Palin's visit to Saturday Night Live left me a little confused. The way that they made fun of her was not reined in at all, if anything they were more critical of the candidate's flaws. They even got her to make fun of the fact that she will not do press conference and will not answer questions.
It's common knowledge, and people have reminded me, that just going on SNL is good for a politician career in general. It shows they have the ability to laugh at themselves. For me though, that's not what I saw on Saturday Night. I saw a person straining hard to seem amiable and undaunted by the mockery that was being made of her, but to little avail. Behind her faux i'm-having-fun look, if you looked very closely you could see a deer caught in the head lights. Lucky for her she wasn't a moose in the head lights, because then she would have been forced to run herself over, strictly on principle. Oh see, she does have one!
I have to say that a still-somehow-very-tiny-while-being-hugely-pregnant Amy Poeler, doing the Sarah Palin rap song, while Palin tried to do her best gangsta head nod, had me doubled over laughing. I felt like I had stepped through the looking glass into an alternate reality where people actually call politicians out for all their bullshit - to their faces! "There's no way she was in on all this!" I thought, but Palin just sat there playing along, yelling back "Ayers!" when Poeler shouted "When I say Obama, you say Ayers." I guess it's not too much a stretch of my imagination to think she just didn't get it, but I still kept waiting for her to walk off set as Todd Palin did the running man while pointing out Russia on a map, and a happy cartoon moose got gunned down in cold blood. "Cause I'm an Animal! And I'm bigger than you!"
I suppose the whole thing just illustrated to me that you can pretend you're laughing at yourself, but you have to have some form of self awareness before you can actually be in on the joke.
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