![]() “The Bubble is a planned community of like-minded free thinkers-and no one else,” one of the community’s announcers says, as the camera pans across a scale model of a gleaming, white cityscape. It was a commercial for a community called “ The Bubble.” The most remarkable sketch to come out of this weekend’s Saturday Night Live was, to that end, not the show’s cold open-which featured, predictably, “Trump” (Alec Baldwin) coming to terms with his own unpreparedness for the presidency (“Siri, how do I kill ISIS?”)-but rather one of the show’s classic fake ads, pre-produced for the occasion. You satirize not (just) the candidates, but the people who supported and/or spurned them. One way: You satirize not (just) the person, but the politics themselves. And as the reality TV-driven logic that animated the election has settled into the soft grooves of reality itself, the conundrum has only expanded and amplified for O’Rourke and his fellow comedians: How do you make jokes about the new administration in a way that moves beyond simple parody? How do you convert humor into satire? How do you make jokes about a politician whose defining feature is the fact that he is avowedly not political? This-the difficulty of satirizing campaigns that so often satirized themselves-was a common complaint as comedians and other commentators tried to apply humor-as-usual to a situation that was neither terribly funny nor terribly usual. ![]() ![]() He explained: “I am a political humorist, and it’s been impossible to be funnier than Hillary’s pantsuits and I’m a political commentator, and I simply can’t get a word in edgewise with Donald Trump around.” O’Rourke said in October, speaking of the marathon presidential campaign. ![]()
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