SNL Turns Fifty: Our Favorite Political Sketches (1975-2025)

This Day in Esoteric Political History

Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia

History

4.6 • 982 Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2025

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This weekend Saturday Night Live celebrates its 50th anniversary. To help celebrate, we're bringing you an episode we recorded last fall about SNL's political impact.

Jody, Niki, and Kellie discuss the way that SNL's spoofs have changed, whether their skits have had a political impact -- and why it can be a struggle to do spoofs in the Trump era.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, Jody here. This weekend is the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live. There's a big
0:06.0	anniversary reunion show planned. There's been a ton of coverage of this moment and this anniversary.
0:11.4	Lots of great stuff looking back at the history of the show. I, for one, have been devouring it.
0:16.0	I've really loved it. I love the documentary about music on S&L. There's one about what life is like inside
0:22.0	the writer's room over the course of the week. I even watched a 45-minute documentary about
0:27.0	the more cowbell sketch. Loved it. Anyway, last year, we did an episode about S&L and politics,
0:33.7	and we figured we run it back and get in on the celebration. So here it is. Take a listen.
0:38.4	And one last note in the newsletter this week, we're running a poll asking which is your
0:43.5	favorite political sketch in S&L history. So subscribe to the newsletter, vote in the poll.
0:49.2	Anyway, here we go.
0:54.3	Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.
1:01.8	This day, October 1975, Saturday night live debuts. And if we thought we would take a moment to
1:08.0	talk about the political impact of SNL, maybe specifically
1:11.6	the election impact. This is from spoofs of Carter and Ford to Sarah Palin and Donald Trump.
1:17.3	I should introduce the two of you. Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of
1:21.0	Wellesley. Hello there. Hello, Jody. Hey there. S&L premieres in 1975. It has political DNA right from the jump, you know, and I think it is a very reasonable
1:32.6	lens to sort of view it as a political show in many ways and has a huge political.
1:38.0	I mean, I've become convinced that it has a genuine political impact.
1:41.4	One interesting sort of part of that DNA is that it was spun off of laughing.
1:45.9	And we've talked about it on the show before. Nikki, I think you've talked about it. But,
1:49.7	you know, laughing was the show where what Roger Ailes put Nixon on and had that line. And so
1:55.4	kind of from the beginning, you can trace the sort of nexus of comedy and politics, right?
	...

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