knew Stewart didn't "Make fun of both sides" - as he said.; 4/26/20, 9:03 AM
Kai Akker said...: There was a new camera angle for almost every sentence just in the first minute of that "open." Highly edited -- that can't have been a live performance. Can't Brad remember more than one sentence at a time?; 4/26/20, 9:16 AM
Andrew said...: Brad Pitt is still underrated as a legitimate actor, in my opinion. I just recently watched The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford for the first time, and was blown away.; 4/26/20, 9:17 AM
Lurker21 said...: SNL has ALWAYS been left-wing. The first sketches in 1975 constantly made fun of Gerald Ford. Al Franken didn't just perform on the show, he was one of their main writers. Now they've lurched far to the left, and they're completely unfunny and untalented.

It's the "lurch" that matters. Sure, they liked the Democrats better in the '70s. They were even harder on Nixon than on Ford, but they were able to joke about both sides. They were gentler on Carter than on the others, but they did take shots at him. Nowadays they just don't bother making fun of Democrats. That reflects what happened in the country: people get a lot more of their identity from ideology than they used to.

People in the 80s said the show was funnier in the 70s and they were right. People in 2000s said the show was funnier in the 90s and they were right. Sometimes, things get worse as they age, and the past was really better.

The show was fresher and edgier in the '70s when the concept was new. I'm not sure that it was better or funnier than it was in the '80s or even the '90s. People laughed at many a bit in the early seasons just because they'd never seen anything like it before.

The show did get less funny in the new century. The cast wasn't as good. Neither were the writers, and the failure to joke about Obama hurt the show. Some of it, though, was just that the rest of the country caught up with "edgy" humor and went further with it than the show does. Something similar happened to Mad Magazine and the National Lampoon.; 4/26/20, 9:23 AM
narciso said...: there were a few episodes like the 1981 season which were scathing, Reagan just agitated them to eleven, w to 13, trump to 17,; 4/26/20, 9:33 AM
WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 4/26/20, 9:36 AM
Mr. O. Possum said...: SNL mocks Trump for saying that light can be used internally to fight the virus.

On April 20, 2020, Cedars-Sinai announced that it had licensed its virus-fighting UV-light technology, which is used internally via endoscope, to a publicly traded biotech company for further development.

Clearly, someone had mentioned that to the President. Had he only dropped the words 'Cedars-Sinai UV light technology,' people would say Trump is a genius.

As for the internal use of 'disinfectants,' this American Thinker article links to a study by a Japanese doctor on 'controlled ethanol vapor inhalation' technology to fight the virus, i.e. inhaling whisky or sake vapor.; 4/26/20, 9:37 AM
wendybar said...: BleachBit-and-Hammers said...
People want a break from politics. Comedy shows be funny - not political advertisements for The Party (D).
4/26/20, 9:36 AM

THIS^^^^

Otherwise, WHY didn't they do a Pelosi skit. You don't get any funnier than that!!; 4/26/20, 9:44 AM
Dude1394 said...: Brad Pitt is a tremendously underrated actor. SNL is a tremendously overrated democrat shill.; 4/26/20, 9:44 AM
WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...: People want a break from politics. Comedy shows should be funny - not political advertisements for The Party (D).

SNL is one giant ad for the Democrat Party. They know it and they are fine with it.; 4/26/20, 9:47 AM
Andrew said...: I'll be honest - the political skits are the only thing I have liked about SNL for decades. Even though they are predictably left-wing, I still find them entertaining. I'm a Republican, but don't mind good quality satire at my party's expense. My favorites (from when the rest of the show could still be funny) were the Reagan and Bush Sr impersonations.

I've always loved the video of Dana Carvey actually going to the White House and performing in front of GHW Bush. Funny, but good natured. (Scroll down in the article below.)

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/amp/news/watch-dana-carvey-do-george-hw-bush-impression-at-white-house-1165629; 4/26/20, 9:49 AM
WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...: Wendy-Bar - exactly.

Mocking Pelosi and Biden = low hanging fruit. Where are the hilarious SNL skits mocking any D?; 4/26/20, 9:51 AM
WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...: The last time SNL was funny mocking pols was GWB and Gore. it was balanced and it wasn't so mean-spirited.

"lock box" and "Strategery"; 4/26/20, 9:53 AM
WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...: After Hillary lost, the collective left & the corporate media industrial complex/ big entertainment all realized they need to up their game and go all in for the D-party.; 4/26/20, 9:58 AM
Wince said...: Undoubtably, here's the SIR infectious Disease model Trump was shown and was trying to describe when he said, "It's going to disappear. One day. It's a miracle. It will disappear."

