Live From New York, It's the Fake News!Saturday Night Liveand the (Non)Politics of Parody

Abstract

Though Saturday Night Live's “Weekend Update” has become one of the most iconic of fake news programs, it is remarkably unfocused on either satiric critique or parody of particular news conventions. Instead, the segment has been shaped by a series of hosts who made a name for themselves by developing distinctive comic personalities. In contrast to more politically invested contemporary programs, the genre of fake news on Saturday Night Live has been largely emptied to serve the needs of the larger show, maintaining its status as just topical, hip, and unthreatening enough to attract celebrities and politicians, as well as a mass audience.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 53 citations exist upstream.