C2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 27 , 2021
that former SNL star Tina Fey
looked like Sarah Palin and, in her
guest spots on the show, could
nail her voice and cadence with a
heightened spin on an already
headline-making politician.
Arguably the most relevant im-
pression was also the most recent:
Alec Baldwin’s Donald Trump.
The divisive, eventually exhaust-
ing impersonation came after
Hammond portrayed him for
nearly a decade.
Baldwin’s approach felt unin-
spired, particularly compared
with previous presidential takes.
(It also led to SNL’s extensive
overuse of the celebrity cameo.)
Rather than offer a particular spin
on Trump, who many comedians
claimed was unmockable, Bald-
win wore orange makeup, pouted
his lips and furrowed his brows as
he repeated (nearly verbatim)
things Trump actually said.
Regardless of what detractors
thought, however, it worked, gar-
nering the once-struggling legacy
show the best ratings of its 40-
plus year existence. Whereas
presidential impersonations used
to be seasoning for the show, Bald-
win’s Trump felt like an entree. He
reprised the role in nearly every
episode for several years, some-times more than once a show, and
a hungry audience feasted on it.
By the time 2020 rolled around,
SNL had grown so fond of hiring
celebrities to maintain those stel-
lar ratings, it turned to Woody
Harrelson to portray Biden in
three different episodes, John
Mulaney for one, and then loudly
announced that Jim Carrey would
take on the role during the pivotal
election season.
It was a disaster, to put it mild-
ly.
Carrey played Biden with wide-
eyed mania, face twisted and fro-
zen into a pained grin. It felt more
akin to his iconic movie charac-
ters in “The Mask” and “Ace Ven-
tura: Pet Detective” than the
presidential nominee.
“Smart political comedy always
has an element of truth,” Chris Lu,
who served as a senior Obama
White House aide, told The Post
last October. “Like any politician,
Biden certainly has particular
traits that can be caricatured, but
he’s absolutely not the maniacal
figure that Carrey is portraying.”
After six episodes, Carrey was
replaced with Moffat — who
played the character a single time
before the show seemingly for-
went poking fun at the Bidenadministration at all. Some ar-
gued that’s due to the show’s poli-
tics, which are no secret. Others
have suggested Biden is, in es-
sence, too boring to make for good
comedy.
“Biden, so far, has been impreg-
nable,” author and critic Richard
Zoglin wrote in The Post. “The
voice is too bland and devoid of
obvious quirks, and beyond the
occasional ‘C’mon, man,’ his con-
versational manner too muted
and self-effacing to give the paro-
dists much to work with.”
Ironically, Johnson, who was
dubbed by Vanity Fair as “the best
Trump impersonator,” became
the seventh person to take on
Trump’s successor when he joined
the cast in 2021. Johnson has
quickly proved himself a master
imitator, and he plays his Biden
closer to the real thing (albeit, a
rather simple and oft-confused
version of him) rather than going
for an absurdist impression a la
Carvey’s Bush.
He’s only held the gig for a
month, so there’s still room to
tweak and refine a Biden carica-
ture that sticks. But as Saturday’s
cold open reminded us, it’s not an
easy job to keep.
[email protected]K evin Nealon was the first to
take Biden on in a one-off sketch
from 1991 that finds the then-
senator leading the Senate Judici-
ary confirmation hearings of Su-
preme Court nominee Clarence
Thomas. Nealon doesn’t attempt to
transform into Biden but is instead
primarily used to anchor the
sketch, which finds the various sen-
ators arguing over what they feel is
the best way to pick up women.
It wasn’t until Biden became
vice president that the show truly
began grappling with how to sati-
rize him. Over the course of the
Obama administration, Sudeikis
portrayed him as Cool Uncle Joe,
an aggressive, fast-talking,
aviator-sunglasses-wearing loose
cannon known for both his loud
guffaws and his inappropriate
faux pas.
“It’s all the teeth. It’s all teeth,”
Sudeikis said of taking on the
impression, for which he used
large prosthetic chompers.
His take was most reminiscent
of the Onion’s, which imagined
Biden as “Diamond Joe” and “The
President of Vice,” a blue-collar
deviant who washed muscle cars
on the White House lawn, sang
Pearl Jam songs during security
briefings and had a leather vest-
clad dude named Worm sit in for
him at Cabinet meetings.
Fashions, of course, change
over time. When Biden beat out
many of his more progressive op-
ponents and won the most del-
egates on Super Tuesday in 2020,
the Onion ran a markedly differ-
ent headline: “Biden wondering
where all this support was when
he still had a functioning brain.”
