Last month, my wife and I caught Rob Schneider live in Niagara Falls. Great show, genuinely funny. I highly recommend it. Obviously, we were both first introduced to Schneider by seeing him on Saturday Night Live so many years ago, and somehow the experience of seeing him live sent us down a nostalgia rabbit hole, revisiting early '90s SNL episodes on Peacock.
In my head, the show was a lot funnier back then, but, more importantly, the show still understood something basic: if you’re going to mock politics, you mock everyone.
Now, there’s no denying that SNL leaned left back then. It always has. Anyone pretending otherwise is rewriting history. In 1992, it was obvious the show wanted Bill Clinton to win. But here’s the difference—it didn’t treat him like a protected class. Clinton got hammered for his scandals, his wandering eye, and his policy missteps. Hillary was a frequent target as well. Her healthcare push, the awkward public image, even the dynamics of their marriage—all fair game.
That’s what made it work. The humor didn’t feel like activism. It felt like comedy.
Even when Republicans were the punchline, the jokes landed as part of a broader satire. There was a sense that the writers were equal-opportunity offenders. Nobody was sacred, and that gave the show credibility.
Fast forward to today, and that balance is gone. Not subtly. Not gradually. Completely.
New data from the Media Research Center’s NewsBusters makes it painfully clear. Through the first 19 episodes of SNL’s 51st season, 91% of political jokes on “Weekend Update” targeted conservatives. That’s 205 out of 226 jokes. Democrats and liberals? Just 18. Three were nonpartisan.
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The show’s infamous cold opens tell the same story. Eighty-two percent of political portrayals mocked Trump or Republicans. Conservative figures appeared 49 times. Left-leaning figures showed up just 10 times. One was neutral.
And at the center of it all, as always, is Donald Trump.
Nearly half of all “Weekend Update” political jokes—101 of them—were aimed at him alone. You don’t need a study to tell you Trump dominates their material, but seeing the numbers really puts things in perspective.
That obsession crossed a line earlier this season. During an April 4 episode, Michael Che joked about Trump attending a performance at the Kennedy Center: “I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?” A not-so-subtle reference to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.
This came after Trump survived two assassination attempts during the 2024 campaign—and before another attempt just weeks later.
“Nobody is asking SNL to become conservative, but when every political punchline is nothing more than Trump Derangement Syndrome all the time, SNL risks turning itself into a caricature of its own political obsessions,” David Bozell of the Media Research Center said.
There was a time when SNL understood that if you want to keep your audience, don’t treat half of them like the enemy. That’s exactly what’s happening now. And it’s less funny because of it.
