"You know where we are? We're in Chongqing, China! Look at this! We're literally in the sky. Look at this!"

"It's so high! It's so high! It's like we're walking in the sky!... And look at the way they plan their cities. Vintage style!... Density! And the density is pretty high...."

"The Bidens are still living in an alternative universe that revolves only around them. Their irresponsibility, family ego and selfishness..."

"... put the Democratic Party in this position in the first place.… The Biden family — and the disconnected reality that they and their ineffective little circle live in — is responsible for the Trump sequel and the wilderness the Democratic Party finds itself in today.... These people drank so much of their own Kool-Aid... that they believed — and still seemingly believe — that an 82-year-old man with a 38% approval rating on a good day, who can’t sit down for a simple traditional 10-minute pre-Super Bowl interview, was the answer for Democrats in 2024 and now this same group thinks the Bidens are the answer for Democrats now? The fact that they continue to surround themselves with the same cast of clowns who delivered them nothing but the most devastating humiliation in modern political history — a president’s own power taken away by his own party — is all you need to know about them. They’ve learned nothing and they are the absolutely last and worst remedy for what ails the party in 2025 and 2026."

Said "a onetime senior White House adviser, quoted in "Biden aides, more Democrats pile on ex-prez’s offer to boost party fundraising after 2024 disaster...." (NY Post).

Did the Bidens "put the Democratic Party in this position" or did the Democratic Party put the Bidens in the place where they found themselves? What happened "in the first place"? The Democratic Party has itself to blame for forcing Biden on the country in 2020 and for everything that happened down the line.

ADDED: Dana Carvey captured the essence (on last night's new episode of "Real Time"):

"You’re not actually finished until you do read poetry on the weekends for fun."

Someone says in response to someone who said "I vividly remember discovering Dylan’s whole catalogue in college and consequently falling entirely out of touch with everything else music-related for a solid year, I also grew my curls out and you best believe I was wearing scarves and dressing like someone who liked to read poetry on weekends for fun."

All of that was in an r/bobdylan discussion of this new clip of Timothée Chalamet, getting (too far?) into his impersonation of Bob Dylan:

Welcome to the Church of Bob, Timmy. 🙏🏻🎶❤️
pic.twitter.com/g7N7S9DfBk

— Melanie Young 🔧 (@FreewheelinMY) December 18, 2024

What poetry does Bob read?

"Did you just do the weave?"/"It's my own version of the weave, I call it the wander."

"Saturday Night Live" did a good job with the election results.

It goes a little long, but stick with it, because one person is much funnier than everyone else...

... and he's not a current cast member.

They did not repeat the inanity of their response to the 2016 election — the sorrowful "Hallelujah" performance by the Hillary impersonator. And I think they realize that as a comedy show, they are better off having Trump as their raw material rather than the dreary, awful Democratic Party.

The basic comedy idea used in the "SNL" cold open last night is very similar to what the brilliant comedian Tim Dillon used in his new podcast, released earlier in the day: Trump detractors are terrified that now Trump will come after them. 

"Saturday Night Live" cold opens with lots of political impersonations — including Dana Carvey as Joe Biden.

Scroll ahead if you must — to 10:23 — but don't miss Dana Carvey:

 Also — beginning at 2:22 — Jim Gaffigan as Tim Walz.

Maya Rudolph does Kamala Harris well, but the show's urgent need for us to love Kamala makes it too hard to like what Rudolph is able to do. The show presumes we agree politically and will simple-mindedly experience fun as "Kamala" has "fun" (and that's how Harris's campaign feels to me). I resist feeling the candidate's emotions as enacted on the political stage. And, for political satire, I want to laugh at her. Speak to me as someone on the outside. Don't treat me like a willing guest at her party. 

Sample line, spoken by the Trump impersonator: "We had this in the bag, but then they did a switcheroo and they swapped out Biden with Kamala. And now everything is chaos. They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats. They're taking your pets, and they're doing freak offs. They're doing freak offs with the dogs, and they're making the geese watch. It's very sad. It's very sad. They're doing a Diddy."