The shift was so seismic, one of
the writers responsible for Dia-
mond Joe apologized for its crea-
tion.
“If you’ve ever thought of Joe
Biden as a clueless but lovable
clod, a well-meaning klutz who is
predictable, friendly, and ulti-
mately electable, I am in small
part responsible for that image,”
former Onion writer and features
editor Joe Garden wrote in an
essay published by Vice. “And I’m
sorry.”
“Instead of viciously skewering
a public figure who deserved scru-
tiny, we let him off easy,” he added.
“The joke was funny, but it didn’t
SNL FROM C1 hit hard enough.”
In 2019, with Sudeikis gone and
Biden running for president, SNL
seemed to be grappling with the
same question as the Onion: What
do we do now?
P
residential impersonations
have been an integral part of
SNL’s DNA since it debuted
in 1975, and cast members have
followed various comedic philos-
ophies when shaping them.
The show’s first major impres-
sion, which came less than a
month after the show premiered,
was Chevy Chase’s portr ayal of
President Gerald Ford as a klutzy,
bumbling fool. The impression
was memorable for what Chase
didn’t do: attempt to replicate
real-life Ford in any sort of mean-
ingful — or even insignificant —
way, in either his mannerisms or
his voice.
As the New York Times noted,
“Ford was an accomplished foot-
ball player, skier and golfer and
was not considered unusually
awkward by those around him.
But he contributed to his own
boneheaded persona in a few ill-
timed episodes of camera-range
clumsiness, like stumbling down
the steps of Air Force One in
Austria, wiping out on the slopes
in Vail, Colo., and getting zonked
on the head by a passing chairlift.”
Similarly, Dana Carvey played a
completely absurdist version of
President George H.W. Bush in
the late ’80s and ’90s, waving his
hands around with abandon and
nasally reciting made-up catch-
phrases. The impression “was
never mean, though also not par-
ticularly flattering,” The Washing-
ton Post’s Michael S. Rosenwald
wrote in a remembrance of Bush
in 2018. “In Carvey’s rendering,
Bush was a little more weird, a
little more out of control with his
hands, a little more prone to inex-
plicable, staccato phraseology.”
Bush so enjoyed the impres-
sion, he invited Carvey to the
White House. He also appeared
on SNL himself, where he jokingly
told Carvey’s Bush, “George Bush
here. I’m watching you do your
impression of me, and I gotta say
it’s nothing like me. Bears no
resemblance. It’s bad. It’s bad.”
Darrell Hammond famously
leaned into the image of Bill Clin-
ton as America’s horniest presi-How best for SNL
to satirize Biden?
DANA EDELSON/NBCUNIVERSAL/GETTY IMAGES
Darrell Hammond, left, a nd Will Ferrell lampoon V ice President Richard B. Cheney and President George W. Bush in a 2009 SNL
sketch. The show has had s even Joe Bidens over the years, but the president’s quirklessness hasn’t given them much to work with.dent, all lip bites and thumbs-ups,
while Will Ferrell luxuriated in
George W. Bush’s forgetfulness
and linguistic stumbles — so
much so that he took the charac-
ter to Broadway.Sometimes, the show was
forced to rely on cast members
who couldn’t quite find a good
take on a political figure: Fred
Armisen and Jay Pharoah both
attempted President Barack
Obama, nailing his speech pat-
terns but without crafting memo-
rable takes on him.
Other times, the stars merely
aligned. It was a happy accidentWill Ferrell luxuriated
in George W. Bush’s
forgetfulness and
linguistic stumbles — so
much so that he took
the character to
Broadway.
ness challenges of their new me-
dia ventures,” said Jim Friedlich,
Lenfest’s executive director and
chief executive. “Launching a suc-
cessful new local news brand
almost always takes longer than
its founders hope or expect.” Bai-
num, by contrast, “has been
studying the challenges facing
local news for several years now
and is committed to invest mean-
ingfully and patiently.”
Bainum will be chairman of the
board. The Banner will exist un-
der the umbrella of the nonprofit
Venetoulis Institute for Local
Journalism, named for Bainum’s
old friend and former Baltimore
county executive Ted Venetoulis.
Venetoulis had first ap-
proached Bainum about launch-leave two places that I love.” The
Times endured some of the same
budget cuts that have afflicted the
Sun during the years that it, too,
was owned by Tribune before
finding a measure of stability
under the new ownership of bil-
lionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong.
“I’ve lived through — and sur-
vived — bad newspaper owner-
ship and a bad boss,” she said.
“The L.A. Times still has work to
do on its path toward sustainabil-
ity, but it’s absolutely headed in
the right direction.... I can’t
think of a more important chal-
lenge right now than figuring out
a way to make local journalism
sustainable.”
