So why did “Saturday Night Live” kill its opening sketch last week making fun of President Obama’s chest-thumping Osama bin Laden speech and substitute one about “Fox & Friends”?
The script of the Obama sketch — which was used in dress rehearsal but cut for the live show — was posted on the Internet Monday setting off an online political debate about whether the late-night comedy show is taking a dive for Obama.
“This is a special time of year,” Obama (played by Fred Armisen) says, “when we gather together with family and friends to commemorate the shooting of this terrorist, and the gutsy decision that made it possible.”
“Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to be at home this year, as I had to fly to Afghanistan, to remind President Karzai that, exactly one year ago, we killed Osama bin Laden and that the decision to do so was a gutsy one — and was mine.”
The conservative National Review Online yesterday speculated that “SNL” “feels a liberal taboo against mocking Obama in an election year.
“Any thought that ‘SNL’ is an equal-opportunity political slasher is fast becoming, well, a joke.”
“Obviously, I thought it was funny or I wouldn’t have led dress [rehearsal] with it,” Lorne Michaels told The Post yesterday.
“But we were 27 minutes long” and something had to go, he said.
“It wasn’t its politics,” Michaels said. “It was about the comedy.
“The show’s many things, but partisan it is not.”
The author of the skit, longtime “SNL” writer Jim Downey, does not believe it was cut for political reasons, he told the Web site Mediate.
“They just preferred the other piece,” he said.