They've always been political, beginning with Gerald Ford's alert Secret Service agents who were always wrestling something to the ground, to Dan Aykroyd's Jimmy Carter giving overdose advice on a call-in radio show, to Ronald Reagan's stupid/not stupid switch skit, and on and on.
I've written before that they accidentally found their super-power when the mocked the first Bush-Gore debate in 2000, potentially turning the tide against Al Gore's sighing, interrupting, crowding behavior. I don't think they set out to politically assassinate anybody at the time, but their mockery struck a mortal blow to Al Gore's chances with that skit. WorldNetDaily's multi-part series on the Gore family in Tennessee did the rest, and Gore ended up losing both his home state and Bill Clinton's home state.
Fast-forward to 2008, and SNL learned to use their power for evil when they mocked Sarah Palin's debate, creating the mythology of the "I can see Russia from my house" line, and propelling Tina Fey to A-list fame. They never touched a Democrat that way again.
After they successfully took down the Palin/McCain ticket, they never looked back. They became shrill, angry, and one-sidedly leftist. They refused to mock Obama, and tepidly treated Hillary Clinton.
I stopped watching after the Palin show, and never looked back. They learned their lesson with Gore and swore never to repeat it. Just like with the rest of late night television, what was once funny (Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, early David Letterman) became dreary left-wing agitprop, and SNL happily joined the fold. It's the same lesson that the LAAP-dog media learned after President Trump won in 2016.
-PJ
For some people, maybe. For me it was before the campaign when he showed up in a bookstore for a book signing for that ridiculous global warming book—without his wedding ring, a shiny whitened dent around his ring finger—and after his talk that evening went partying with a bunch of people I knew from Sierra Club. A few weeks later he announced for President, had the wedding ring back on, and was bending his wife over to kiss her onstage. Creep.
The other thing was, I took a 12-year-old black school child whom I was mentoring to the book signing and sat in the front row. I took the kid up and introduced him after his talk. Algore looked at me like I was out of my mind. I guess his roots betrayed him like a bottle blond's.
Unlike many here, I do not consider the 1975-1980 period the "golden era" of SNL. It was by and large an uneven show with some really cringe-worthy skits. For example the skit about the mall store that sold scotch tape only. Or the land-shark skit with Lorraine Newman. But some really great skits as well.
After a few forgettable years in the early 1980s when Lorne briefly left the show, SNL started really hitting its stride and had its best era (in my opinion) from roughly the 1985-1995 period. During those years we had really great cast members like Jon Lovitz, Victoria Jackson, Dennis Miller, Phil Hartman, Chris Farley and Mike Myers just to name a few. Eddie Murphy, I never really cared for. Didn't find him funny at all. Not even in the movies he did.
SNL stopped being entertaining when it decided to take a knee to the politically correct "woke" movement over the past 15-20 years.