ADDED: Mixing the P. Diddy story with the Haitians-in-Ohio story: Is that racist? It would be considered racist if Trump did it. It's in the black-people-remind-me-of-black-people mode. But in the sketch they have the Trump character combining the 2 topics, so if it's racist, it looks as though the racist is Trump. Clever? That's how you (try to) get away with it.

ALSO: For clarification, I substantially rewrote first 2 sentences of the paragraph that begins "Maya Rudolph does Kamala Harris well...."

"It’s the stuff of #Resistance dreams: Kamala Harris, the prosecutor, gets onstage in Philadelphia next Tuesday across from Donald Trump, the felon, and proceeds to brutally expose him..."

"... as a racist and sexist con man who’s been lying to the American people ever since his famous escalator ride nine years ago. Only that’s not how she or her debate-prep team sees her main objective for the debate — at all. In mock-debate sessions in Pittsburgh, planning meetings in Washington, and briefing-book cram sessions between public events on the campaign trail, the vice-president and her aides have kept much of their focus on fine-tuning ways to keep presenting her as representative of a new political era for the benefit of curious voters who are still interested in learning more about her — and who may swing the race come November... 'She’s not known in the way Donald Trump is,' says one senior Democrat who used to work for Joe Biden and is now close to the Harris campaign’s leaders. 'It’s an opportunity to define herself....'"

Writes Gabriel Debenedetti, in "Why Kamala Isn’t Preparing to Knock Out Trump at the Debate/To her campaign, something else is more important" (NY Magazine).

Trump impersonates Elon Musk.

NEW: Donald Trump does an impersonation of Elon Musk, imitates Elon talking about one of his Space X rockets.

Lmao.

"With Elon, it's like, 'well, you know, I'm doing a new stainless steel hub that can get us around the engines much quicker.'"

"'Because there's a problem with… pic.twitter.com/7eOIrgAyWG

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) August 31, 2024

Trump's analysis of Musk's speech pattern: "I'm hearing everything that's going through his mind."

"You're going to be so blessed, you're gonna be tired of being blessed."

NOT FUNNY!!!😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/ha3EeFosAj

— il Donaldo Trumpo (@PapiTrumpo) July 16, 2024

Trump is now on TikTok.

Here's his first post... followed by some Trump-related TikToks you might appreciate:

How to get started working on your female impersonations.

Some are easier than others. We all think we can do Kamala, and we all actually can do Cher.

"George Carlin’s estate is suing the creators of an online comedy special that claimed to imitate the late comedian’s voice and sense of humor using artificial intelligence."

"'George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead,' an hour-long video supposedly written, voiced and illustrated by an AI model trained on decades of Carlin’s comedy routines, constituted copyright infringement, according to the lawsuit filed this week in the Central District of California."

WaPo reports.

George Carlin's daughter Kelly said: "The ‘George Carlin’ in that video is not the beautiful human who defined his generation and raised me with love. It is a poorly-executed facsimile cobbled together by unscrupulous individuals to capitalize on the extraordinary goodwill my father established with his adoring fan base."

How is it different from a live human being who does a George Carlin impersonation? We've accepted impersonators for a long time. They "capitalize on the extraordinary goodwill" of beloved performers. Is it that impersonators need to work hard and we respect human labor? Or is it that they are human and we can imagine being an impersonator but we can't imagine being A.I.?

Here's the discussion at the George Carlin subreddit: "In case you needed more proof that AI is fucking monstrous garbage."

The James Austin Johnson impersonation of Donald Trump is so good they must be worried it will...

... transcend the defenses of the "SNL" audience and cause them to bond with the man they think they need to hate.

"At one point in his show, he said the real divide in the country was not between rich and poor, Democratic or Republican, but between 'the insane' and 'the insufferable.'"

