When the crowd burst into applause when Kamala Harris appeared Saturday Night Live This weekend she was surprised by their appearance, perhaps they were the only ones there. The moment Air Force Two changed course in mid-air to head to New York instead of Detroit, spirits were high. Lorne Michaels said it before SNLThe season began with the presidential candidates not appearing on the show for fear of violating the Federal Communications Commission's equal opportunity regulations, but the chance of being thrust into the national spotlight must have been greater than he could resist. And if it gave the vice president a few moments of uncritical admiration on the final campaign weekend, all the better.

Michaels has long proclaimed that the show is neutral on election matters, and last month's political skits have made clear nods to bipartisanship. But the swipes at Harris were either loving or toothless or both, either making fun of her linguistic tics or half-heartedly repeating right-wing attack lines, while the portrayal of Trump, if not exactly vicious, at least completely devoid of empathy, James condemned Austin Johnson's Trump rambles endlessly at the podium while Maya Rudolph's Harris turns away from the campaign. Weekend updateColin Jost merely formalized an already obvious bias when he joked that the election “would decide whether the next president is Kamala Harris or whether everyone is in.” SNL is checked.”

SNL’s attempts to embrace the political moment have often been worthy – remember Kate McKinnon’s “Hallelujah”? And his celebrity appearances often descend into subservience. But Rudolph's confrontation with the real Harris, staged as if they were seeing each other in a locker room mirror, managed to strike a valuable balance between parody and poignancy. When Rudolph's Harris wished there was someone like-minded she could talk to, “a black South Asian woman running for president, preferably from the Bay Area,” the joke was in the specificity, but it was also Reminder of how rare a figure is in America Politics is the real Harris – so much so that only her comedic doppelganger can understand what she's been through.

There's a certain jolt inherent when public figures confront their imitators, the kind of expectant silence that reigns in a classroom when the teacher turns unexpectedly to catch a child making faces behind his back. But Harris seemed too happy to make even the slightest complaint except in the form of a question: “I don't really laugh like that, do I?” At a Trump campaign stop the following day, Marco Rubio quipped that Harris' unbridled laughter was “probably right there.” worth two to three million votes.” But while Republicans have tried to make an issue of Harris' laugh, what? Saturday Night LiveWhen the cameras caught it, there was not a sinister laugh but a radiant smile, carried by a whopping 30 seconds of tumultuous applause, as if a woman who had spoken to stadium-sized crowds was overwhelmed by the admiration of a few hundred. In a day or a week, this moment could feel like a final whiff of hopium, a crowd of blue state elites applauding their own righteousness. But with the polls throwing emotions in every direction and both sides acting like they were losing, it was balm to see a candidate acting like something good could actually come out of the race, if only for the period of a few minutes.

SNLTrump, on the other hand, was, by his own words, “in full swing,” dancing freely on stage in front of an apathetic audience while clearly wishing he could be somewhere else. And although the real Trump campaign requested and received the same amount of time, the minute-long message Trump recorded for NBC on Sunday was similarly low-energy. It felt like he, not the network, was the one being forced to comply. Trump has always fed off his crowds, but in recent weeks he has shown signs of turning against them, complaining about broken microphones and looking more drained than energized. If only he had someone to talk to To.