A few years back something strange and unexpected happened. People started paying attention to Saturday Night Live again. After years of being ignored or casually dismissed, it became appointment television. Fate and circumstances had rendered it relevant. This curious phenomenon was attributable largely to the fortuitous cosmic accident that former headwriter/castmemeber/universal girlcrush Tina Fey looks uncannily like a former Alaskan governor/former Vice Presidential candidate with an endless assortment of tics, mannerisms and verbal gaffes that had the comedy world salivating with glee over the prospect of mocking a faux-folksy instant folk hero/national nightmare who already lustily embraced self-parody.
Inhabiting Palin’s cornball soul catapulted Fey to stardom, especially when Palin stopped by 30 Rock to show what a good sport she was for all the Joe Six-Packs and Soccer Moms, you betcha. Saturday Night Live’s heat has cooled from red-hot to its lukewarm default state since the election of President Obama but it got some of its sizzle back with the announcement that Fey would be returning to host and breaking out her Sarah Palin glasses. In a somewhat ridiculous development, it was treated as news that a popular comic performer would be spoofing a prominent politician on Saturday Night Live.
So I am pleased to report that last night’s much buzzed-about Saturday Night Live rose to the occasion. So let’s cut the foreplay and get right to the fucking: the Palin sketch. To the glee of latte-sipping Liberals everywhere, Fey slipped on her Palin glasses to announce the launch of her very own cable channel, a folksy, all-American enclave home to Lifetime-style TV movies about a young woman powerless before the sinister powers of Obama’s death panels, a cop show about an Alaska snowmobile cop in the big city starring Todd Palin, a 30 Rock parody with Stephen Baldwin and Bobby Jindall, a “gotcha” interview show where Fey’s interviews are re-edited to make the interviewees look bad and, of course, The Tonight Show With Jay Leno. It was a spoof that perfectly captured Palin’s homespun cult of personality and the them-against-us paranoia of the Far Right.
If Palin is God’s gift to comedy writers, Obama has proven vexingly difficult to lampoon. Yet the show’s cold open found a smart way to glean comedy out of a man who embodies dignity and self-respect to many Americans by having him introduce, in that soothing, reassuring voice of his, an American census that has been changed to now peer creepily through the window shades of Americans with comically invasive questions about their sexual kinks, political quirks and most shameful secrets. It was a simple joke but the juxtaposition of solemnity and ridiculousness proved inspired.
30 Rock has gone out of its way to depict Fey as a dowdy, unattractive spinster-in-the-making yet tonight featured Fey at her most glamorous. Fey may or may not have delivered the greatest opening monologue in the history of Saturday Night Live: I was too hypnotized by her cleavage to pay much attention.
Later, Fey traded in her trademark spectacles for contact lenses, put on a wig and push-up bra and played a skank hired to provide a trollop’s perspective on Tiger Woods’ return to golf. Like the spoof of Tiger Woods’ almost avant-garde latest Nike commercial, it was obvious but funny and Fey was clearly having a ball.