Saturday Night Live's Homophobic Trump-Putin Jokes Need to Stop

[DonViejo]

Lame jokes about the presidents being “gay for each other” are so common you may not have noticed a problem with Saturday’s sketch. But that doesn’t mean they’re OK. Far from it.

Kevin Fallon
12.03.18 11:36 PM ET

It is approaching two years since Donald Trump was sworn into office, which means it’s been two years of Russia “collusion” talk and parsing of his relationship with Vladimir Putin. It’s been endless, and exhausting. That means we are also approaching two years of jokes about the two presidents fucking.

That, too, has been endless, and exhausting—and lazy, and ignorant, and offensive, and base-level, and baseless, and homophobic, and, well, not really a joke at all.

The most recent example happened during this weekend’s episode of Saturday Night Live, as part of a recurring bit that exists to test your eye-roll reflex: Alec Baldwin’s Trump and Beck Bennett’s always-shirtless Putin making light of their close ties by winking at a homosexual relationship.

The brief bit was part of the episode’s cold open, in which Trump is awake in the middle of the night, despondent about the Robert Mueller probe while at the G20 Summit in Argentina. He’s visited by a revolving door of his shady cronies, including, at one point, Putin.

“Honey, why you still up?” Bennett’s Putin says, emerging from a hotel room door bare-chested with a randy, horny smirk. He seductively pats the small of Baldwin’s Trump’s back. “Come back to bed, babe!”

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/snls-homophobic-trump-putin-jokes-need-to-stop?ref=home

[Gothmog]

1. I like the SNL Putin/trump jokes

[Crazyleftie]

2. I also love the humor, but....

the actual relationship between the two is deteriorating. Perhaps the skits should now play to their lost "love"....

[femmedem]

3. I guess I'm naive because I thought the joke was that they are lovers, as opposed to gay lovers.

I saw the skit working the same way if it were Trump and an autocratic female leader: our president isn't just buddying up with, but is actually sleeping with a foreign power. And it would have occurred to the writers because Putin sexualizes himself by posing shirtless for photographers.

Looking at it that way, the writers are treating a homosexual relationship the same way they'd treat a heterosexual relationship.

However, I hadn't seen all the skits. Reading the descriptions, it does seem as if they have crossed a line and are playing the physical relationship for homophobic and sophomoric laughs.

[mucifer]

4. I agree. It also pissed me off that we are supposed to laugh at celebrating the murder and

torture of khashoggi. I did enjoy other parts of the skit. Vampire Guilianni was great. Melania was funny. Acknowledging that the FBI and Mueller have all of Cohen's phone calls and email thus tons of proof. Usually tv pundits don't discuss that. They often say that Cohen could be lying now and not before.

[SCantiGOP]

5. I think part of the joke

Is the audience knowing Trump’s relationship with SNL and the media. He wants so badly to be accepted by the MSM like he is by his redneck base. Thus the tweets: “The horrible and failing SNL, which I never watch but happened to see this week,.....”

I don’t view the skits as homophobic, just a way to needle Trump about his behavior and how world leaders are playing him for a fool.

[zipplewrath]

6. It's a metaphore

I get that people will be sensitive to these jokes. But it is a metaphor for the intimate and controlling relationship between Putin and Trump. It's not that evil men must be gay. It's substituting a sexual relationship, with all of its intimacy and jealousy, for a political relationship.

[Polly Hennessey]

7. Calm down DonViejo.

Just because something is not to your liking does not mean it has to stop.

[DonViejo]

8. Am I the author of this opinion piece from the Daily Beast?

[LakeArenal]

9. Can't pick and choose the comedy.

Every group can find a reason to not like a joke about them. It’s satire, it is barbed.

I like the comment that treating all relationships the same.

All that being said I’m not gay. But I’m blonde, a woman, Irish, fat (that one is always getting barbed) and a “libtard”.

If it’s funny it’s funny. When it’s not (to me) it’s not.

[marble falls]

10. I agree 100%. We'd never stand for that kind of 'humor' about Democratic figures, there'd be ...

no defending it as humor.

[SunSeeker]

11. No one said the jokes about Trump holding hands with Theresa May were "heterophobic."

Last edited Tue Dec 4, 2018, 04:05 PM - Edit history (1)

Why are jokes about Trump and Putin being lovers "homophobic"?

Trump being so devoted to Putin makes so little sense that the joke practically writes itself.

The joke does not rest on the proposition that a gay relationship is in and of itself bad, so how is it homophobic?

A gay man I know often posts Trump-Putin memes on Facebook. His response to Kevin Fallon at the Daily Beast? "It's funny. Fuck off."

[dalton99a]

14. +1

[marble falls]

15. Add another 1 for me.

[BigDemVoter]

12. As a gay man, I'm not offended. I think they are needling Pussy Grabber, as HE is the one who finds

it offensive. . . .

[Mazeltov Cocktail]

13. Gay here...give me a fucking break...

It is a comedy...if it offends you, turn the channel.
Then...write about it in an journal, no need to share...