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TwitterIs SNL's humor liberally biased? No way, says Seth Meyers
"It's a playoff atmosphere," "Saturday Night Live" head writer Seth Meyers says about the 2008 election season in the new issue of TV Guide that hits newsstands on Thursday.
Star performances have included Tina Fey's spot-on spectacle of Sarah Palin, Amy Poehler's pant-suited Hillary Rodham Clinton, Darrell Hammond's rambling, delusional John McCain and Fred Armisen's big-eared, cool as a cuke Barack Obama.
But even the comics are blown away by the recent political circus. Hammond jokes with TV Guide about the surreal nature of doing a skit dressed as Bill Clinton with the real Obama last season: "There is no need to do LSD."
SNL's executive producer Lorne Michaels admits that the debates' high viewership has helped "SNL's" numbers.
"With 70 million people watching a debate, and then with the echo of the Internet and the 24-hour news channels, everything gets seen. When we did the second debate sketch, Darrell [as McCain] wandering into the shot got an immediate laugh. You had to have watched the debate to laugh at that."
But isn't SNL pro-Obama? No way, says Meyers. "We did the sketch that basically made fun of the media's treatment of Hillary," he says, "and all of a sudden we were in the tank for Hillary. If you look back over the years, that would be a very hard argument to make."
Michaels also insists, "We're not partisan. We don't say, 'Let's get so and so.' All campaigns do awful things, and our job is to point that out."
Despite the mockery, the candidates certainly are not afraid to be on the show. Obama, Clinton, McCain and Palin have all shown what good sports they are.
"It definitely helps [them]," Michaels told TV Guide. "You are less likely to trust someone who doesn't seem to have a sense of humor."
But the TV Guide piece notes that Palin's favorability ratings dipped following her "SNL" visit, when she head-bopped to Poehler's rap song featuring a moose, gunshots and... dancing Eskimos.
Could it be that Alec Baldwin is the only one who still thinks Sarah's "way hotter in person"?
What do you think? Is "SNL" leaning to the left or the right? Or are they equal-opportunity offenders?
Photo: courtesy of TV Guide
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SNL is a comedy show..
And they are less baised than what I see on Fox, who in todays news reports basicly has him flying around in spaceships feeding cigarettes to children.
It's comedy folks, is nothing sacred anymore??
http://soundclick.com/333maxwell
errr....headline should read "is SNL humor idiotically biased?" that show jumped the shark 10 years ago.
Of course they're liberally biased. How else to explain Al Franken giving them comedy skit advice? Thank goodness Sarah Palin and the Republicans have a sense of humor. God forbid they should make fun of global warming, Jeremiah Wright, or Obama's faux presidential conferences in foreign countries.
I am beyond tired of questions about "liberal bias," much less the notion that anyone should be ashamed of it. Meyers needs to grow a pair.
Why not question the conservative bias of "24" instead? Since when it is wrong to take a point of view?
As Stephen Colbert said far better than I, "reality has a liberal bias."
it is ABSURD to think that snl is not completely democrat. They did everything they COULD not not get palin elected, they constantly crack on fox news, when cnn is probably even more biased than fox news. They wont make an obama joke, and even when tehy TRY to do that, the farthest they will go is to say that hes TOO nice or something or they will just make fun of biden a little bit. It is VERY clear how SNL sways. To not think so is moronic. Its "cool" in the media to support an idiotic presidinet who has done nothing more than quadroople our debt in a year. To use your brain and support the same party who gives h1n1 vaccines to prisoners (bleeding heart losers) than to people who actually need it like hospitals... shows unintelligence and ignorance.