 Now, it's been said that satire sometimes reaffirms power, while poetry affirms only its own power. You have a podcast where you express a worry that Tina Fey, by mimicking and satirizing Sarah Palin, actually made her more acceptable and more likable in doing so. So fast forward to the current moment. We have Saturday Night Live, Alec Baldwin and Donald Trump. Is that useful satire? Is it not sufficiently negative? Should we be deploying poetry, or is that the effective medium for social commentary? Well, I don't like the Alec Baldwin Donald Trump. I don't think actually it's, I mean if you compare it to the Sean Spicer, it's not as good. It's not as good because the truly effective satirical impersonation is one that finds something essential about the character and magnifies it, something buried that you wouldn't ordinarily have seen or have glimpsed in that person. So with the Spicer impersonation, why that's so brilliant is that it draws out his anger. He's angry at being put in this impossible position, right? That is the essence of that character. So what is a, how does a person respond to this? It's almost an absurd position he's in, right? And he has this kind of, it's not sublimated. It's there, this kind of rage at like, I mean in every one of his utterances, it's like, I can't fucking believe that I am in this. And so that satirical impersonation gets beautifully at that thing. It satirizes that. And so when, I've forgotten the name of the woman who does it, when Melissa McCarthy, when she picks up the podium and back, you know, that's an absurd illustration of that fundamental point. But the Alec Baldwin Trump doesn't get at something essential about Trump. It simply takes his mannerisms and exaggerates them slightly. But he hasn't mined Trump, and there's so, there are many directions you can go with Trump. I mean, the kind of extraordinary insecurity of the man, which I, you know, that, like I said, there are many things you could pluck out. But that, for one, the idea of doing an impersonation where you really thought deeply about what it would mean in a comic way to represent this man's almost kind of tragic level of insecurity. That's an interesting, and Alec Baldwin is not, he's a little too glib to be able to, and that's the problem with Saturday Night Live, the larger problem, and I was trying to get out of that podcast episode on satire, the problem with doing satire through the vehicle of a show like Saturday Night Live is, they're not incentivized to do that kind of deep thinking. The Melissa McCarthy thing is an exception, it's not the rule. Really what they're incentivized to do is to use for the actor who is, in many cases, as famous or more famous than the person they are impersonating. The actor is using the character to further their own ends. Tina Fey is infinitely more popular, more accomplished, more whatever than Sarah Palin will ever be, and so she's using Sarah Palin to further her own ends. That's backwards. She's not inhabiting the character of Sarah Palin in order to make a point about Sarah Palin. She is inhabiting Sarah Palin in order to make a point about Tina Fey. And I feel like so long as satire is done by a television show, which has such a lofty position in the cultural hierarchy, it's always going to be the case that that's what's going to drive their impersonations. They're always going to be sitting on their hands. Remember, they're making fun of Trump six months after they had him on the show, after they were complicit in his rise. And after Jimmy Fallon ruffled his hair on camera. These are people who, maybe that's fine. My point is you can't be an effective satirist if you are so deeply complicit in the object of your satire.