Donald Trump ‘SNL’ Review: ‘I Have Nothing Better To Do’

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Host Donald Trump kicked off this week’s Saturday Night Live with an opening monologue that demonstrated all the reasons it wasn’t a good idea for him to host SNL. He joked that he was doing the show “because I have nothing better to do” and brought up his old insult of Rosie O’Donnell, just as the rest of America had begun to forget it. The punchline for that joke was that he’d been supposedly mistaking cast member Aidy Bryant for O’Donnell all week. So, Trump being unable to distinguish between two different women is funny?

“I know how to take a joke,” Trump insisted, and to prove it, he stood onstage while Taran Killam and Darrell Hammond impersonated him. Then Larry David — who’d made his second, and this time exceedingly unfunny, appearance as Bernie Sanders in the cold-open segment — stood offstage and shouted, “Trump’s a racist,” adding, “I heard if I yelled that they’d give me $5,000.” This was an attempt to preempt the reported offer made by the protest group Deport Racism 2016 to anyone who interrupted the show. Even this early on, it was hard to believe we were going to have to endure a full show of this.

There was a sketch about Trump as a fully elected President, seated in the White House with wife Melania (Cecily Strong) and a group of advisors. According to the latter, ISIS had been defeated in Syria, Putin had withdrawn from the Ukraine, and “everyone loves the new laws you tweeted.” Ivanka Trump made a cameo as the new Secretary of the Interior, and the best thing I can say about that it that she didn’t get the obligatory round of applause all cameo celebs get when they appear on this show.

Trump announced he wasn’t going to be in the next sketch, but not to worry: he was going to tweet about it. What followed was a non-sketch set in an Italian restaurant, with Trump’s supposed tweets popping up on the screen, every one insulting the cast (“Kate McKinnon was born stupid,” etc.). For the record, Trump’s real Twitter account did not contain these insults, which I think made the stunt even more lame than it already was.

Related: Donald Trump on ‘SNL’: Watch the Best and Worst Sketches

Trump made a lurching appearance in a taped parody of Drake’s “Hotline Bling” — yeah, seeing Trump trying to dance “funny” is surefire material. I began to think Trump’s boast to Bill O’Reilly on Friday that he’d hand-picked the material was utterly true.

Trump introduced Sia. The second time he did so, it was prefaced by Trump with Kenan Thompson playing Toots Hibbert — Toots and the Maytals were the musical guest when Trump previously hosted SNL. There was no point to any of this, and everyone mispronounced “Toots.”

Trump’s presence was felt during “Weekend Update.” Michael Che made a joke about Trump’s new Crippled America that amounted to just a plug for the book, and Bobby Moynihan did his Drunk Uncle character proclaiming himself Trump’s biggest fan. Trump portrayed a musician who played the “laser harp” in a bar band. The sketch betrayed no evidence that human intelligence was applied to the composition of it.

Trump popped up at the end of a taped piece as a producer for “Startraxxx Productions.” If the cast and writers demonstrated no attempt at effort, I feel justified in not describing these particular pointless moments.

The only sketch that carried any sting was, appropriately, Cecily Strong and Vanessa Bayer’s porn-star characters doing a pitch for “Donald Tramp”: “You’ll feel like you got a Yankee Doodle Handy.” The cheap porno jokes were the only ones suitable for this, what Trump called in his sign-off, “a great evening.”

So, that’s the extent of the Trumpification of this show… The only entity that came off worse than Donald Trump was SNL. Turns out, this really was just a craven move for ratings. There was no attempt by Lorne Michaels and company to use Trump as a critique of himself, no moment that did not feel vetted by the candidate. But the way this campaign season is going, the insulting, often repulsive content of this SNL show won’t matter. All that’s important to Trump — constant, pervasive ubiquity in the pop culture — was achieved.

Saturday Night Live airs Saturday nights at 11:30 p.m. on NBC.