Media Scribbler

Seriously, did anyone watch “Saturday Night Live” last night to see Anna Faris from “The House Bunny”? When word leaked that Tina Fey was going to be doing another Sarah Palin impersonation, suddenly enough people found a reason to stop watching SportsCenter after the Georgia-Alabama game for the show to get a 6.0 Nielsen rating share. The Saturday primetime show with the most viewers on the nets, “48 Hours Mystery“, had a 5.0.

If you aren’t in America (blame NBC and Hulu) or don’t want to view the clip, Amy Poehler did a surprisingly good Katie Couric impression as Fey/Palin answered questions about her recent trip to New York, saying her family had enjoyed visiting “the crazy evolution museum”, how she was disappointed that none of the people she thought were Osama Bin Laden were actually him, and how she and McCain would get all those UN jobs back “from those foreigners” when elected.

Fey called Bono “the king of Ireland” and explained the geography of Russia and Alaska as being so close that it’s Alaskans’ responsibility to tell Russians to “shoo” when they come over the border for no good reason. And when Poehler/Couric pressed her on her foreign policy plans (beyond “spreading democracy to everyone who wants it”), Fey/Palin asked to use one of her lifelines (next up, a fake Meredith Viera should actually do Fey/Palin on “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”. Or better yet, bring Anne Robinson over to line up all the SNL political impersonators for an episode of “The Weakest Link”. Better than a debate!)

Since NBC has discovered such comic gold in bringing Fey back to do Palin (another quote from Poehler/Couric: “It seems to me that when you’re cornered, you become increasingly adorable”) it only makes sense that Darrel Hammond make a return trip to SNL to reprise his Bill Clinton impersonation during “Weekend Update”, where he gave special thanks to musical guest Duffy, told everyone how he is such a Democratic Party stalwart because “I love parties” as he gave a non-ringing endorsement of Barack Obama (and why am I not shocked that fake-Bill loves “Californication”?)

And oh yeah, there was a parody of Friday night’s first presidential debate, hosted by Chris Parnell playing Jim Lehrer, with Hammond as Sen. John McCain wanting to cancel the presidential debates for a series of pie-eating contests, then to appear semi-nude at town hall meetings, and then have both of them “airdropped into Waziristan, and neither of us comes back until we’ve found and captured Osama Bin Laden.”

Alas, this skit ran very long and was actually less visually interesting than the actual debate, and Fred Armisten suffers as the only political impersonator on SNL that doesn’t really capture any of the essence of his politician (he plays Sen. Barack Obama.) But he did do some nice jabs at Obama’s alleged ties to the Chicago political machine and by saying he’d “pull out the race card” if negotiations with foreign countries turned sour.

Next week should be entertaining if Fey returns to take on the Palin/Biden debate scheduled next week. By the time this is over, Palin may be trying to distance herself from that uncanny resemblance by switching glasses.

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