• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, November 9, 2015

How stupid can you get?

When it comes to Donald Trump’s appearance as guest-host this past weekend on “Saturday Night Live,” the answer to that question is off the charts.

What a festival of time-wasting idiocy that show was -- for Trump first and foremost, but also for anyone who watched it. Does anyone even work on this show? What a mess, what a dud, what a flop.

I have long held the opinion that the writers on “Saturday Night Live” must represent the dregs of TV comedy writing. Here you have a show that airs intermittently -- a few Saturdays in a row here, a few there, and then a few weeks off -- and the sketches feel like they were written the night before by college sophomores pulling an all-nighter.

By contrast, think about all the weeknight late-night shows -- “Fallon,” “Colbert,” “Kimmel,” “Seth Meyers,” “James Cordon,” “The Daily Show,” “Conan” and in the not-too-distant past “Letterman,” “Leno,” “The Colbert Report” and Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” (which won Emmys for years and years). On these shows, a ton of high-quality written comedy material gets produced night after night. And yet, on “SNL,” time and time again for years, the show comes across as having hardly been worked on at all.

This weekend’s Trump show was a case in point. What an unimaginative, unfunny pile of dreck this show was. Trump dancing in a Drake spoof? That was an embarrassment. The sketch in which Trump live-tweeted during a sketch and labeled the bit’s various participants as “losers”? That sketch was a loser -- dull, pointless, over-long (which became painfully obvious after about 15 seconds).

And what about the one where The Donald played a musician in a bar band playing something called a “laser harp”? Huh? You may have had the same dumbfounded reaction a few minutes later in a sketch in which Trump appeared as a brash music producer. Or you may have wondered: What is the “SNL” creative process under which this kind of idea makes it to the air? Does some writer suddenly declare, “Hey, I have an idea: Trump as a music producer!” and then the thing gets made regardless of whether it makes sense comedically or in any other way? It seems so.

Let the record show that at least one sketch dealt with the main themes of Trump’s campaign for president -- his views on Mexico and the need for a border wall, his promises to outfox Putin and the Chinese in negotiations on trade and military matters, and others. This was the sketch -- seen in the show’s first half-hour -- in which Trump was seen in an Oval Office meeting in 2018, midway into his first term as president, with First Lady Melania sitting beside him (played by Cecily Strong). This sketch actually worked because it was what anyone watching the show expected to see: A satirical sketch about Trump the candidate. Using him in any other context was senseless.

As for Trump, he should reconsider the value of whoever on his campaign staff advised that he participate in this irrelevant, useless, embarrassing exercise. You can imagine the conversation: Some adviser who probably never actually watches “SNL” probably told The Donald it would help him score with “young people” if he appeared on this show that young people seem to like.

Maybe this adviser persuaded Trump that he would come across as “hip” if he agreed to put himself in the silly, juvenile situations that are “SNL’s” stock-in-trade. Well, hipness is over-rated. And in the context of “SNL,” hipness is synonymous with stupidity.

What will Trump’s media team advise next? An interview with Mad magazine?