The "SNL" cold open mixes coronavirus with the Democratic candidates.

I recommend starting at 2:00, when the "Democratic candidates" begin to appear, with Fred Armisen as Michael Bloomberg and, tormenting him, Kate McKinnon as Elizabeth Warren:



If you have low patience for "SNL" just watch this clip, with Bernie Sanders/Larry David advising you about washing your hands:



"I might get in trouble for saying this, but you know who was great at washing his hands? Joseph Stalin. Just sayin'."

ADDED: Too bad the cue — "Use Purell" — that brings in Larry — with his "No! No! No!" — is botched by McKinnon's mispronunciation of "Purell."

"Suggestive of the sky at dusk, the reassuring qualities of the thought-provoking PANTONE 19-4052 Classic Blue highlight our desire for a dependable and stable foundation on which to build as we cross the threshold into a new era."

"Imprinted in our psyches as a restful color, PANTONE 19-4052 Classic Blue brings a sense of peace and tranquility to the human spirit, offering refuge. Aiding concentration and bringing laser like clarity, PANTONE 19-4052 Classic Blue re-centers our thoughts. A reflective blue tone, Classic Blue fosters resilience. As technology continues to race ahead of the human ability to process it all, it is easy to understand why we gravitate to colors that are honest and offer the promise of protection. Non-aggressive and easily relatable, the trusted PANTONE 19-4052 Classic Blue lends itself to relaxed interaction. Associated with the return of another day, this universal favorite is comfortably embraced."

Pantone's explanation of its "Color of the Year" for 2020.

Everything's so political nowadays that I can't help reading that as an anti-Trump message. Quite aside from blue's having become the color of the Democratic party, "relatable" seems like a word only Democrats use.

What am I thinking of? Was it all only about Hillary Clinton? See the NYT column from 2015, "Hillary’s Eternal Quest for Relatability." Excerpt:

The thing with “relatable” is that it has become an inside joke, or even a not-so-inside joke. The word was set in lights by “Saturday Night Live” a couple of weeks ago with a sendup in which the former first lady — played by Kate McKinnon.... “Tonight I am speaking to you not as secretary of state, or as a senator or as a first lady,” McKinnon said, “but as a relatable woman on a couch.”...

Late in the “S.N.L.” skit, McKinnon’s Clinton... cackled and added, for good measure, “what a relatable laugh!”... You can imagine Clinton seeing this and wondering whether she is in danger of being buried by a cartoon...

Anyway, I like the idea that a color can help us with "the promise of protection." And a promise — the feeling of a promise — can help us. Colors help us! Pantone is simply telling us what sort of help from colors most of us will be looking for this year. And, if Pantone is right, we don't want excitement. We want calm and reassurance.

I think Trump knows that. He famously tweeted "All is well" just as the more nervous among us were steeling themselves for World War III and the return of the military draft.

But the color most associated with Trump is orange. Orange man bad! And we know that orange is the complete opposite of blue.

"Your insurance is like a bad boyfriend."

Elizabeth Warren (played by Kate McKinnon) is questioned by a pretty young woman (played by new SNL cast-member Chloe Fineman):

SNL's one comic idea about Elizabeth Warren — "jacked up and ready to pop off" — is that she finds nerdiness sexually exciting.

If you want to watch her writhe, gyrate, and mime copulation at the mention of any wonky concept, feast your eyes:

SNL spoofs the CNN Equality Town Hall — with Kate McKinnon excellent as Elizabeth Warren and Lin-Manuel Miranda pretty good as Julian Castro.

There's also Woody Harrelson as Joe Biden:



I'm glad to see SNL making fun of the Democrats, but it's obviously much gentler fun than what they've been doing with Trump for years. I'd say just be really funny. Gentle or cruel, I don't really care. Just do it well. That is: funny.

"What would it take for President Trump to lose your support?"

"This is 'The View.' We are 5 best friends with nothing in common."

Says "Whoopi Goldberg"/Leslie Jones in an "SNL" spoof of "The View." The impersonations are pretty good, especially Jones and Kate McKinnon as Joy Behar. They're talking about the border crisis:



I also enjoyed Aidy Bryant as Meghan McCain: “Can I just say something? As the princess of Arizona, there is a crisis at the border, and the border is right up in my Arizona, which was founded on sunburned women selling turquoise jewelry, not rando Mexicans. And that’s not racist, because my makeup artist is gay."