The Banner name is a refer-
ence to “The Star-Spangled Ban-
ner,” written by Francis Scott Key
in Baltimore after the British
unsuccessfully attempted to pen-
etrate the city’s Fort McHenry in
the War of 1812.
The lofty name comes with a
lofty budget: $15 million for its
first year, with a plan to hire
roughly 50 reporters. But Bainum
says it will be essential that the
Banner find outside revenue to
support it beyond his initial in-
vestment. He said he expects the
publication will be able to draw
from subscriptions, a limited
amount of advertising, philan-
BALTIMORE FROM C1 thropic donations and, eventual-
ly, fees from events or
e-commerce.
Yoshino said that while she
hasn’t determined specific beats
yet, she expects the Banner will
cover city hall, education, crimi-
nal justice and inequality in addi-
tion to providing more “service”
coverage. The Banner will also
cover sports, culture and food.
Throughout the process of con-
ceiving the Banner and selecting
an editor, Bainum and his key
deputy, Wall Street Journal vet-
eran Imtiaz Patel, consulted
widely with news leaders across
the country, including those at
digital start-ups such as Denver’s
Colorado Sun and Memphis’s
Daily Memphian, as well as non-
profit journalism leaders at the
Texas Tribune and ProPublica to
explore different journalism
models.
Patel, who will serve as chief
executive and publisher of the
Banner, stressed that the organi-
zation has focused first on build-
ing its business operation — his
earliest hires were in areas such
as marketing, subscriptions and
technology — so the journalists
have a strong commercial institu-
tion to step into. Many other
media start-ups, he said, are “a
bunch of journalists trying to
figure out what to do with sub-
scriptions.”
The Banner is also receiving
support from the nonprofit Len-
fest Institute for Journalism,
which owns the Philadelphia In-
quirer.
“Wealthy, first-time owners are
sometimes surprised by the busi-ing a digital news operation in
2015, and Bainum turned him
down. But when Venetoulis tried
again in 2020, Bainum was more
receptive, and their discussion
launched the months-long effort
to buy the Sun from Tribune, and
eventually to try to keep Tribune
out of the hands of Alden Global
Capital.
Venetoulis died suddenly this
month just as Bainum was pre-
paring to announce his new non-
profit, prompting Bainum to
name it in his honor.
Bainum’s other boosters in-
clude David Simon, a former Bal-
timore Sun reporter who created
the HBO hit “The Wire.” Simon
has committed to write a monthly
column for the Banner. Billion-
aire publisher and former New
York mayor Mike Bloomberg has
also offered guidance and exper-
tise.
Among the media leaders Bai-
num and Patel conferred with
was Norm Pearlstine, former top
editor of the Los Angeles Times,
who recommended Y oshino, ac-
cording to Bainum: “He was very
high on her.”
Yoshino was among the pool of
candidates considered to replace
Pearlstine, a position that went
earlier this year to Kevin Merida,
formerly of The Washington Post
and ESPN’s the Undefeated.
Yoshino first talked to Bainumover Zoom one Saturday in Sep-
tember. The call was scheduled to
be one hour; the two talked for
nearly three, Bainum said. He
interviewed eight or nine candi-
dates for the role, whittled down
from an initial list of nearly 150
people. “She was our first choice
the whole time,” he said.
Yoshino said she “has a lot to
learn” about Baltimore and plans
to start her new role in December
by researching the city and hiring
a team. There is no launch date
for the publication but rather an
initial goal to start publishing in
the first half of 2022.
The Banner is targeting a goal
of 100,000 subscribers to break
even; the greater Baltimore re-
gion has a population of about
2.5 million.
“We haven’t sold one subscrip-
tion,” Bainum said. “And nobody
knows our brand. So that’s the
task a start-up has. It’s going to be
a challenge.”
He recalled his years in the
Maryland General Assembly in
the late 1970s and the early 1980s,
when there were six major papers
on the State House beat. “There
was always someone in local gov-
ernment being incarcerated back
then,” Bainum said, bemoaning
the shortage of attention today.
“Who knows what shenanigans
are going on now?”
[email protected]Los Angeles Times managing editor will lead news start-up in Baltimore
“Nobody knows our
brand. So that’s the
task a start-up has. It’s
going to be a challenge.”
Stewart Bainum, on the launch of
the news site Baltimore BannerTHE VENETOULIS INSTITUTE/THE VENETOULIS INSTITUTE
Stewart Bainum, left, who tried to buy the Baltimore Sun, has
hired L.A. Times Managing Editor K imi Yoshino to run his news
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