Political Tribune

Donald Trump, Opinion, Racism

Tom Hanks’ SNL Return As MAGA Supporter Sends Trump Base Into Tailspin

Some audiences misunderstood Tom Hanks' appearance in a Saturday Night Live sketch on Sunday night.

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Throughout its 50-year history, Saturday Night Live has done a great deal of political humor, including memorable impersonations of just about every president and presidential candidate. The sketches haven’t always driven that far into incisive political satire, but a sketch did on one occasion in 2016.

The sketch was called “Black Jeopardy,” and it has since become a recurring sketch on the show. It’s a parody of the popular game show in which the host (Kenan Thompson) and the guests are typically Black and discuss Black topics. On the 2016 version of the sketch, which aired a couple of weeks before the presidential election, Tom Hanks appeared as a contestant as “Doug,” a Southern-accented white man in a MAGA hat who competed against two Black contestants.

The joke of the sketch, which was widely praised at the time by people across the political spectrum, was that urban Black people and white rural MAGA voters have more in common than you would think. However, it does include a moment when Thompson approaches “Doug” to shake his hand, and Hanks backs up as if he’s being robbed, before catching himself and shaking the host’s hand.

On Sunday night, NBC aired its Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary special; it reprised the “Black Jeopardy” concept, with Hanks reappearing halfway through the sketch, again in costume as the Doug character. Doug answers a question correctly, commenting on how more people should attend church. Then, the sketch repeats the moment from the 2016 version when Thompson goes over to shake Doug’s hand, and Doug puts his hands up before shaking Thompson’s hand.

In reaction to this, a lot of MAGA-adjacent people, either misremembering the 2016 sketch and the point it was trying to make, or not having seen it at all, responded in anger on social media, believing Hanks was there to mock them:

A lot of the reactions, going into even uglier territory, referenced baseless rumors, long a staple of QAnon, that Hanks is either a pedophile or an associate of Jeffrey Epstein.

Later on the night, Hanks returned to the stage to introduce a montage of SNL moments from throughout the years that “have aged horribly,” whether “ethnic wigs,” use of racial slurs, or appearances by the likes of Diddy, Jared Fogle, and R. Kelly.

Photo courtesy of X screenshot. 

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Stephen Silver

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Stephen Silver is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, and contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Stephen has authored thousands of articles that focus on politics, technology, and the economy.

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