Review: Hillary Clinton on ‘Saturday Night Live’

By JAMES PONIEWOZIKOCT.

Kate McKinnon, left, as Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mrs. Clinton as Val in a sketch on "Saturday Night Live." Credit Dana Edelson/NBC

Hillary Rodham Clinton appears to have figured out how best to neutralize, at least for a night, a potential public image problem. Just pour her a stiff drink.

On the season premiere of “Saturday Night Live,” Mrs. Clinton played “Val,” a kindly bartender opposite Kate McKinnon, the cast member who portrays her. It was a nice encounter — surprisingly nice, given Ms. McKinnon’s work to date.

Ms. McKinnon’s impression has been the toughest “S.N.L.” has done of Mrs. Clinton in her long political career. In 2008, Amy Poehler played her sharply but admiringly, as a well-prepared aspirant whose fault was mainly being too eager. Arguably, Ms. Poehler’s Clinton was even a rough model for her later role as the idealistic if overzealous bureaucrat, Leslie Knope, on “Parks and Recreation.”

Ms. McKinnon has taken some of the same attributes of Mrs. Clinton and sharpened them into a flint dagger. She’s played the candidate as unhinged by ambition, struggling to ask for votes rather than simply demand them. Where Ms. Poehler gave Mrs. Clinton a fulsome belly laugh, Ms. McKinnon’s is a brusque, “Hah hah HAH!” (“What a relatable laugh!” she once congratulated herself.) But the key to Ms. McKinnon’s character is in her face: the eyes flaring into burning headlamps of desire, her teeth bared in an Ed Grimley rictus.

Those teeth were still there in their joint sketch, but the satire was comparatively toothless. Candidate and doppelgänger commiserated about the campaign trail and generously poked fun at election-speak. When Mrs. Clinton’s Val asked her what she did for a living, Ms. McKinnon’s Clinton answered, “First, I am a grandmother. Second, I am a human entrusted with this one green Earth.” (“Oh, I get it,” Mrs. Clinton said. “You’re a politician.”) But there was no mention, for instance, of the controversy over the candidate’s using a personal email server while Secretary of State.

There were a few digs, notably when a bar patron thanked Mrs. Clinton for supporting same-sex marriage. Ms. McKinnon suggested, in character, that she should have supported it sooner. “You did it pretty soon,” Mrs. Clinton said. “Could have been sooner,” Ms. McKinnon-as-Mrs. Clinton said, pointedly.

But it rarely hurts candidates to show up and take their lumps on a national comedy show, even if we’re a long way from the days when it was stunning to see Richard Nixon say “Sock it to me?” on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.” Mrs. Clinton’s appearance in character was a departure: candidates usually play themselves, though her Val was really a sort of meta-image of Mrs. Clinton’s ideal voter. (“I’m just an ordinary citizen,” Val said, “who believes the Keystone pipeline will destroy our environment.”)

Mrs. Clinton also showed off a serviceable Donald Trump impression. And that may have said more than anything in the sketch about the state of satire in this election cycle: you can’t get away from Mr. Trump right now, even when you have his chief opponent from the opposing party in the flesh.

In fact, Mrs. Clinton didn’t even get the episode’s cold-open segment: that went to Mr. Trump, in the person of cast member Taran Killam, with Cecily Strong as his wife, Melania. (Ms. Strong also played Mrs. Clinton’s adviser Huma Abedin on the later segment.) This segment was harsher, with the duo sending up Mr. Trump’s insults of women, his ideological inconsistency and his vanity. (“I’m just like you, a regular Joe,” he told voters, “but better.”)

The Clinton sketch, on the other hand, ended with the candidate singing a few bars of “Lean on Me” with Ms. McKinnon. If Mr. Trump is going to be this much of a presence in late night, then, he might be wise to follow Mrs. Clinton’s lead and appear on the show. As his fellow New Yorker discovered, it’s possible to find somebody to lean on in the world of political satire. You just have to show up.