CHRISTIAN TOTO: ‘SNL’ Audience Cheers Trump Assassination Joke.
Once upon a time, we frowned upon wishing death on a sitting president.
Kathy Griffin’s career collapsed in 2017 after she shared an image of her holding President Donald Trump’s bloody head aloft, ISIS style.
That same year, actor Johnny Depp apologized after suggesting it’s time for another actor to kill a president, a Lincoln-Trump gag that landed badly.
That was then. Now?
Griffin wears that bloody image like a badge of honor. And “Saturday Night Live” not only joked about Trump’s possible death last night, but the show’s far-Left audience celebrated the crack.
This isn’t shocking. It’s the new, ghoulish normal.
Weekend Update co-anchor Michael Che noted that President Trump attended a showing of the Broadway musical “Chicago” this week.
“What’s the worst that could happen?” Che said, alluding to actor John Wilkes Booth’s infamous act.
Wild, sustained applause and cheers ensued. Not laughs, mind you. Cheers. Co-host Colin Jost couldn’t have smiled any wider at the crowd’s reaction to the Trump assassination joke.
That this joke aired also shows how badly NBC’s Standards and Practices Department have slipped. In their 1986 book Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad wrote that about the time of the show’s second or third season writers Al Franken (yes, the same) and Tom Davis attempted to write an assassination sketch, only to be rejected by one of NBC’s censors:
A similar idea F&D had that never made it on the air was a David Susskind talk show featuring four guests who wanted to assassinate Ted Kennedy. Dan Aykroyd was to play a twisted character who lived over a muffler shop. “He’ll know me when he sees me,” was one of his lines. Garrett Morris was a man who had been dishonorably discharged from the Army and wanted to kill not only Kennedy but also the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gilda Radner had seen Kennedy on TV and thought he was the Devil. F&D were invited to Herminio Traviesas’s office to discuss the sketch.
“I don’t believe you guys wrote this,” Travie told them. “Usually when I see the things you write they’re at least funny, but I don’t see what’s funny about this.”
F&D thought the piece was hilarious and explained its point: “It’s about how much insanity there is, about how stupid and out of control it all is.”
At length Travie began to concede the humor, but he still refused to let it on. “Suppose we air it and Kennedy gets shot next week?” he said. “If anything could ever get NBC closed down, that would be it. And this might increase the chance of that happening.”
It was F&D’s turn to concede the point, and they left the office.
As Toto concludes, today’s SNL audiences “are cheering on death, assassination dreams and arson. Hope Lorne Michaels and co. are proud of what they helped build.”
And I hope NBC’s censors are proud of the material they’re signing off on these days.
