Lifestyle
‘SNL’ has always taken on politics. Here’s what works – and why
Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, Kate McKinnon as Hillary Clinton, and Amy Poehler as Hillary Clinton during the “A Hillary Christmas” sketch on December 19, 2015.
Dana Edelson/NBC
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Dana Edelson/NBC
As a comedy nerd who has watched Saturday Night Live since I stumbled on a rerun of the debut episode back in the mid-1970s, I’m convinced SNL has had a profound impact on how America views politics.
But the show has seemingly struggled in recent years, as the absurdity of modern politics has caught up to satire. Former president Donald Trump’s references to myths about Haitian immigrants eating pets, his running mate JD Vance’s comments about women without children, Vice President Kamala Harris having to defend stories about working at McDonald’s as a youth – it all seems like stuff which would have been in sketches years ago, instead of real life.
As a historic election looms, and the show begins its landmark 50th season this week, SNL faces an ongoing challenge: to make America laugh – and think differently – about a political world which has gotten stranger than anyone could have predicted when the show debuted back in 1975.
Already, the show’s been on summer hiatus for the year’s three most seismic political events: President Joe Biden’s terrible debate performance against former president Donald Trump, Biden’s eventual decision to step aside for Vice President Kamala Harris and Harris’ domineering debate performance against Trump. So they’ll need to hit the ground running Saturday, when comic actor Jean Smart hosts the show.
A political impact from the beginning
I decided to bounce some of my harebrained theories about SNL’s impact over time off Al Franken, who wrote some of the show’s earliest political skits and worked there for many years as a writer and performer, before serving nearly ten years as a U.S. senator from Minnesota.
(Franken resigned from the Senate in 2018 amid allegations of misconduct from several women who accused him of touching or kissing them in inappropriate ways. He has denied some allegations, said he remembers others differently, apologized for making some women feel uncomfortable and said he regrets resigning the office.)
When it came to political satire, Franken says he and his fellow SNL writers had a pretty simple goal: Craft stuff that would be funny for people who knew both a little – and a lot – about politics.
“We didn’t try to be liberal or conservative,” says Franken, who worked on the show in various stints from 1975, during its very first season, to 1995, helping write classic sketches featuring Dan Aykroyd as President Richard Nixon during his last days in office and Dana Carvey as both George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot in a debate.
Quoting another legendary SNL writer, Jim Downey, he adds, “We just tried to do stuff…that would reward people for knowing stuff, but not punish them for not…Sketches that would be funny to everyone, but we were also trying to put in things that, really, really, smart people could go, ‘Oh I see. They put that in there for me.’”
SNL shapes our view of politicians through impressions
When Saturday Night Live nails an impression of a politician, it manages a unique alchemy – elevating the thing about that person that is so funny it can pretty much define them in the public’s mind. Often, it is something people already suspected about the politician, crystallizing how the public feels about their policies or candidacies.
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When John McCain announced Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, Tina Fey produced a devastating take on the vice-presidential candidate as a superficial dimwit given to folksy-sounding word salads in speeches and interviews. Some people even assumed the politician actually said “I can see Russia from my house” – one of the jokes Fey’s Palin announces during a speech that the real Palin never said.
Think Gerald Ford was a clumsy dolt? That might be because that’s how Chevy Chase played him in the show’s first season, even though Ford was a former champion athlete. Aykroyd handled Nixon and Jimmy Carter – nailing Nixon’s shifty villany and Carter’s wide smile and youth appeal, despite wearing a mustache neither politician had. Dana Carvey’s take on George H.W. Bush as a stiff patrician given to flailing his arms widely also led people to confuse Carvey’s jokes with things the real-life president said and did.
And there was Darrell Hammond’s take on Al Gore during a debate sketch in 2000, playing Gore as an oblivious technocrat obsessed with the word “lockbox” to a crushing effect. “I think [that sketch] elected Bush,” says Franken, recalling how Gore’s team reportedly used the sketch to coach the vice president on future debate performances.
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But sometimes impressions aren’t enough
Because so much of the show’s political insight comes from impressions, it creates problems when SNL can’t find the right approach. The show never really found a great caricature of Joe Biden, despite having everyone from Jason Sudeikis to Woody Harrelson and Jim Carrey play him.
When I say they had similar problems with Barack Obama, Franken agrees. “[It] was like trying to climb a smooth, vertical wall,” he says of lampooning Obama. “He had nothing to really grab onto. You could do an impression of his voice … but there [weren’t] really a lot of footholds there.”
The problem with Donald Trump may be the opposite: too many footholds. Alec Baldwin nailed Trump’s scowling self-obsession, while James Austin Johnson captures the former president’s stream of consciousness patter, though finding things funnier or more absurd than what he’s actually done in real life remains a challenge.
This weekend, though Maya Rudolph seems ready to nail Harris’ coolly efficient power, the question remains: who will play crucial figures like Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and his GOP opposite JD Vance – and what will those impressions say about our politics writ large? (My money’s on a “cold open” Saturday focused on Walz and Vance prepping for the vice presidential debate.)
Helping the audience process political ideas beyond impressions
There have been impactful SNL sketches which speak to political ideas beyond lampooning politicians, often in the name of helping the audience process potent ideas.
One of my favorites is a bit from 2016, where Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock are sitting in an election watch party surrounded by white people. As Trump’s election is confirmed, the white folks are shocked that America elected a candidate with such obvious race and sexism issues, while Rock and Chappelle – as Black men familiar with America’s hypocrisies – are not.
When politicians appear as themselves
Particularly before the rise of social media, the best way a politician could try to get ahead of how SNL portrayed them was to appear as themselves in the show’s sketches. Obama, Palin, Hillary Clinton, and even Nikki Haley used this tactic, popping up to look like good sports while pushing back subtly against the most insulting parts of the parodies.
McCain, who called Saturday Night Live creator and showrunner Lorne Michaels a friend, delivered one of the most notable cameos. He kicked off the SNL episode right before the presidential election in November 2008 with an appearance where the senator – flanked by Fey as Palin and his actual wife, Cindy – hawked fake merchandise on the QVC home shopping channel, deftly presaging when Trump would do it for real with his own Bibles and luxury watches.
But one of the most infamous political cameos is also the show’s earliest, when Ron Nessen, then press secretary for Ford, hosted the show in 1976 and got his boss to pre-tape saying the show’s legendary opening phrase, “Live from New York, It’s Saturday Night.”
Franken says he impulsively asked Nessen to host the show at an event for Ford – later, he says, Michaels reminded him that handing out host invites was not his job – but they didn’t really ease up on the president for the episode. “We had way too much fun with them and the Ford family was not appreciative,” Franken adds. “And I think right after that he lost in South Carolina to Reagan…They hated it.”
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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