If the crowd that erupted in applause when Kamala Harris showed up on Saturday Night Live this weekend was surprised by her appearance, they might have been the only ones. The instant that Air Force Two changed course midair to head to New York instead of Detroit, the jig was up. Lorne Michaels had said before SNL’s season started that the presidential candidates wouldn’t appear on the show for fear of running afoul of the Federal Communications Commission’s equal time regulations, but the chance to grab the national spotlight must have been more than he could resist. And if it gave the vice president a few moments of uncritical adulation on the last weekend of the campaign, so much the better.
Michaels has long proclaimed the show to be neutral in electoral matters, and the past month’s political sketches have made game stabs at bipartisanship. But the jabs at Harris have been affectionate or toothless or both, either poking fun at her linguistic tics or halfheartedly recycling right-wing attack lines, while the portrayal of Trump has been, if not precisely vicious, at least utterly without empathy, condemning James Austin Johnson’s Trump to ramble endlessly at the podium while Maya Rudolph’s Harris kicks up her heels away from the campaign trail. Weekend Update’s Colin Jost was merely formalizing an already obvious slant when he joked that the election would “decide if the next president is Kamala Harris, or if everyone at SNL will get audited.”
SNL’s attempts at rising to the political moment have often been cringeworthy—remember Kate McKinnon’s “Hallelujah”? And its celebrity cameos often devolve into obsequiousness. But Rudolph’s faceoff with the real Harris, staged as if they were seeing each other in a dressing-room mirror, managed to strike a precious balance between parody and poignancy. When Rudolph’s Harris wished there were someone likeminded she could confer with, “a Black South Asian woman running for president, preferably from the Bay Area,” the joke was in the specificity, but it was also a reminder of how rare a figure in American politics the real Harris is—so much so that only her comedic doppelgänger can understand what she’s been through.
There’s a built-in jolt in having public figures confront their impersonators, the kind of anticipatory hush that falls across a classroom when the teacher unexpectedly swivels to catch a kid pulling faces behind their back. But Harris seemed too delighted to lodge even the mildest of complaints, except in the form of a question: “I don’t really laugh like that, do I?” At a Trump campaign stop the following day, Marco Rubio quipped that Harris’ unbridled laughter was “probably worth 2 to 3 million votes right there.” But while Republicans have tried to make an issue of Harris’ laugh, what Saturday Night Live’s cameras caught wasn’t a sinister chuckle but a radiant smile, buoyed by a solid 30 seconds of rapturous applause, as if a woman who’s been speaking to stadium-size crowds was bowled over by the adulation of a few hundred. In a day or a week, the moment might feel like the last huff of hopium, a clutch of blue-state elites clapping for their own right-headedness. But with the polls jerking emotions in every imaginable direction and both sides acting like they’re losing, it was a balm to see a candidate act like the race could actually produce something good, if only for the space of a few minutes.
SNL’s Trump, meanwhile, was by his own token “running on fumes,” free-associating in front of an impassive onstage crowd while clearly wishing he could be anywhere else. And though the real Trump’s campaign requested and got their equal time, the minute-long message Trump recorded for NBC to broadcast on Sunday was similarly low-energy. It felt as if he, and not the network, were the one being forced to comply. Trump has always fed off his crowds, but in recent weeks he’s shown signs of turning on them, complaining about broken microphones and looking more drained than energized. If only he had someone to talk to.
