Talking About Politics: Trump, Saturday Night Live, and that pesky Constitution thing....

Anonymous on Quora asked: 

Why is Saturday Night Live so disrespectful to Donald Trump? Why isn't there a law making it illegal to slander the President of the United States?

Political satire, which is the type of comedy practiced by Lorne Michaels’ long-running comedy-sketch series when it lampoons any sitting President, is one of the oldest forms of satirical comment in the humanities. As long as there have been kings, emperors, prime ministers, presidents, and other heads of state, there have always been comedians and/or political cartoonists who, in their routines or drawings, comment on the political realities of the day.

To those diehard loyalists of those heads of state, who tend to see things in a different light as the opposition, any criticism of their nation-state’s leadership is often interpreted as an unwarranted attack. And because the satire is often a response to a policy or political philosophy that the head of state promotes, and the loyalists support, then the jokes don’t seem funny. Indeed, as the tone of the question clearly implies, the supporters of the head of state - especially those who believe that their beloved leader can do no wrong - consider jokes, political cartoons, and satirical sketches on shows such as Saturday Night Live as “slander.”

I’m not a lawyer, nor am I well-versed on legal terminology, but if Alec Baldwin’s sketch lampooning the President’s rambling, often inarticulate, and overly long declaration of a national emergency is based on the speech and the President ’s traits, it’s not slander. As someone else said in an answer to this insincere and loaded question, “It’s not slander if it’s true.”

Saturday Night Live is treating the current President of the United States the same way it has treated every other Chief Executive since it premiered in 1975. Obviously, the tenor of the humor depends on the personality of the President in office, the policies he promotes, his speech pattern, and the decisions he makes. If the person in the Oval Office is basically decent (think Gerald R. Ford, George H.W. Bush, or Jimmy Carter), the satire is not as biting as, say, the Alec Baldwin representations of the current occupant of the Oval Office.

Let’s watch a sketch from one of SNL’s early seasons with Chevy Chase as Gerald Ford, the 38th President of the United States:

Now, as the sketch itself slyly notes, this is not a great impression of Gerald R. Ford; Chevy Chase is decades younger than the only President who made it to the White House as a result of not one but two resignations (Spiro Agnew’s in 1973, and Richard Nixon’s in 1974), is not made up to look like Ford, or even sounds like Ford. Chase’s “schtick” in his Ford sketches was to highlight the sitting President’s tics and exaggerate Ford’s clumsiness. (For instance, Ford once accidentally locked himself out of the White House during an early morning walk. On another occasion, the President slipped and nearly fell while walking down a boarding ramp while deplaning from Air Force One at Vladivostok in the former Soviet Union.)

As the show went on, other comedians took aim at other Presidents. For many years, Dana Carvey’s most popular sketches were his impressions of the late George H.W. Bush. They were so funny that even the target of the satire, Bush 41, invited Carvey to a White House function and “do” a performance there.

Here’s a later sketch with Carvey as Bush 41 and Will Ferrell as Bush 43:

Now, before you say that I’ve only chosen Republican Presidents being lampooned, here’s one making fun of President Barack Obama:

And here are two sketches featuring two different cast members (Darrell Hammond and the late Phil Hartman):

And here SNL makes fun of both George W. Bush and Al Gore:

So, to recap: Saturday Night Live satirizes politicians from both sides of the aisle, not just from one party.

As to the “Why isn’t there a law….?”

Well, there is this document called the U.S. Constitution, which is the law of the land. It not only sets the rules for how the government is supposed to work, but it also enshrines certain rights that every American is entitled to.

Chief among these is this one:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It’s called the First Amendment. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?