Here's the actual "View" incident that "SNL" is spoofing (I'd skip you to 2:30 to get to the good part but then you'd miss how long McCain talked before Behar got her chance):



Side note: Ana Navarro isn't in the real view clip, but she's in the "SNL" skit, where her annoyingness is well depicted.

"Saturday Night Live" does a fantastic cold open with Matt Damon as Brett Kavanaugh.

I've watched this and I still have not read what anyone is saying about it, so let me sketch out a few thoughts before I read what people are saying.

1. Matt Damon was great. For a moment there, I thought he was channeling Chris Farley, with the idea of raging and amping up the rage, but that association left my mind as Damon continued and used a lot of the details observed in the hearing: turning the pages angrily, drinking water, sniffling.

2. Yesterday, I was predicting that "SNL" would do a Kavanaugh cold open, and I pictured lines like "I like beer, do you like beer," and I got them.

3. The character of the prosecutor Rachel Mitchell was very well observed, conveying apt criticisms that I myself have about how she was used. The SNL castmember, Aidy Bryant, did a nice job of playing the bland professional who found herself in a place where she didn't belong, asked to do something she wouldn't be permitted even to begin to do.

4. The Lindsey Graham part was a complete disaster. Kate McKinnon will get credit for suppressing any vanity and dressing as a man, but there were 2 things wrong. First, Graham was the loudest, angriest person in the room last Thursday, so McKinnon needed to top Matt Damon, and Damon set a high baseline. McKinnon has a less powerful voice than Damon, unsurprisingly, so the loudness may have been physically impossible, but she also couldn't begin to match him in conveying intense anger. Second, the writers gave her a script premised on the idea that Graham is a gay man. Some of the lines were like lines in a dating ad, saying he's 5'11" and "uncut," and the part ended with "This right now, this is my audition for Mr. Trump's cabinet and also for a regional production of 'The Crucible,' and let me tell you, queen, I was good." Queen???!!! Did I mishear that? I replayed it 10 times, and we turned on the closed captioning, which simply omitted the word (after pausing, so apparently the closed captioner didn't know what to do).

"SNL" awkwardly needles the audience about the reality that Robert Mueller is not going to get Trump out of office.

There are many long silent pauses in last night's cold open (possibly because people were not up to speed on what happened recently on the reality show "The Bachelor"):



I've read enough about "The Bachelor" to get what they were parodying. The man who'd chosen a particular woman to marry later dropped in to give her the news that he wasn't going to marry her after all. She's surprised and crushed or something.

In last night's parody, a woman who'd been hoping that Mueller was going to get rid of Trump is dropped in on by Mueller who — in the style of The Bachelor — breaks the news that he's not going to be able to get Trump and we're going to need to find a way to accept and go forward with the reality that Trump is President.

Maybe you'll find it funny precisely because of the many long silent pauses that speak of the audience not finding it funny at all. The cast members — Kate McKinnon (as Mueller) and Cecily Strong (as the woman who can't believe this is happening to her) — are fully aware that they are — as actors say  — dying out there, and it's interesting to watch them soldiering on with the material to which they must remain committed until they finally get to the part when they can break character and shout "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night" and unleash the blaring saxophone music and the cornball announcer spewing as many unfamiliar names as a Mueller indictment.

A great cold open on "SNL" last night.

I particularly love Fred Armisen as Michael Wolff. It's also wonderful to see Bill Murray as Steve Bannon, and I'm told the Mika and Joe stuff is spot on. I find Kate McKinnon very funny here, but I don't know "Morning Joe" enough to see how closely she's tracking Mika Brzezinski, but Meade tells me it's a great impersonation:



I'm told I should watch some YouTubes of "Morning Joe" so I can understand the Mika and Joe dynamic, but trying to extrapolate from this imitation, it seems that the man (Joe) is inflated with self-importance and the woman (Mika) serves the role of continually deflating him in this weird combination of disrespecting him and being sexually attracted to him. Did I get that right? I don't know, but I laughed a lot and am prompted to believe I would laugh even more if I understood the target that is Mika Brzezinski.

What really cracked me up was Fred Armisen, whom I couldn't recognize for a good while because of the bald head but also because he assumed the ridiculous, infuriating demeanor of Michael Wolff so perfectly.

I laughed even more at the "My Drunk Boyfriend" sketch, which was about full-size robot dolls that are actually like your drunk boyfriend. The physical comedy is really excellent:

"Saturday Night Live" had a sketch designed to address the Harvey Weinstein story that was so obviously avoided the week before:

Here:



That's Leslie Jones as Viola Davis, Cecily Strong as Marion Cotillard, and Kate McKinnon as the fictional character Debette Goldry.