"The insane include the people who stormed the capitol. He calls them nuts, before adding: 'but fun.' Then he grew more animated describing the insufferable by their 'NPR tote-bag energy' and 'hall monitor' tendencies.... Minhaj... repositions him[self] less as a righteous political comic than a more self-questioning, personal comic, a move he had already begun to make; this scandal may have accelerated the shift...."

Writes Jason Zinoman, in "Was a Scandal the Best Thing to Happen to Hasan Minhaj? At the Beacon, the comic took a different tack after posting a video rebutting a New Yorker article on fabrications in his work. The crowd went wild" (NYT).

Zinoman likes that Minaj isn't "playing the victim," like "seemingly everyone" these days, including Elon Musk and Taylor Swift. And Zinoman, in a sidetrack, praises the filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli, and gives a tip about a new movie I might want to see:

On "SNL," Trump makes an appearance at the Republican debate.

Good impressions. Who was that "eggo" Trump kept talking about, the cast-member playing Vivek Ramaswamy? That was Ego Nwodim (a woman).

I thought that was a very well-written cold open. The Trump impersonator, James Austin Johnson, is so good they must worry he's going to cause the audience to kind of love Trump. We haven't faced such a risk since Charlie Chaplin impersonated Hitler.

Here's an article about Johnson, from last summer, in the Chicago Sun-Times. Johnson is opposed to Trump's political positions, but realized that, to do a successful impersonation, he needed to like something about Trump:

David Bowie through the ages.

A brilliant impersonation, after the jump, because it's TikTok:

"Satirizing the attention-seeking culture wrought by social media is almost as difficult as impersonating Donald Trump..."

"... the source material is already so cartoonish and despicable that most attempts to mock it seem obvious to the point of being dull. Perhaps no screenwriter could have imagined a character as controversial as Jameela Jamil, the British actress who’s been vocal about her various afflictions, which have included shellfish allergies, celiac disease, mercury poisoning, partial deafness, and a history of run-ins with bees. And perhaps no performance artist could have staged a hoax as elaborate and culturally radioactive as Jussie Smollett’s...."

Writes Carrie Battan, in "Desperate to Be Micro-Famous/The satirical film 'Sick of Myself; shows the warping effects of social media by way of a character who gives herself a hideous rash" (The New Yorker).

Speaking of social media and the difficulty impersonating Donald Trump (because he's already so funny in the original version), here's a woman on TikTok who — like Sarah Cooper to Donald Trump — lip-syncs to the voice of Joe Biden:

The 3-year-old boy who won World Book Day.

Today is World Book day and this cute little boy dressed up has Prince Harry. He must be a fan, he also has great taste. Have a great day little Ellis. 🤗 pic.twitter.com/sF4JQUFOsL

— The Duchess (@h_desires) March 2, 2023

Here are 7 TikToks I've chosen to launch you into the long weekend. Let me know what you like best

 1. Alice in Wonderland and autism acceptance.

2. The crocheted pregnant doll.

3. Interior design for the solo woman.

4. Abbey (from "Love on the Spectrum") felt the allure of the SpaghettiOs can, but the actual SpaghettiOs are a different matter.

5. Now, what to wear to the beach?

6. Do celebrities like it when you impersonate them while standing right beside them?

7. Don't watch this one unless you have breasts and they are bothering you. Note: It's an ad! Some people love it. I'm seeing commenters who say it's the best ad they've ever seen.

"Jamie Foxx Is Secretly a World-Class Trump Impersonator."

 NY Magazine declares.

I disagree. It's not secret. Here's the evidence:

Tmw. Fake News! #RapRadarPodcast @iamjamiefoxx + @SnoopDogg 🔊🔊 @strongblacklead @netflix @dayshiftmovie pic.twitter.com/GaV0ZZDJEX

— Elliott Wilson (@ElliottWilson) August 24, 2022