Television teams that write parodies of the news ought to follow the news.
That might seem self-evident, but it’s a piece of advice the hacks at “Saturday Night Live” want to follow if they’re going to avoid embarrassing themselves.
Judging by this weekend’s episode, they don’t — and the backlash has been brutal.
“SNL’s” rake-stepping moment came during the “Weekend Update” segment when host Colin Jost attempted to mock former President Donald Trump but ended up making a fool of himself.
The joke came after a solid two-minutes hate against Trump that included comparing a Manhattan jury’s verdict against him in a civil suit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll to the verdict against O.J. Simpson in a wrongful death suit. The whole thing was spectacularly not funny (though at least some of the audience pretended it was).
But it verged into simple stupidity when Jost accused Trump of making up an “interesting new term called ‘debank.’”
The clip “SNL” played is from a Trump speech Jan. 17 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he pledged to his supporters that he would stop financial institutions from “debanking” conservatives.
“We’re also going to place strong protections to stop banks and regulators from trying to debank you,” Trump told his audience.
Is “SNL” funny nowadays?
“They want to debank you, and we’re going to debank …,” he said.
“I don’t know what the hell ‘debank’ means,” Jost said, sporting a simpering, cloying grin. “But he might have to take de-ambulance to see de-doctor.’”
Leave aside the fact that the punchline might have come from a fifth-grade classroom. (Jost might have followed it up with a classic like “Florida has the biggest soda in the world — it’s Pensa-cola.”)
The sheer ignorance on display — real or feigned — is staggering.
“Debanking” is a strategy to force political opponents to come to heel by cutting off their access to the financial system. The Collins English Dictionary defines it as “to deprive (someone) of banking facilities.”
It’s true that the term is mainly used by Republicans — because Republicans and conservatives are the victims of it — but it’s a term of politics that should be familiar to anyone who claims knowledge of current events — like, say, a host or a writer for “SNL.”
In 2021, a report by the liberal news outlet Axios used the term when it described how Republican lawmakers were infuriated that “climate czar” John Kerry had “leaned on the banks to help reduce U.S. carbon emissions.”
North of the border, in 2022, it’s a strategy Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau employed against the “Freedom Convoy” truckers who opposed his totalitarian steps on coronavirus vaccinations, as conservative radio host and author Ben Shapiro wrote in 2022.
In 2023, Newsweek published a column co-written by Sam Brownback, the Trump administration’s ambassador at large for international religious freedom, and Jeremy Tedesco, senior counsel and senior vice president of corporate engagement for Alliance Defending Freedom, specifically about, as the headline put it, “Politically Motivated Debanking.”
And here in 2024, when Bloomberg reported on Trump’s speech from Jan. 17, it used the term without explanation or even quotation marks, indicating that the news agency built on disseminating financial information assumed it was commonly understood.
(Bloomberg, being liberal, framed it as “so-called de-banking,” and the article went out of the way to claim that there are “few examples of that practice in the U.S.” But it was clear the term itself was not unusual.)
But in the blinkered world of what progressives pretend is humor, in the ignorant silos of “Saturday Night Live” writers and their audience, “debanking” is presented as some kind of bizarre idea Trump just came up with, when the reality is, he was exactly right.
And as the social media reaction showed, it was an attack that backfired badly.
“This is what happens when you live in your own echo chamber,” the X account End Wokeness wrote.
SNL did a segment mocking Trump for using the word de-bank:
“Trump introduced an interesting new term: de-banking. I don’t know what the hell de-bank even means.”
This is what happens when you live in your own echo chamber.
Not one SNL writer or audience member realized that… pic.twitter.com/oUKZjFa1SL
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 28, 2024
“Dilbert” creator and current leftist target Scott Adams chimed in with, “The left debanks while the right debunks.”
The left debanks while the right debunks.
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) January 28, 2024
And they had plenty of company:
SNL continues trying to be funny by mocking former President Trump. In this bit, the SNL host acknowledges he doesn’t know what “debank” is and accuses Trump of making up the term to uproarious audience laughter. They’re clueless. Canadians understand.#TCNT @JonJustice #mnleg pic.twitter.com/w1pB2LLQNs
— SD42GOP (@SD42GOP) January 28, 2024
SNL mocked Trump over his use of the word ‘de-bank’…
But Trump was RIGHT again, OF COURSE https://t.co/NdcudwgdD5
— Just meCassie (@browneyegirl400) January 28, 2024
It also happened to Nigel Farage.
The media is comprised of low-IQ, bubbled buffoons who somehow see themselves as your intellectual betters. pic.twitter.com/SJgb35dJft
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) January 28, 2024
@SNL
Sad that Jost has a net worth of $10mill, his wife, $165Mill, and he is so out of touch as to not know de-bank is not a Trump word. Real comedians used to be hungry performers dying for a shot — SNL just coddles rich boys now- goodbye SNL, lost humor, touch, and me. https://t.co/GxwJzKotRg— SMC, for reals (@thecarrollfam7) January 29, 2024
It’s important to remember the context where this is all happening.
The man who’s now serving as the president of the United States has been exposed as the figurehead of a crime organization that brought in millions of dollars to shell companies that benefited his family. He’s a man who used electronic aliases to hide his activities from the American people when he served as their vice president.
The only serious question is to what degree Joe Biden himself was involved in pimping his own political career. (The answer is almost certainly: “He was in it up to his eyeballs.”)
That same president embarrasses both himself and his country on a near-daily basis with nonsense words and nonsense formulations, or fabulistic stories about a past that never happened, but “SNL” writers and stars choose to spend their time hammering repeatedly on a man who’s challenging him the White House.
And seriously, the best joke they could come up with was “de-ambulance” and “de-doctor”? It’s a disgrace to even the idea of funny.
Of course, maybe the “SNL” writers don’t really know much about Biden’s ethical and legal problems or his increasingly evident loss of cognitive abilities.
Clearly, they don’t follow the news much.
