Dissociation, Misogyny, and Saturday Night Live in Authoritarian Times

Before a particularly vicious Saturday Night Live monologue finally broke me last weekend, I hadn’t felt anything for weeks.

Dissociation, an unconscious coping device to protect ourselves from trauma, is fascinating. I can think I’m fine, but then I find myself staring at Connections until my eyes cross and, despite a 97% win streak, the words now make very little sense.

Our brains aren’t made to function in a state of never-ending hypervigilance, which many of us have been in since 2015. I wrote about the authoritarian threats of Handsy McGrabsalot’s first presidential bid — which he won after bragging on tape about sexual assault. I reported on anti-Trump protests, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and more for The Village Voice, and NBC’s role in Trump’s rise to power for Bitch Magazine. Wrestled intergenerational trauma to analyze Sean Spicer’s Holocaust denial. Reckoned with rage to cover the corrupt Kavanaugh hearings that placed a second credibly accused sexual abuser on the Supreme Court (where he helped overturn Roe v. Wade, inevitably resulting in women bleeding out in parking lots). Fell into deep depression as ambulances blared outside my Brooklyn window 24/7 while I dissected Trump’s deadly COVID-19 disinformation, right-wing media’s gleefully cruel framing of babies in cages, and Fox’s role in a bloody failed coup for my forthcoming media literacy graphic novel.

By the time Joe Biden dropped out of the race, I only had it in me to critique coverage of Harris’ campaign and offer tips on fighting disinformation in brief social media bursts and interviews. I shut down well before JD Vance mocked “childless cat ladies” and slandered Haitian immigrants with fake pet-eating memes. Before Tucker Carlson creepily called American women “bad girls” who deserved a “vigorous spanking” from “Daddy Trump.” Before Elon Musk’s PAC ads branded Harris “the C word.” Before the sundowning adjudicated sexual abuser and avowed “dictator on day one” himself boycotted journalism to hang out in the misogynist manosphere, held a Nazi-style rally at Madison Square Garden, and gloated that he’d “protect” women “whether the women like it or not.”

So when America opted for more of this, supercharged by Project 2025 and king-like immunity, my brain masked my fury and sorrow in cerebral bubble wrap. It took five full days before the dissociation began to lift. I’d had no trouble monitoring harrowing news coverage all week, but by Sunday morning, just a few minutes into watching a TV discussion about kleptocracy compromising our national security, I finally FELT. It was sudden: a deep, sinking sense of dread, heaviness, and despair. The sensation was emotional and physical, like being sucked into a pit of ’80s movie quicksand.

I know dread, heaviness, and despair are not productive. Action is. Strategy is. Resistance is ... which is why I’d already attended six tactical movement Zoom calls to resist oncoming threats. It’s why I finally added video to my communications tool kit, committed to building community and advancing media literacy on Bluesky, and started planning where modest recurring donations can do the most good.

Yet all of a sudden reality was too much. Taking the advice of therapists and organizers, I tried to protect my peace. I went for a walk with my husband, and got brunch at the local café. I edited a book chapter. I made hot cocoa from scratch. I watched clips of Tig Notaro, Josh Johnson, W. Kamau Bell, and other favorite comedians. It worked. By Sunday evening a calm equilibrium set back in. And then I decided to try to watch Saturday Night Live.

In the words of ’90s romcom royalty: Big mistake. Big. Huge.

I skipped it live because I assumed comic Bill Burr might be a salt-in-our-wounds choice to host such a meaningful episode. I hate that my instincts were right. Promising to “keep it light,” he opened his monologue with a hacky joke about Asians spreading COVID-19. Sure, just a little “light” racism aimed at a group who suffered violent hate crimes based on that premise.

Two minutes later, Burr — as host of SNL’s first post-election episode — framed Trump’s victory this way:

“All right, ladies, enough with the pantsuits, OK? It’s not working. Stop trying to have respect for yourselves. You don’t win the office on policy, you gotta whore it up a little bit. I’m not saying go full Hooters, but find a happy medium between Applebee’s and ‘your dad didn’t stick around.’ You all know how to get a free drink. And I know a lot of ugly women — feminists, I mean — don’t want to hear this message, but just tease them a little bit. Make a farmer feel like he’s got a shot.”

I shut off the TV and sobbed for 10 minutes.

The sinking sensation I’d intercepted that morning roared back. It hit my gut as grief combined with that same dirty feeling I’ve gotten whenever I’ve been groped or grabbed by a street harasser. To say I was furious is an understatement, but the sense of profound disrespect cut deeper. That monologue was JD Vance and Tucker Carlson. It was a cleaned-up-for-primetime version white supremacist Nick Fuentes’ and alleged rapist Andrew Tate’s cackling taunts about men controlling women’s bodies. Most damningly, it was an institutional statement from SNL and showrunner Lorne Michaels that at best they DGAF about the impact of kicking women when we’re down — at worst, that this 50-year-old hallmark of American comedy wants to multiply our pain. To make us feel small, disgusting. Wants us to know we’re on our own, that the culture now belongs to the boys and men who revel in their perceived power over us. Wants to rub our faces in it.

