Even though few of my friends still find it relevant enough to watch hung over on a Sunday morning, I still find myself looking forward to Saturday Night Live nearly every week. Maybe I'm just a sucker for sketch comedy, maybe it's just that I can't abide all the Sunday morning NFL talk. Either way, the Republican VP candidate's appearance last Saturday was enough to get that Nielsen rating up by a couple million viewers, so apparently I wasn't alone in watching this particular broadcast. And two questions were the inevitable result of that: how did Palin do, and how did SNL do?

If you ask me, and I know you didn't, I say that SNL did the best they could. But as usual, that's only half the story.

The thing is, SNL can't say no to Palin's appearance, it makes them look awful and awfully partisan. While making light of right wing politicians seems to be their bread and butter, it's not their place to be one-sided and they've been mostly balanced in their critiques in previous elections. (This one has been more one-sided than most, but that might be more a representation of the state of this election than the biases of the show.) But, simply allowing Gov. Palin to hang around Studio 8H doesn't mean an endorsement, as was made amply clear.

Palin's appearance was unlike any other politician's appearance on SNL, because they didn't pal around with her. She didn't stand arm in arm with her doppelganger the way Amy Poehler did with Hillary Clinton months ago, nor did she enter the scene dramatically the way countless other politicians have. There was barely any self-referential joking around, only the "I'm not gonna answer that" line when she entered her own "first press conference," right before delivering the "live from New York" catchphrase that begins each show. Besides a mentioning of the 'Caribou Barbie' and showing an affinity for William Baldwin, Palin had very little to say during this first sketch. This was extended and enhanced during her Weekend Update appearance thirty minutes later when she (seemingly) backed out of a rap that Poehler did in her staid, in a performance for the ages. Weekend Update ended, as did Palin's appearance, with that segment's final line ("good night and have a pleasant tomorrow") and while some people felt it sacrilege that she be given the show's two enduring catchphrases, I think it was a clearly pointed move by the writers of the show and one that shouldn't go unnoticed. Also not unnoticed, neither Fey nor Poehler even acknowledged Palin with eye contact.

What the writers of SNL decided was that they weren't going to play ball. They might have been forced by standards of fairness or whatever to let her have her time on their stage, but they weren't going to expend any energy on her behalf. That's why she said little more than the lines that are uttered every week; someone has to say them and it might as well be her if it means not having to come up with any thing else for her to do. Instead, the writers spent their time doing what they do each week, deriding her and the ridiculousness of her VP candidacy, and letting Tina Fey and Amy Poehler speak for her. This, to me, was tantamount to not justifying her with a response.

That's why Alec Baldwin trashed her to her face, under the guise of mistaking her for Tina Fey. There's clearly lots of truth to his lines about how SNL can't let her on, that she's horrible, that they can't leave Tina ("our Tina") alone with her. Even his "you're way hotter in person" line is pointed, her relative attractiveness is the only thing viable here.

Although certain responses have been pretty negative about both Palin and this particular episode at large, and some have done a great job of discussing various different elements involved, some points about the other sketches seem have gone unnoticed. SNL, to me, took a few chances at making some points not entirely about Sarah herself. First, the Suze Orman show sketch about credit and jackets and showing both how the once wealthy can quickly become destitute and hopeless and about the misguidance of conservative pundits, was surprisingly apt. Next, the three part MacGruber sequence, while usually much more spaced out, showed the rapid descent of average, working class, mulletted Americans, in this case MacGruber the improvisational superhero.

The sketch that really struck me was the 'fart-face' sketch, though it was singled out for scorn in the Huffington post column linked above. In this sketch, the moniker 'fart-face' is applied to one person in a business meeting and then transfered over to another. While it does sound pretty lame, there's actually a lot of subtext here. It's a sketch about not just name-calling, in an election about name-calling, but about how the force of that name-calling can change the dynamic of the room. In the sketch (I can't find it online), Bill Hader chides Will Forte for being a fart-face and then, upon entering, host Josh Brolin does as well. However, when Forte begins to call Brolin a fart-face, and Brolin is unable to convincingly refute the claim, Hader joins him and together they drive Brolin from the room in tatters. In the last election, we saw John Kerry (scumbag that he was) undone by the "flip-flopper" moniker and in this one every attempt has been made to do the same to Obama, only with insinuations far worse than what Kerry dealt with.

While SNL had people's attention, it did what it could to make use of those extra eyes. But of course I'm biased, I already like the show, and that's sort of the crux of the larger picture. Some felt that because Palin showed some semblence of timing and presence, the appearance was a success for the ticket, and that therefore undecided voters would be swayed by her appearance, as if undecideds matter at all at this point. Here we are talking about the subtext of a sketch comedy show, talking about the minutiae of gestures and whatnot and the truth is that everyone who was gonna vote for McCain/Palin before SNL is gonna vote for them after it and vice versa for people with some sanity. To say that it changes anything is like asking how Joe the Plumber is gonna vote, since we know that he was in the tank for McCain the whole time. Or, more appropriately, it's like crafting the Onion-esque headline: "1oo% of McCain supporters plan to vote for McCain." Though, to be fair, at least that's a statement that would be more true than the majority of their stump speech content.

What I do find most amusing about it all, however, is how readily the McCain/Palin ticket will shred everything that they see as embodied by New York City, right after sauntering in as supposed celebrities. This is the place of Wall Street and not Main Street. It's the place where Joe Six Pack can't survive, much less have everyone know his name and his troubles. NYC is the antithesis of what they mean when they talk about the real America, when they talk about god fearing, hard-working American folk who work hard to achieve and believe in God. NYC is the capitol of Fake America, the America that McCain/Palin wish wouldn't vote, or worse. Maybe they wish none of us had made it out of the 9/11 attacks that they use to justify their worst intentions, forgetting that it wasn't Alaska and it wasn't Arizona and it wasn't Joe the Plumber who saw their city under attack that Tuesday more than seven years ago. Instead, they come here pimping themselves with little more than an arm wave, a catchphrase or two, and Jeff Larson's credit card, and some mixed up bullshit about who's really American and who's promoting some other agenda that might endanger the lives of flannel wearing moose killers everywhere. It reminds me of a line from Woody Allen's Annie Hall, a film essentially about the differences between New York City and the rest of the country. "They look at us like we're a bunch of gay, jewish commie pinkos," Allen's Alvy Singer tells his buddy Tony Roberts, "and we are." We most certainly are. And, especially in light of this election, I've never been prouder.

**concurrently posted on stevesword.com