Matt Wilstein at the Daily Beast interviewed former Saturday Night Live star Norm McDonald about comedy, politics, and his old show. McDonald said he could not believe the over-dramatic opening of SNL right after the election, with Kate McKinnon somberly playing the piano and singing as Hillary. He thought it was absurd, that Hillary's lose would be someone died:
Did you see that? And this wasn’t even a tragedy; just a guy got elected. They open the show with Kate McKinnon singing “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen. And I was sad Leonard Cohen died, I love Leonard Cohen. But at the end, Kate McKinnon said, “I’m going to get through this and so are you. [The actual quote was, “I’m not giving up, and neither should you.”] I was like, what the f--k are we getting through? That a man was duly elected president? What are you, crazy?
Like, at first, I seriously thought she meant Leonard Cohen’s death. And I was like, well I can get through that. I can get through anything. I got through my own father’s death. You think I can’t get through a man getting elected president of the United States? It was so absurd that, for some reason, she was the one that was supposed to let me know that it’s alright to go on. Go on as if nothing happened. Nothing exploded.
Wilstein asked McDonald how he felt SNL was doing after the election, with Alec Baldwin mocking Trump. McDonald said all this satire was helping Trump:
I love Alec Baldwin. And one of my best friends, Jim Downey, writes the political sketches....But I think they’re playing into Trump’s hands. Because if you satirize someone, or mock them, you’re trivializing any danger that they might be. I don’t know any other way to do something. You can’t get a laugh without making the person more likable. Plus, I don’t think comedy does anything anyway. I was reading this book—I’m kind of obsessed with Hitler, you know? And they were saying, when Hitler took power, all these comedians and sketch troupes would do Hitler. They’d put a comb under their nose. They all hated Hitler and they’d make fun of him. Hitler didn’t care and then he did all those bad things. I don’t want to get into the details, but this guy was no saint. So I have no historical precedent that comedy ever changed anything.
So Wilstein asked how McDonald would deal comedically with Trump if he were still on the show, but instead McDonald talked about why Hillary lost:
I always wrote non-political jokes, because I just hate politics so much. Jim Downey wrote the political jokes. And I was kind of shocked, because someone sent me a thing of all the Hillary [Clinton] jokes I did. It was like 20 minutes of them. And they were all, every one of them, the premise was that she was a huge liar. And that was like 20 years ago. I didn’t know that. I guess she was. My theory is this: People hated Hillary Clinton so much that they voted for someone they hated more than Hillary Clinton in order to rub it in.
Earlier in the interview, Wilstein noted that McDonald appeared on the controversial episode of Jimmy Fallon's late-night show where Fallon was condemned for mussing up Donald Trump's hair -- as if that was a mortal sin of television:
There was a whole bunch of people watching it [backstage] and everybody was laughing and thought it was cute. So I was very surprised by the pushback or blowback or whatever that new word is. But Fallon, he’s never going to host Meet The Press. He just does what he does. He has fun. He likes to have fun and laugh. Also, I don’t how you blame Fallon when every media outlet in the world had Trump on and treated him with kid gloves until it was too late. But I thought it was absurd.
