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THE OBLIGATORY SELF-FLAGELLATING INTRO

“You still watch ‘S.N.L’? Like every week?” is a common line of questioning I get fired at me once someone gets to know me and we’ve already peeled back the layers of small talk that revolve around “the weather” and “how we feel about this whole AI thing.” But, I don’t watch TikTok or reels other than the ones that are sent to me, I don’t do any drugs or drink excessively, nor do I spend my month’s salary on Crap bought from Crap.com — I am a woman of few vices. I just like to watch Saturday Night Live.

And I have no defense other than to say that I like comedy. I like the debates about the “purpose” of comedy, I like listening to my favorite comedians gush over the genius of George Carlin and Richard Pryor, and I like having opinions about the 50-year-old live sketch comedy show.

ON IMPRESSIONS

Within the sphere of comedy, what continues to fascinate me most is the impression — the ability to completely inhabit another person’s soul for a rewarding laugh. (Trust me, worse things can happen to souls. Just ask Jerry Seinfeld what happened to his.) And to differentiate between impressions and a portrayal, Natalie Portman doing Jackie Kennedy isn’t an impression, it was an Oscar-nominated (but not winning) portrayal. I am certainly not laughing as she shakes and screams in terror as her husband’s head gets blown clean off beside her. Anyhow.

Being able to imitate a person is one hat trick, but reciting President Carter’s malaise speech line for line — down to his exact Georgian lilt — while impressive, certainly doesn’t make the hat trick funny and I think everything should be funny. What elevates an impression is a a demonstration of insight, that the performer can not only capture the voice, but manage to squeak out a truth of the impersonated. In order to skewer a person and glean into their quirks and tics and to create that into original jokes that reflect the individual is a feat. In order to do an impression well, you need to know your subject. Yes it’s amazing that Bill Hader is able to sound like Lorne Michaels but the fact that he knows him well enough to mimic his demeanor in private moments, allows the watcher of the impression feel like they know him too.

Now, you can theoretically say whatever you want under the velvet robe of an impression. If you feel so obliged, you can make Trump review Lady Gaga’s “Mayhem” or make Mike Meyers do a cooking video voiceover. But now with generative AI, anyone can create brain-dead-Leonardo-DiCaprio-in-Once-Upon-a-Time-in-Hollywood-pointing-meme video content that only requires of viewer to Recognize and Understand the “joke” being laid out in front of them. However, a truly guffaw-worthy impression is one that is arrived at from a more noble human quality than what goes into generating poop-from-a-butt videos: research — research by a person desperate to unlock and peer into the mechanics of the target of their impression. Oh, and talent.

In a series of articles for Slate on impressions, Jacob Rubin wrote, “The process of becoming famous is a process of becoming a kind of object, and, in America, a familiar kind of object, usually: that is, a product. Impressions of celebrities abet this process, making the already-reduced all the more recognizable and transmissible.” While an impression necessitates a flattening of a person’s existence into tics, vocal quirks, or catchphrases, you don’t land on these kinds of skewering impressions without a fascination with the person you’re imitating.

Which is why I’ve fucking had it with the S.N.L cold open.

BOB ‘IN MALIBU’ DYLAN

I first heard “S.N.L” star James Austin Johnson’s Bob Dylan impression on John Mulaney’s 2024 Netflix show “Everybody’s in L.A.” when Mulaney answered a call from a “viewer” (which was Johnson) chirping in on the episode’s topic of helicopters. This “Bob in Malibu” complains, “They [the helicopters] spook my horses.”

“Bob, what’s your full name?” Mulaney asks.

“Bob Dylan. I’m a recording artist for Columbia,” the cawing voice on the phone replies. When Mulaney inquires him about where he was on the evening of the O.J. Simpson-Bronco chase in June 1994, “Bob, ‘a recording artist for Columbia,’” answers “Krakow, Poland.”

That’s when the rabbit hole appeared before me. Suddenly, I’m watching J.A.J on his 2022 appearance on The Tonight Show and singing “Jingle Bells” using a series of different Bob Dylan voices: Greenwich Village Bob, Nashville Skyline Bob, Rolling Thunder Revue Bob, and Time Out Of Mind Bob. And his greatest feat to date was getting his Bob Dylan on a promo for SNL with Mulaney, which ends with Johnson saying as Dylan, “On the night that Judas betrayed Christ, they broke bread and he said, ‘One of you is gonna sell me up the river—rat me out — sell me to the Pharisees. I think it’s gonna be you.’” I threw my hands up in the air — only a master of the form can drop “the Pharisees” as Bob Dylan for a not-even-two-minute promo.

Bob Dylan is already a unique voice who’s been the target of impressions for decades but what Johnson does is see the man beyond the voice and from that, draws a character. As Johnson says, in an “Uproxx” interview, “It’s more about attitude. It’s not so much about sounding exactly like him.” How he came to this impression is that while on summer vacation, he decided that “if I’m doing an impression of him [Dylan], I should probably know what I’m talking about.” So, he did a deep dive into the discography listening to the music podcast Jokermen.

What’s also so great about his impression is his willingness to ostracize his audience. You don’t need to be a Bobcat to join in on the J.A.J. joy. I’ve seen A Complete Unknown, but like most people, I’m not that familiar with Bob Dylan as an artist or pop culture figure. So for me to laugh at Johnson’s Dylan doesn’t feel like simple “Haha, I get that reference” humor — because I actually don’t get the reference! But there’s reward enough in the obvious joy he brings to the character. Even if you aren’t all caught up with Mr. Dylan and his various Bob-isms, you come away from Johnson’s impression feeling smarter — like you’ve been let in on some secret sauce knowledge.

YES THIS IS POLITICAL

Johnson, best known for his Trump impression, has probably taken it as far as it can go in this current era. While his impression of the President is the best our country has, I don’t need to see another caricature of a man who’s already a caricature of himself. At this point, there’s nothing left to learn about Donald Trump — it’s all on the page. The performance no longer reveals anything new, it only reminds us how exhausted we are by the subject.

I can still find the humor in Trump, because yes, sometimes he still has the sauce but I can’t find it in is staring at a TV screen and laughing at every toothless impression of Trump and Co. by the S.N.L cast (bless them) as they invade our cities and dismantle the institutions that serve its people. How else can I say it’s not funny anymore? I have never feel more nouveau riche than when I was watching Tina Fey as The Devil Wears Cakey Foundation Kristi Noem on the cold open the other weekend. And maybe this speaks more to the state of “S.N.L” in 2025 than it does about political comedy broadly. But perhaps it is true that imitation is the highest and purest form of flattery, in which case, I don’t wanna see it on my screen. I think art and comedy for that matter are best when they expand upon our reality, not just reflect it.

Would I have said the same thing when “The Great Dictator” came out in 1940, after Hitler invaded Poland? Maybe. Or perhaps in retrospect, I’ll come back to Johnson’s Trump with open arms and see the biting criticism for what it was at the time, but in the current context of political comedic laziness combined with the awful, awful shit, I just wanna tune out.