Is it time to stop making fun of Joe Biden?

The iconic comedy show “Saturday Night Live” began its 50th season Saturday with a collection of skits making fun of the players in the 2024 presidential election — and one person who is no longer officially involved.
The sketch featuring President Joe Biden, played by Dana Carvey, was short but still delivered a punch, making fun of Biden’s verbal mannerisms and mental acuity. The bit would have been funnier six months ago.
Coming as it did after Biden’s supporters pressured him to step out of the 2024 race following a devastating debate with Donald Trump, it raised a question: Is it time to stop making fun of Joe Biden?
At 81, he’s the oldest sitting president in U.S. history, and his plentiful verbal gaffes and lapses of memory, coupled with the expressions of concern about his health from people close to him, have caused some people to say that Biden should resign the presidency and let Kamala Harris run as an incumbent. The White House’s unwillingness to share information about Biden’s health has fed rumors about his condition, and social media distortions have made matters worse.
In recent days, people have expressed concern over Jill Biden “running a cabinet meeting” — she didn’t, according to the fact-checking website PolitiFact — and there was widespread derision over Biden misunderstanding a reporter’s question about Israeli strikes in Yemen. He thought she was asking about a pending longshoremen’s strike and answered accordingly. To be fair, that’s a mistake that any one of us could have made, with all the background noise as Biden was preparing to board a plane at Dover Air Force Base Sunday.
In the “Saturday Night Live” skit, the Biden character is standing next to Maya Rudolph, who plays Vice President Kamala Harris, and bumbles through remarks saying “And guess what?” and “by the way” — mimicking the presidency’s tendency to go off topic. He also said, “A lot of people forget I’m president, including me,” and at one point, lowers his voice to a stage whisper to say “The rich don’t pay their fair share” — which was a spot-on impression of Biden’s tendency to whisper during speeches in order to make a point. At the end, the Biden character verbally stumbles from “Build back better” to “I can’t believe it’s not butter.”
In the ending, the Harris character tries to get Carvey’s Biden to leave the stage by saying “Thank you for putting country first and handing over the reins,” to which Biden belligerently replies, “I didn’t want to! They made me!” which is something many people believe to be true to an extreme. In the days after Biden stepped down, some people were speculating on social media that he hadn’t even signed the letter announcing his decision.
You don’t have to be a Biden fan to wonder at what point it’s going too far to poke fun at a frail octogenarian months away from retirement, and surely we’re approaching that point — and maybe have already passed it — if we don’t want to normalize poking fun at the elderly. Like other presidents, Biden has been a target of SNL before, portrayed by actors such as Woody Harrelson and Jim Carrey, and there’s certainly plenty about his mannerisms (and, many might say, policies) that lend themselves to comedy. And yet we’ve been in new territory since the June 27 presidential debate, with a sitting president who is a lame-duck not because primary voters rejected him, but because many people believe he is not up to the task. In this territory, the most recent SNL portrayal is more than a little cringe.
That said, comedy isn’t supposed to make us feel comfortable but to point out things about the world while making us laugh. In the same show, Jim Gaffigan savagely skewered Tim Walz’s ebullient mannerisms, and James Austin Johnson’s Donald Trump had some people wincing about the reference to an assassination attempt that killed one man and wounded two others.
And guess what — Biden is still the most important public figure in America — and, by the way, as such, ought to be able to take a joke.
But the Biden sketch was still a stinging reminder of what a peculiar year we are in. Way back in February, a headline in The Atlantic dubbed this “the weirdest election in political history.” We had no idea then what was coming, and probably still don’t. The SNL cast and writers are no doubt loving everything going on in the political world. For the rest of us, Jan. 20, 2025 can’t get here soon enough.