Blinded by the White
‘SNL’ admits that they have a race problem. So what are they going to do about it?
The first step is acknowledging you have a problem. And Saturday Night Live did this this past weekend in their cold open, the way a teenager cops to the kegger he threw when his parents were away that night. He might faithfully recount his litany of crimes and seem genuinely repentant — he knows what he did wrong. He cleans the house top to bottom, finishes his homework, walks the dog at 5 a.m., and promises, with seeming sincerity, never to do it again. But as soon as enough time has passed, he’ll be back to his old ways.
The “kegger” here is not only the sketch comedy’s very present absence of a black female castmember, but the controversy surrounding Kenan Thompson’s audacious claim that there is a dearth of talent among black female comics. On October 14, he told TV Guide, “It’s just a tough part of the business. Like in auditions, they just never find ones that are ready.” SNL had a PR disaster on it hands: So, what better way to address it, thinks Lorne Michaels, than invite Scandal star Kerry Washington to host. Two weeks later, SNL’s writers delivered their most consistently funny episode in a long time (oh, why can’t they be this hilarious every week?). And Kerry brought it — big time. Newsflash, Kenan: As it turns out, black women, even Emmy-nominated dramatic actresses like Kerry Washington, have comic talent — imagine that.
The very weird, smugly amusing opener was a mea culpa, reuniting President Obama with the FLOTUS, whom we haven’t seen since 2008, when former SNL cast-member Maya Rudolph returned in a guest appearance to play Michelle to Fred Armisen’s Barack. “I feel like it’s been years since I’ve seen you,” Jay Pharoah’s Obama tells Washington’s Michelle, thereby pulling down the fourth wall.
And soon a faux-exasperated Washington was running on and offstage, juggling every black female role the writers were throwing at her, from the First Lady to Oprah to — well, just as she was about to change into Beyoncé (“don’t even” she blurted) as she stormed out, a posse of six Matthew McConaughey impressionists entered the Oval Office, highlighting how indistinguishable the white male castmates are from one another. It also underlined how many major cultural comic opportunities are being missed by not having a black woman on the cast to send them up. If there are enough comics to spoof Angela Merkel and Kathleen Sebelius (I have to plug Kate McKinnon here in specific and the women cast members in general, because they are brilliant, and responsible for most of the laughs this season), how is it that there is no one to parody some of the biggest names in the news right now — not least of whom, our First Lady?
The sketch wrapped up with a word-crawl apologia with a half-baked promise to rectify the issue (“unless we fall in love with another white guy first”— hardy-har-har) and an appearance from Reverend Al Sharpton, who asked what many viewers wanted to know, “What have we learned from this sketch? As usual, nothing.”
As baby Liz Lemon famously said on 30 Rock, “It’s funny cuz it’s true.” Or it was funny in the moment, at least. But facing the criticism head on with jokes and a public flogging by Al Sharpton will just look like meaningless insincere shtick — like a crocodile-tear-filled apology to mom and dad after raiding their liquor cabinet — if the demand to diversify the cast goes unfulfilled. The fact that Lorne Michaels had to be publicly shamed into addressing race and gender at all … Of course he doesn’t want to look like he’s running an old boys’ club. And he doesn’t want his decades’ old show to seem culturally irrelevant. Which is why he’s finally broken his silence on the subject, albeit with a rather vague response: “It’s not like it’s not a priority for us. It’ll happen. I’m sure it’ll happen.” So, he’s on the case — now. But, in the words of Washington’s Miss Uganda, from the “Miss Universe” sketch on Saturday: “What is who? How is where?”
