Throughout the coronavirus scare, Saturday Night Live repeatedly ducked the opportunity to ridicule mandates that, in the name of countering coronavirus, proliferated in America and across the world. Instead, skits on the NBC TV comedy show repeatedly praised the authoritarian measures and scorned people who opposed those measures or who challenged the supporting “science” propounded by government and big money media “experts” that has proven to have been wrong across the board.
Saturday Night Live had a reputation as a comedy show willing to make jokes challenging those holding political power. In years preceding the coronavirus scare, the show had developed a much heavier bias in favor of the liberal and Democratic end of American politics. Yet, it still took shots at politicians and views across the political spectrum.
When the exercise of power went into overdrive with the imposing of draconian measures including stay at home orders, mask and “vaccine” mandates, vaccine passport requirements, and the forced closing of stores, offices, churches, schools, sports venues, and other places people could interact in person, the jokes challenging such exercises of authority did not materialize. Instead of challenging team tyranny, Saturday Night Live joined in promoting it. This choice was particularly interesting because it deprived the show of much good material for skits. Making the show funny was placed on the back burner.
People watching Saturday Night Live throughout the coronavirus scare were treated over and over to sycophantic praising of coronavirus police state actions and the echo chamber of pseudoscientific justifications offered in its support. For people who saw through the coronavirus fearmongering and associated power grabs, Saturday Night Live’s propping up of tyrannical reordering of human behavior turned the show into an annoying weekly display of skits advancing authoritarian propaganda. Entertainment would need to be found elsewhere.
One example of this bleak situation with Saturday Night Live came in an opening skit of the April 25, 2020 episode of the show relatively early in the coronavirus scare. The opening skit concluded with actor Brad Pitt breaking character to praise top coronavirus scare and coronavirus crackdown culprit Anthony Fauci. This followed the earlier portion of the skit in which Pitt had depicted Fauci, all the while failing to ridicule Fauci even mildly in regard to Fauci’s coronavirus fearmongering and mandates support. Fauci was the face of a huge expansion of power in America at the expense of freedom and of an all-out effort to instill enough fear in the American people to ensure that power expansion could proceed. But, instead of challenging Fauci with humor, Pitt in his skit portrayed Fauci as a voice of reason. Watch the episode’s opening skit here:
This brief bit garnered Pitt an Emmy nomination, suggesting the extent to which television more broadly was in the tank for the coronavirus propaganda campaign.
A very different take on the coronavirus scare was offered on Saturday Night Live in actor Woody Harrelson’s monologue opening the episode he guest hosted last weekend. In his monologue, Harrelson spoke of having read a movie script before the coronavirus scare that he threw away because it was too crazy to believe. Here is how Harrelson describes the script’s plot:
So the movie goes like this. The biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in their homes. And people can only come out if they take the cartel’s drugs and keep taking them over and over.
Does Harrelson’s monologue indicate that Saturday Night Live will finally, after the coronavirus scare has largely receded into history, be regularly featuring ridicule of the coronavirus scare and the people who sought power excused by it? We’ll see with time. Harrelson could have proceeded with his swipe at the powerful on the show despite objections or by going off script in the live broadcast.
You can watch Harrelson’s opening monologue here:
Harrelson’s recent challenging of the coronavirus fearmongers and powermongers is not limited to his comments during the Saturday Night Live episode. Zack Sharf reported Monday at Variety about Harrelson, in a new interview at the New York Times, condemning as “absurd” the “coronavirus protocols” imposed on movie productions — protocols that Harrelson describes as in place even for independent film productions and as including mandates related to mask wearing, coronavirus testing, and the taking of the experimental coronavirus “vaccine” shots. Sharf related Harrelson’s comments as follows:
‘I don’t think that anybody should have the right to demand that you’re forced to do the testing, forced to wear the mask and forced to get vaccinated three years on. I’m just like, let’s be done with this nonsense. It’s not fair to the crews. I don’t have to wear the mask. Why should they? Why should they have to be vaccinated? How’s that not up to the individual? I shouldn’t be talking about this [expletive].’
‘It makes me angry for the crew,’ Harrelson continued. ‘The anarchist part of me, I don’t feel that we should have forced testing, forced masking and forced vaccination. That’s not a free country. Really I’m talking about the crew. Because I can get out of wearing a mask. I can test less. I’m not in the same position they’re in, but it’s wrong. It’s three years. Stop.’
Too bad this “anarchist part” of himself that Harrelson is paying attention to seems to be absent from, or rigorously suppressed, by most people calling the shots in the television and film industries.
