What Are We Laughing At?

I Can See Russia From My House!

I saw Tina Fey do her impression of Sarah Palin on SNL the other night. (I actually caught it on YouTube. It's a cliche nowadays to say, "I haven't watched Saturday Night Live in years," so I won't say it.) The impression has become as popular as the candidate, with some wandering if Fey can come back and be Palin on SNL while continuing to write and star in her own TV show, “30 Rock”.

I have to say that Tina Fey is really funny, and the sketch is great. It’s probably the best thing anybody on SNL has done in quite a while, probably since Will Ferrill’s Bush impression.

My problem is that the best impressions are the ones who generally win elections. Think about it. Dana Carvey’s George Bush probably helped the real Bush win his term in the Oval Office. You might be able to say the same thing for Phil Hartmann as Bubba Clinton. Then there is Ferrill as Dubya, and now we have Fey as Palin.

I won’t say that the best impressions help the candidates. Dan Ackroyd did an awesome job as Bob Dole in the fake Republican debate back in ’88 which is the last decent thing he has done. Ackroyd is so good, he makes Carvey’s Bush look like a wimp (much as Dole made Bush look like a wimp in real life), but Dole couldn’t get the nomination that year, and he lost to Bill Clinton four years later. Ackroyd never repeated his impression on SNL again, and the role fell to Norm MacDonald, who pretty much imitated Ackroyd imitating Dole. MacDonald’s impression was nowhere near as good as Phil Hartmann as Bubba. Hartmann was so sleazy, so repellant, it was awesome. The one I remember most clearly was Clinton at Mickey D’s stealing food off people’s plates.

Then there is Ferrill as Dubya. I forget who took over when Ferrill left the show, but he is nowhere near as good. Ferrill specializes in stupid people, so he and Dubya are a perfect match. But did you ever stop to think that maybe Ferrill’s Dubya made the real Dubya possible?

It’s like all of those Ronald Reagan impressions people did in the eighties. It kind of made the guy more charming than he already was. The impressions give a gloss of humor to these people that their actions alone would not merit. We don’t take them seriously, so it’s easy to discount the actual effect of their decisions on our lives.

People have been writing Bush off as a joke for eight years, and look where not taking him seriously has gotten us. Bush may be a smirking buffoon, but he has won every fight in his term of office. The Constitution has been gutted, the Economy has been looted, the infrastructure has been wrecked, and he’s to blame for all of it. But we still laugh. If an idiot has you arrested while stealing your wallet and having you evicted from your home, you can’t really compliment yourself on how much smarter you are. Dubya might not score much higher on an IQ test than Forrest Gump, but he is a member of one of the most powerful families in the U.S. While we have been busy laughing at Ferrill as Dubya (even the nickname makes him more approachable, more friendly seeming) George Bush has been destroying this country.

So now I worry that because SNL has us laughing at Sarah Palin, that might make it less scary to actually vote for her. Laughing at things has a way of shrinking them down to size. It’s part of how we deal with our problems, but is there really anything about George W. Bush and Sarah Palin that we should be laughing about?

How is it funny that we are almost twenty trillion dollars in debt? Is it funny that our economy is collapsing like a cheap tent? Is it funny that three thousand people in Louisiana drowned? Isn't it hilarious that we're paying four dollars a gallon for gas? You could die laughing when you think that more American soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan than died in nine years at Viet Nam (I'm quoting from an article in Atlantic Monthly here). It's a real rib tickler when our bridges collapse and our road ways just fall apart from under us. While we have been laughing, this country has regressed to where it's almost a fuedal state.

Maybe the real question we should be wondering about is not whether Tina Fey can find the time in her busy schedule to impersonate Sarah Palin again. Maybe the real question we need to ask is how long can we afford to be laughing this hard?