It's too late and I'd also say: too little.

They lined up some chairs, plunked female cast members and had them say there's a lot of sexual harassment in Hollywood and Harvey Weinstein is ugly.

Harvey Weinstein's ugliness was joked about in terms of how he looks, not what he has done and is accused of doing, which really is ugly.

The cheap joke, which could be used against any man, was that he was hanging upside down naked and he looked pretty much the same as if he were not upside down. A man's face is as ugly as genitalia. Notice all the problems:

1. Judging people by the way they look.

2. The baseline assumption that male genitalia is ugly (which undercuts the complaint about sexual harassment by trading on the notion that the male body is inherently repulsive and nothing a woman would want).

3. The lack of anything specific about Harvey Weinstein. (He is said to have done many things, but I don't think hanging upside down naked is one of them).

4. If the idea is that Harvey Weinstein is ugly, so no one would want to have sex with him, that actually sounds like a form of humiliation that has often been directed at women. It's like the terrible old rape jokes that responds to a rape accusation by talking about how unattractive the woman is, so who would rape her? (And some of that "Debette Goldry" material was supposed to be funny because she's physically unattractive — she's old (get it??) — and yet even she had experienced sexual harassment.)

Later in Saturday's show, in the "Weekend Update" section, there were a few Weinstein jokes and again the idea of his physical ugliness dominated. As the NYT described it:

Michael Che, the other co-anchor of “Weekend Update,” noted that the Weinstein scandal put comedians in a “tough spot” because it was hard to make jokes about sexual assault. Then, with a photo of Mr. Weinstein on the screen, Mr. Che added:

“But it’s so easy to make jokes about a guy that looks like this. I mean, he looks like chewed bubble gum rolled in cat hair.”

It's hard to make jokes that are actually on the subject of what Weinstein did wrong, so let's make jokes that could be made against him if he were a great guy. I wish Che had entered into the realm of self-deprecation and said something more like:

We know we have to make some jokes about Harvey Weinstein. We know because we got scorched in social media last week for weaseling out of it. Lorne Michaels said "It's a New York thing." What's a New York thing? Running away from humor that too hard to do? So we are scampering this week. The weasels are scampering, trying to come up with something we can say to make you laugh about sexual harassment, and I've got to admit, 99.9% of the ideas we came up with boiled down to the fact that Harvey Weinstein is ugly. We were coming up with material like "he looks like chewed bubble gum rolled in cat hair." It's like we were liberated to do jokes about physical ugliness because a guy who did horrible things is, fortunately, ugly. It was funny because half the people pitching the jokes to Lorne were also physically ugly. Maybe they knew so many jokes because they've been hearing them all their lives. Probably a lot you out there, staying home watching TV on Saturday night, are ugly too. And just saying that, I feel ugly... on the inside.

Not even one "Weekend Update" joke about Harvey Weinstein on last night's "SNL."

The Daily Mail observes, in "'Where's Harvey Weinstein?' SNL stays SILENT on sexual abuse allegations against movie mogul much to the anger of social media who accuse the show of liberal hypocrisy."

ADDED: After writing this post, I watched about half of last night's "SNL" (which I had on the DVR). Not only was there nothing about Harvey Weinstein, but it was full of sexism. Nearly everything involving women was about women's bodies. Despite all the female performers on the show (including the guest host "Wonder Woman" Gal Gadot). roles for women were all Women as Sex Object, including Gal Gadot — wearing a black bra under a tight white tank top — doing a sexy dancing move involving holding lemons in front of her breasts and Kate McKinnon as a highly sexualized Ruth Bader Ginsburg repeatedly dancing in glee at insults about things like penis size. Women are only funny as sex objects — that seems to be the "SNL" theory. Here, check it out:



By the way, the "horny granny" character was a longtime meme in Playboy as a cartoon character drawn by Buck Brown:

More Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer on "SNL" — nicely done.

I like the way the second go-round with this was good and not just overmilking something that was successful the first time. I also like this thing of the female cast members impersonating men. Not to take anything away from the male cast members who have impersonated females over the years — not that I can think of any (other than Dan Aykroyd doing Julia Child) — but it takes something special for a woman who's worked hard to get perceived as physically attractive to put on a balding-man wig and show her face without the "smoky eye" getup.

