NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” is in its 39th season now. The show has many rules – most of them laid down by evil Buddha Lorne Michaels. The two most important ones seem to be that 1) every episode hosted by a woman of color will be strong and that 2) there will only be one such an episode a season. Maybe two if Maya Rudolph happens to be in New York.
The reason why these episodes are usually so good is because then the writers can use all their ideas they normally can’t do because they involve a black woman. Saturday’s episode guest-hosted by Kerry Washington was no exception.
SNL has a big ensemble of cast members and featured players, but most of them are white. There are two black guys, a Persian woman and a woman who might – might – be Hispanic. These limitations lead to some questionable choices: Fred Armisen (who has Venezuelan and Japanese roots) played Barack Obama in what was effectively blackface for four years till Jay Pharaoh was allowed to take over.
When the show announced the new players for this season many people thought it was a joke. Five white dudes and one white woman, and the men all looked sort of the same and had made-up names like “Beck Bennett” and “Brooks Wheelan”, which sound like the alias of a superhero.
Jason Zinoman wrote about SNL’s “race problem” in the New York Times. The show addressed the criticism with a sketch in which Kerry Washington was annoyed because she had to play Michelle Obama AND Oprah AND Beyonce simply because nobody could do it. Zinoman tweeted his reaction: “Um, wow.”
(Let’s now not do the boring thing and imagine such a controversy – or such a show, or comedy in general – if it happened in Germany. Thank you.)
Probably a coincidence but in an episode almost exclusively about race the musical guest was Eminem, still one of the premier White Dudes of Hip-Hop – and of course he was rapping about bringing real rap back. And to top it all off he had Rick Rubin on stage as his DJ. Rubin, hyper-bearded, in a winter coat, with shades and big headphones – scratching. Scratching! I don’t even wanna know if it was fake or not – and please don’t tell me if you know. At least not this week.