SNL Thinks the Tucker Carlson of Fox News Still Exists

They are out of touch and out of time.

I don’t watch Saturday Night Live and haven’t for years. They now cater their comedy, for some reason, to Gen Z or millennials. Imagine trying to make comedy for generations raised to be inoffensive in everything they do? It isn’t easy. SNL somehow threads the needle, though they’ve long since lost their cutting edge.

They know the ratings aren’t great, but they make up the difference with viral clips across all platforms, at least that’s the hope. Their easiest target is the Right. They treat the other half of the country like insects in a jar. They don’t know the other half and have heard nothing but terrible things about them (think: Basket of Deplorables as comedy), so we get their version, which often comes off, to me, like extra-terrestrial life forms trying to make sense of regular people.

Their Tucker Carlson, for instance, isn’t the Tucker of today. It’s the old Tucker, the Fox News Tucker, the one everyone knew before he morphed into the Tucker of today. This new Tucker is obsessed with Israel, to the point where nearly every one of his episodes is about Israel. He now hates Trump (because of Israel), and for that, he’s gotten some attention at the New York Times.

Their Tucker mocks the Met Gala and Burqas. The new Tucker would never mock the Burqa. That’s half his audience. He’s now very Muslim-friendly, a defender of Islam — believe it or not. But SNL never got the memo.

Then again, I suppose making a more sophisticated joke about the real Tucker wouldn’t pander to their core audience, who wouldn’t get the joke. And by the way, that core audience probably likes Tucker now because they’re largely “Free Palestine” types, as is much of Hollywood. They are now more like Tucker than they ever have been, so the Burqa joke works to pander to them, but it isn’t funny because it isn’t true.

Comedy isn’t all the way dead, but it’s mostly dead, at least in the mainstream and on the networks. Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver, and Stephen Colbert - none of them are funny anymore. They’re too impressed with themselves to make fun of anyone other than Trump and his voters. It’s so boring by now. If there was one group in all of American history worthy of mockery, it’s today’s Left. And yet, they rarely do.

Instead, we get the same old crap, mocking Kash Patel, Justice Kavanaugh, and Pete Hegseth. Matt Damon was the host, so it’s logical they would unearth his (not very good) Kavanaugh impression and maybe like the kinds of women who shop at Gelson’s and are addicted to Instagram Reels think it’s funny.

Even their non-political humor is only fairly amusing, not laugh-out-loud funny. This one could be told to a room full of Kindergartners; it’s so tame.

Saturday Night Live serves as a cuddly, warm blanket for the Aderoll generation, who are traumatized by the 8-hour workday. Gone are the days when they touched the live wire. They will probably never be back. Comedy like that can only be found outside the mainstream, with a new counterculture on the rise.

Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, a film no one saw, and probably no one knows even exists, is terrible. It is yet another Boomer love letter as the Me Generation takes its final bow. Now, we’re getting all of the Boomer biopics. This was about Lorne Michaels, and it was dull as a doorknob. There is no way they could really tell the truth about what things were like in the 1970s. It would offend everyone.

How I wish comedians, writers, and everyone else on the Left did not exist in such an insular bubble. I wish they still had the courage to offend. I wish all of culture wasn’t part of the same propaganda machine to push the same message and tell the same story, the “correct” story. Maybe someday. Maybe never.

Perhaps I’m being too harsh. I guess in their own way, they’re doing the best they can. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s my taste that has become too particular. But is it too much to ask to, at the very least, get Tucker Carlson right? Yes, even that is too much to ask because they’d have to be willing to wade through the waters of humanizing the other half of the country, and that, for most of the Left, is a bridge too far.