POLICY IMPLICATIONS OF MODELS OF THE SPREAD OF CORONAVIRUS: PERSPECTIVES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR ECONOMISTS
Working Paper 27007 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w27007
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH, Cambridge, MA 02138
April 2020

The most common approach that has been used to model the spread of SARS-CoV-2 is the “Susceptible / Infectious / Recovered” (SIR) model. In essence, SIR models can be viewed as continuous-time Markov chain models where only a limited number of transitions between
states are possible. In its most basic form, the SIR model considers dynamics within a single homogeneous population (i.e. what physicists would call a “mean-field model”), following the form Kermack and McKendrick published seminal articles studying this model from 1927 to 1933. These articles were republished in 1991 (Kermack and McKendrick (1991a), (1991b), (1991c)). Sattenspiel (1990) provides a detailed
discussion of the history of models of the spread of infectious disease.

dS/dt = - βIS / N

dI/dt = βIS / N – γI

dR/dt = γI

where S, I, and R are the abundance (or relative abundances) of the three model states, β combines information about encounter rates and infectivity, and γ describes the combined rates of recovery and mortality from the disease. In this model, the disease will increase in incidence until βIS / N= γI (i.e. S / N = γ/β), at which point new infections can no longer keep up with the recovery rate (n.b. this point will always be reached eventually, since recovery results from a linear rate process that is directly proportional to I, whereas infection rates are non-linear and depend jointly on I and S).

Thereafter, the number of new infections will begin to drop, and the disease will die out. This threshold (often referred to as the “herd immunity” threshold) describes the minimum size of the susceptible pool required for the infection to spread through a well-mixed population. Importantly, individuals continue to become infected (especially if the infected pool is large), but on average, the number of new infections per time step will begin to decrease once the herd immunity threshold has been reached.; 4/26/20, 10:05 AM
Spiros said...: SNL is mocking Trump! The Trumpsters are especially demoralized after several idiotic press conferences. Don't worry! Because of the Coronavirus Panic, the media has hit the pause button on Joe Biden's flubs and failings (and rapes). Biden is still going to screw this up.; 4/26/20, 10:12 AM
grimson said...: I had forgotten that Fauci joked earlier that he would like Pitt to play him. It was funny and nice of Pitt to agree.; 4/26/20, 10:19 AM
Howard said...: What I want to know is does that mocking of PDJT disqualify Brad Pitt from the deplorables collective spankbank?; 4/26/20, 10:28 AM
Andrew said...: Double checked. For some reason I thought the Sheriff arrived at the town in the beginning, but he was already there. Scratch High Noon. Great leaving scene, though.

I agree with those above who named Clint Eastwood's westerns. Showing up at a new town in the beginning, then leaving it at the end without a known destination, seems to be his modus operandi.; 4/26/20, 10:32 AM
Andrew said...: Oops!Wrong post. Sorry! Stupid phone. Feel free to delete, Ann.; 4/26/20, 10:33 AM
Wince said...: Trump did get ahead of himself moving the discussion directly from surface disinfectants, but at the same time is that worse than everyone pretending to have never heard of chemotherapy, "the treatment of disease by the use of chemical substances," and the inherent toxicity trade-offs involved in their use?

Antiviral Chemotherapy
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7149393/

In broad terms, there are three classes of chemical agents used to combat [viral] infection: (1) Antiviral drugs act by suppressing or preventing viral replication in infected cells, and are sufficiently non-toxic that they can be used to treat infected patients, (2) Disinfectants are designed to destroy the infectivity of free virus particles, but are mostly toxic for the host cell and have no significant clinical effect against established infection, (3) The many antibiotics now available to fight bacteria have no activity against viruses.

Chapter 52 - Chemotherapy of Viral Infections
Medical Microbiology. 4th edition.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK8119/

Future Antiviral Drugs
The importance of virus infections and the early successes with some antiviral drugs have prompted the search for new agents. This search has been focused on compounds that are active against herpesviruses, retroviruses, and rhinoviruses (Table 52-2). These antiviral drugs of the future are expected to be useful in clinical settings in which the approved antiviral drugs are not sufficiently efficacious...

Main Targets for Antiviral Drugs
For rational drug design, the molecular targets (i.e., proteins or enzymes) should be identified first and then the drugs should be tailored on the basis of the molecular configuration and action of the target proteins. None of the antiviral drugs now available, or considered for clinical use, have been developed by rational drug design (except, to a certain extent, for the HIV protease inhibitors). Instead, their antiviral activity was found first, often by chance, and their molecular targets determined later.

Limitations of Antiviral Drugs
As mentioned above, clinical use of the currently available antiviral drugs is limited by toxic side effects. There are also some general limitations inherent in antiviral chemotherapy (Table 52-4).; 4/26/20, 11:15 AM
RMc said...: Who knew Brad Pitt could do impersonations?

He can't.; 4/26/20, 11:34 AM
madAsHell said...: The SNL skit wasn't funny.

I noticed the video skip between camera angles as well. I thought that might be part of the joke, but it was lost on me.; 4/26/20, 2:03 PM
Lyle Smith said...: Not really funny.; 4/26/20, 2:57 PM
chickelit said...: Real televised humor has been locked away in quarantine. Will it ever come back?; 4/26/20, 6:01 PM
Seamus said...: SNL is a comedy show, right? I kept waiting for the funny part to begin.; 4/26/20, 8:56 PM