Fund: 'Saturday Night Live' Now a 'Joke'

National Review‘s John Fund goes after NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” and there’s nothing funny about his assessment of the formerly courageous sketch show.

It has had its hilarious streaks and its vacuous doldrums, but Saturday Night Live is an American institution. While it has leaned left in its comedy for most or perhaps all of its 37 years on NBC, SNL never gave you the sense that it had tipped so far over as to lose all sense of perspective.

For many of us that may have changed with the revelation that an opening sketch for last Saturday’s SNL was scrapped, apparently because it dug a little too deep at President Obama….The story of [writer Jim Downey’s] lost sketch means either that his SNL colleagues feel a liberal taboo against mocking Obama in an election year has to be enforced or their sense of humor is impaired. Either way, any thought that SNL is an equal-opportunity political slasher is fast becoming, well, a joke.