Donald Trump has been bad for comedy, especially late-night

Fast Company

During the 2016 presidential election, "as the talk shows increasingly gravitated toward 'Today in Trump' recaps throughout the election season, they began foreshadowing how inconsequential this material would prove in the coming years," says Joe Berkowitz. "Try as they might, nobody could crack how to expose Trump through humor. He proved immune to Jon Stewart-style hypocrisy-shaming, choosing simply to create another breaking-news spectacle rather than own up to or apologize for the previous one. (Stewart himself, it should be noted, only remained at the helm of The Daily Show for just two months of Trump’s candidacy before leaving in August 2015.) Giving Trump enough rope to hang himself didn’t work either, whether it involved Jimmy Fallon tousling the candidate’s weird hair on The Tonight Show, or SNL inviting him to host. Instead, it only served to normalize him. Going long with John Oliver-style 'explainer comedy' also failed to land a blow, since anyone who might’ve benefitted from seeing the damning material never did, and probably had their minds made up anyway." Saturday Night Live also struggled to mock Trump, but not at first. "As time wore on, SNL produced a lot of funny sketches about Trump, especially when using women to puncture the macho facade of his administration," says Berkowitz. "However, the writers also seemed to take the wrong lessons from the success of Melissa McCarthy’s run as Sean Spicer. One high-profile guest star after another regularly appeared on the show to reenact the biggest political moment of the week, aping what Trump or whoever had done this time. The mere presence of Robert De Niro as Robert Mueller and Ben Stiller as Michael Cohen signaled Hollywood’s already-assumed abhorrence for Trump, and did too much of the heavy lifting in place of jokes. Politically, SNL often got stuck in comedy cruise control. While the show still has the same high highs and low lows of any era, the cold open political sketches have become reliably, thunderingly redundant. Why bother with tweaked reenactments, when just showing actual clips of the man being weird as hell on TV, heightened by some surreal editing tweaks, can sometimes makes the same points even better."