Political satire, it wasn’t. The headlines from CNN, The Hollywood Reporter and many other media outlets — “‘SNL’ Takes Aim at Pro-Palestine Campus Protesters in Cold Open” reported The Daily Beast — framed it all wrong. It’s not political satire if you leave politics as well as satire out of it.

The sketch presented a community affairs panel TV show on NY1, featuring worried, conflicted parents talking about their confusion regarding the protests, police and administration retaliation, and encampments nationwide on higher-ed campuses.

“SNL” veteran Kenan Thompson, playing the father of a Columbia University undergrad senior, was the Black exception to the white panelists, busting his Uber-driving hump to cover the near-$70,000 in tuition charged by his daughter’s school. “Nothing makes me prouder than young people using their voices” for dissent, Thompson’s character said. Then, the punchline: Not his daughter, of course! Protesting the war on Gaza, or the Hamas assault on Israel, or anything, really — those are white-people problems, which of course they’re not, but …

Topical humor? Sort of. Satire? AWOL. And in 2024 America, says Anne Libera, associate professor of comedy writing and performance at Columbia College Chicago and Second City’s director of comedy studies, “satire is not a useful tool. When we create comedy, we’re using recognition; pain; and some form of psychic or temporal distance.”

Libera told me Monday that with student protests preceded by the worst of a pandemic, preceded by the first of potentially two Trump administrations, “what we have is the pain. But no distance.”

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: Anne, about that “SNL” cold open — I don’t know if it’s even possible to find anything funny in Gaza or Israel or even campus responses right now.

A: That is correct (laughs). The sketch wasn’t particularly good. If I had to guess, I’d guess that Kenan’s character was originally going to be part of “Weekend Update,” and then they thought, huh, maybe we could do something with this for the cold open. The frame for it, and the way people weren’t quite on their lines, suggests to me they rewrote it as a cold open after it was conceived as just a monologue.

I’m directing one of the Second City touring shows right now, and we’ve got a lot of original material. So I’m in the theater, watching comedy being improvised in front of audiences on a regular basis. I can tell you these audiences respond really strongly to absurdity and silliness, and when we become a little more direct about things that are happening in the world, they just seem a little exhausted.

Steve Martin has talked about when he started to change his stand-up act, and got into the ridiculous, wild-and-crazy persona. It came out of a feeling that the audience was getting really tired of the world (after Vietnam), which was serious and complicated and dark. People were ready for absurdity.

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