So Tina Fey has been gaining worldwide notoriety this fall for her portrayal of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live, and the surrounding debate over which of them is funnier, which one is actually taking her career seriously, which one is likely to have a high profile job next year, etc.
Naturally, this in turn led people to wonder whether the real Palin would take a turn on the show, and if so, just what might happen.
Now, we have our answer:
Nothing.
Nothing at all happened.
She was given about two lines to speak, which I'll transcribe for you.
At the start of the show, the first sketch was a "breaking the fourth wall" routine about how Palin showed up while Fey was doing her impersonation, and the backstage reaction, followed by her coming out on stage to finish the routine. Here's what they let her say:
Thank you. Thank you. Now, I'm not going to answer any of your questions. But I do want to take this opportunity to say "live from New York it's Saturday night."
"Not taking any questions." Ha ha. Funny because it's true, not because it's, you know, funny.
Then during the Weekend Update news bit, they brought her out "to clear up misconceptions", and again she explicitly refused to say anything:
Palin: Thank you, Seth. Thanks, Amy. And thanks for the chance to come out here tonight. But I've been thinking it over, and I'm not going to do the piece that we rehearsed.
Seth: But you were really good at it.
Palin: Oh I know. And it was really fun, too, but my gut is telling me that it might be a bad idea for the campaign.
Seth: Are you sure?
Palin: Yeah. After a lot of thought, I think it might just cross the line.
And from there, the regular cast goes into a silly rap routine they they were going to have Palin so. (Yeah, sure they were.)
There was a little bit more patter than this, but these two lines were the heart of what they had her say.
Seriously.
It wasn't funny, it wasn't revealing in any overt way, and it played to negative perceptions (and realities) of her campaign -- for example, she's most effective when she's "on script" (e.g. The nomination speech), but has a natural inclination to improvise off-script, which doesn't work well (e.g. The Gibson Couric interviews), so she's being coached on the material and urged to stay on message (e.g. The Couric Interview with McCain sitting in), and also crank up the folksy personality avoid answering direct questions at all costs (e.g. The VP debate, and all the dozens of press conferences that, err, haven't happened).
This is all exactly how the SNL routines went down: she stayed on script; she appeared to have fought the urge to improvise (you could see her reading from the teleprompters), she probably rehearsed a lot to say all that nothing. She sprinkled in the expected "you betcha", and most of all, the lines she was given went out of their way to explicitly say she wasn't going to say anything.
Unfunny, and self-destructive.
How can her campaign possibly have thought this was a good idea?
I'm almost surprised she wasn't waving a little white flag from the Weekend Update desk.
I can already picture her next line, if the show ever has her back:
"Live in Washington DC, it's President Obamaaaaaa"
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