Posted on 09/12/2012 5:19:43 PM PDT by SMGFan
Fred Armisen will be back on "Saturday Night Live" this season. His woeful President Obama impersonation, on the other hand, is history. TheWrap.com is reporting the late night sketch show will use newer cast member Jay Pharoah, who is black, to portray Obama starting with this Saturday's season debut. That's great news for those hoping the signature series would return to its more fair and balanced approach to political humor. Not only was Armisen's Obama a dud, the comedian's unabashed affection for Obama clearly impacted the performance. Will Pharoah be an improvement? Here's a sample:
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
who is silly enough to watch SNL?
After Obama was elected, Armisen quickly started sandbagging his Obama impersonation and holding back, using his own voice and not even trying to pull it off.
One of the reasons that Saturday Night Live sucks is because lame-ass comics like Fred Armisen are considered 'veteran' cast members.
-PJ
Those gullible enough to think it hip, humorous, or both.
And then there are the entirely laugh-free ‘comedies’ foisted on the public by various SNL alumni. Bill Murray gets a pass as he had the sense to leave after one year.
SNL “fair and balanced”? I stopped reading there.
I know for certain that Carrie Brownstein, Armesin’s coworker at the feminist bookstore, is a big lib. She is an open bisexual and big abortion activist and was a member of the feminist, Riot-grrrl band Sleater-Kinney.
Otherwise, don't bother. I don't want "accurate", and I don't need mean put-downs. "Lame" is right out.
The best ones are when the target can fall off their chair laughing with them. (Nancy Reagan confessed to that, I believe.)
Why the frick do we care about this right now???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
Who’s the SNL guy that does Joe Biden, Greek sounding surname. He plays it for laughs, his SloJo impersonation is hilariously clueless.
-PJ
He’s gone. They’ll have to get a new Biden too.
Thought Armisen was funny as Obama. Jay Pharoah may be too black to play Obama...at least Armisen is mixed race (White and Asian).
Sounds more like the move was done because Armisen is not black
Oh, and Portlandia is one funny show. Armisen and Carrie Brownstein are hilarious in all their different characters. Too bad Dish dropped IFC
Job opening! Is J. Fred Muggs still available?
‘m not changing my vote so I can watch this fool for 4 years!
I didn’t think he was very good even when he was trying, and I agree-,most of the time he wasn’t trying—except to make Obama likable.
SNL will still softball 0bama. Don’t expect any satire or anything. They will have to portray 0bama in a good light. They don’t want any trouble from Axlerod and company
CNN) — Chevy Chase didn’t look like Gerald Ford and didn’t sound like Gerald Ford. But in the mid-1970s, when “Saturday Night Live” first went on the air, Chase — then a writer and cast member of the show — made his impression of the president, rife with pratfalls and slapstick, the talk of the country.
He also made the president a butt of jokes, which was intentional, Chase told CNN in an interview.
“[Ford] was a sweet man, a terrific man — [we] became good friends after, but ... he just tripped over things a lot,” he said. “It’s not that I can imitate him so much that I can do a lot of physical comedy and I just made it, I just went after him. And ... obviously my leanings were Democratic and I wanted [Jimmy] Carter in and I wanted [Ford] out, and I figured look, we’re reaching millions of people every weekend, why not do it.”
Over the years, “Saturday Night Live’s” political satires have become a mainstay of the show, sometimes to startling effect.
Al Franken — now the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate from Minnesota — and his then writing partner, Tom Davis, wrote a wicked takeoff of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book, “The Final Days,” which included Dan Aykroyd as a bitter Richard Nixon and John Belushi as a toadying Henry Kissinger. In the mid-’80s, a sketch starring Phil Hartman as Ronald Reagan showed the president, often lampooned as forgetful, with a razor-sharp command of the Iran-Contra situation, cutting deals in Arabic and barking orders at his staff.
More recently, Dana Carvey’s malaprop-laden impression of George H.W. Bush, Hartman’s puppy-dog Bill Clinton, Will Ferrell’s George W. Bush and Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin have embedded themselves in the culture.
Though Chase believes the show leans left, and Fey’s Palin is an attempt to hurt the Republicans, Marc Liepis, NBC Universal senior director of late night publicity, had no comment.
CNN: You mean to tell me in the back of your mind you were thinking, hey I want Carter ...
Chase: Oh, yeah.
CNN: And I’m going to make him look bad.
Chase: Oh yeah. What do you think they’re doing now, you think they’re just doing this because Sarah’s funny? No, I think that the show is very much more Democratic and liberal-oriented, that they are obviously more for Barack Obama. [In the ‘70s], out of the Nixon era, and it was not unlikely that I might go that direction.
CNN: I talked to one political pundit who said, I think Chevy Chase cost Ford the presidency.
Chase: When you have that kind of a venue and power where you can reach so many millions of people and you’ve become a show that people watch, you know, you can affect a lot of people, and humor does it beautifully, because humor is perspective and has a way of making judgment calls. ... So I think there was no question that it had major effect and in fact, in speaking with his family and then later him, and even reading some of his books ... he felt so, too.
I don’t watch SNL but seems to me there was a guy on Stossel’s FOX show that did a great impersonation of BO.
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