Maybe it’s because I’m a lifelong comedy nerd that SNL’s aggressive contempt finally drove home the heartbreaking humiliation of being a woman in America now (no less a feminist witnessing the progress we fought so hard to secure being dismantled piece by piece), only for a comedic escape to essentially spit in my face and tell me I deserve it.

Ultimately, this isn’t a Bill Burr problem. It’s a Lorne Michaels problem. Burr’s knuckle-dragging wouldn’t have been more tedious than a mosquito had I seen it in a viral comedy club or TikTok video. Bros who confuse punching down for edgy hilarity are a dime a dozen. Yawn. This was devastating specifically because of Saturday Night Live’s iconic role in TV history and in American life.

It’s easy to gripe that SNL is passé, no longer relevant. That claim’s been around almost as long as the show itself. While its political satire has lagged behind Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, Late Night With Seth Meyers, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, and The Daily Show for at least a decade, SNL is still an undeniable institution. Its responses to major cultural events remain a pop cultural benchmark for historians and entertainers alike. And in times of national crisis, it has previously risen to meet the moment.

Just 18 days after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, SNL’s 27th season debuted with then-NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani flanked by stoic firefighters and police officers who’d spent weeks digging thousands of victims out of the rubble. Reading the words written for him, he spoke of their heroism and the city’s resilience. It was “up to us to face the future with renewed determination. Our hearts are broken, but they are beating stronger than ever … We will not yield to terrorism. We will not let our decisions be made out of fear,” he promised. After Paul Simon sang “The Boxer,” camera panning over the somber faces of the first responders, Giuliani told Michaels that “Having our institutions up and running sends a message that New York City is open for business. Saturday Night Live is one of our great NYC institutions, and that’s why it’s important for you to do your show tonight.”

Knowing that “in bad times ... people turn to the show,” Michaels used that influence to heal a country — and especially a city —immobilized with fear and trauma, where laughter seemed almost like a betrayal of the dead. “Can we be funny?” he asked, implicitly on behalf of any American who felt as if they might never feel joy again. “Why start now?” Rudy replied, the only laugh line in the eight-minute cold open. The audience erupted. It was a turning point for the nation, showing that maybe —somehow, someday — they might be OK again.

The cold open following Trump’s 2016 win found a pant-suited Kate McKinnon at a grand piano singing “Hallelujah,” a dirge in a dimly lit studio. The song concluded and McKinnon turned to the audience, uttering just two sentences through a strained smile and watery eyes: “I’m not giving up, and neither should you. And live from New York, it’s Saturday Night.” The gravity of the situation was clear.

Yet now — after an emboldened sexual predator has been given unchecked power to attempt to replace democratic governance with fascism — Michaels decided that Burr’s gutter misogyny was the best of all possible responses.

SNL has had high and low points in its 50 years on air, from brilliant sketches to notorious bombs. Michaels added fuel to the vicious backlash against Sinéad O’Connor after she protested the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse of children on the show, and he has helmed what some former cast members and writers have described as a racist and sexist workplace. Yet the show has also given us so much, launching the careers of a half century of comedy legends (including these 23 faves).

George Carlin, the first-ever host of SNL, once told Larry King that “comedy, traditionally, has picked on people in power — people who abuse their power.” Comedians who demean vulnerable “underdogs” including “women and gays and immigrants,” he said, often do so to appeal to “young white men who are threatened by these groups” and encourage a collective “sharing of anger and rage at these targets.”

Imagine if Michaels had heeded his wisdom. If, instead of parroting the same alt-right mockery of women that permeated the “bro election,” SNL had chosen a politically savvy comedian like former cast members Julia Louis-Dreyfus or Seth Meyers to deliver a monologue promising that the show won’t capitulate in advance for fear of retribution. They could’ve even upcycled Giuliani’s and McKinnon’s old scripts:

We will not yield to fascism. We will not let our decisions be made out of fear. We won’t attack vulnerable Americans with our comedy, and we’ll expose the weakness of politicians who do. We won’t be silenced, and we won’t pull punches to coddle the world’s weirdest would-be strongman. Laughing at the emperor’s naked ass when it’s clothed in bigotry and authoritarianism sends a message that our institutions will prevail. Saturday Night Live is one of our great American institutions, and that’s why it’s important that we punch up. No matter what comes next, we are not giving up, and neither should you.

The day after SNL broke my heart, the New York Comedy Festival helped to heal it. I took my husband to see one of our favorite improv shows, Gravid Water, for his birthday. It reminded me why comedy is always my quickest connection to joy, and the way I cope with trauma.

Not all comedy is political. But brave, uncompromising satire exposes bigotry, hypocrisy, and corruption; raises morale; often leads to changes in public policy; and can ultimately weaken the power of autocrats. So, from now on, every time SNL or another hack comedian pisses me off, I’m going to donate to GOLD Comedy, a training school for women and nonbinary comics to grow their comedy careers. I hope you will, too.