Not only did Melissa McCarthy play Sean Spicer, but — in the same clip above — Kate McKinnon plays Jeff Sessions. And later in the show Leslie Jones makes her bid to play Donald Trump:



AND: For those of you who are about to tell me "SNL" only goes after conservatives, it's not true. Look at this sketch, which went on early in last night's show:



I have a few different theories about this: 1. They realize comedy is better when nothing is sacred and you go after everybody, 2. They know "Portlandia" is better than "SNL" and they're trying to get some of that style of humor, 3. They really do just want to go after conservatives but they know it won't work if they only go after conservatives, so sometimes they bank an anti-liberal sketch to improve their credibility.

They should make a movie about Kellyanne Conway.

It's obvious who should play the role.

ADDED: The "SNL" impersonation of Kellyanne Conway (by Kate McKinnon) does not get at what makes Conway an interesting character. There's too much hate, too much disrespect, and maybe just not enough acting ability (or time on that show to develop anything deep). I think Reese Witherspoon not only looks like Conway — especially in the photo at the top link — but she has the acting ability to bring out all kinds of interesting detail in the character of an ambitious, high-energy woman, as we saw in the great political film, "Election."

The first "Saturday Night Live" after the election — I was expecting something great... what a disappointment!

"Alec Baldwin will have to be on," I said, eagerly awaiting the opening sketch and wanting to see what the show would do with the kick-in-the-head Trump victory.

The show opened with Kate McKinnon's Hillary Clinton playing somber chords on the piano...

... I recognize the chords — there's no secret — it's "Hallelujah." They're combining the election story with the story of the death of Leonard Cohen. How's that going to work?

"Oh, she's doing this in earnest," Meade says, and he turns out to be right. Kate McKinnon sang the song in a somber tone, an earnest expression of sadness about the election (and perhaps also about the death of Leonard Cohen). No Alec-Baldwin-as-Donald-Trump ever bursts in. She completes the song, then turns to us and says, earnestly, her eyes glistening with tears, "I'm not giving up and neither should you."

The rest of the show was under-written and flat. I'm sure they knew that, since in one segment, they resorted to the gimmick of going meta, stopping a sketch mid-scene and switching to the actors analyzing what went wrong with the sketch, and the meta part was also under-written and flat.

The host was Dave Chappelle, who was making a big comeback. His opening monologue seemed be the result of a decision to just let him go on however he wanted for as long as he wanted. Many of his lines were garbled, and nearly all of it was some sort of racial analysis of what just happened in the election, with the main idea being that black people have always known that white people are racist. The most memorable joke was that he's staying in a Trump hotel and he likes it because: "Housekeeper comes in in the morning and cleans my room and I'm just 'Hey, good morning, housekeeper!' grab a handful of pussy, say, you know, 'Boss said it was okay.'"

There were some humiliating, cringe-inducing sketches. 2 were based on pathetic couples getting sex — "Last Call with Dave Chappelle" and "Love and Leslie" — and one was about a grown man (Chappelle) breastfeeding on his mother (Leslie Jones). There was a long, unfunny impersonation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. There was a passable sketch about young white people watching the election returns with their black friend, played by Chappelle, who, I'm thinking, the show's decisionmakers deemed insufficiently energetically funny, since midway through the sketch, Chris Rock shows up to play the role of the white people's other black friend. There was an elaborately produced "Walking Dead" segment that gave Chappelle a chance to bring back a lot of characters that some people may remember from his old TV show. I don't know "Walking Dead" and I didn't watch much of the old Chappelle TV show, so I found this segment very hard to watch. It was one black man forcing a group of black men down on their knees and threatening them with violence. When the violence finally comes — at 3:23 — it gets surreal, and you might enjoy this part if you can endure the n-word and decapitation.

The severed head does some comical things. At 4:10 it talks about the nation "beginning to heal, through laughing again": "Because even though our country feels irrevocably severed like a man from his head, let my example prove that we should continue to move forward." The head asks us "to see ourselves in one another," and the special effects put this talking head in various places, including on the body of Donald Trump ("I am every man") and Hillary Clinton ("I am every woman").

The severed head was the best thing on the show. But then, I like optimism and surrealism. Mostly, I think the show just couldn't get it together to digest the news enough to make it into comedy. It was a real test of comic skill, nerve, and endurance, and they didn't have what it took. I guess it would have been easy to celebrate a Hillary victory, to gloat and mock, but they got their comeuppance, and it showed.