Please, SNL: Don't mock Trump voter fraud witness Mellissa Carone

Slate

Carone immediately became an internent sensation, drawing comparisons to SNL and Cecily Strong's "The Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation with at a Party," when a clip of her appearing to be drunk while testifying for the Trump campaign on Wednesday went viral. "A major character had sprung fully formed onto the national stage and Twitter roared to life with casting ideas for the inevitable Saturday Night Live sketch—proving, among other things, that we still think it’s possible to satirize this moment," says Lili Loofbourow. "It’s not. Carone is the slurring but concentrated version of a particular kind of American “authenticity” whose very mockability is its potency: a type as confident as it is ignorant, so righteous and blustery and simultaneously sincere and unhampered by facts or deference that it makes terrific TV. Announcing that she could go to jail for lying and had been forced to get rid of her social media because of harassment by Democrats, the IT contractor was on social media tweeting less than a day later. She’d lied about lying, but that was sort of beside the point: Carone is a crank, and no one expects cranks to be consistent. And she wasn’t alone." Loofbourow adds: "The fact is we’re in a crank pandemic and there’s no vaccine. Judging by the overnight sensation she’s become, Carone’s is a form of brashness Americans still don’t have much resistance toward. Trumpian in an extremely obvious and enthusiastic way, either by coincidence or design, she’s causing a response that echoes the way so many responded to Trump before he won the highest office in the land: laughing him off and looking forward to SNL."