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In the days since the first presidential debate , a surreal calamity in which the whole world learned that America’s geriatric leader can barely speak after sundown, a familiar election presence has been missing. There’s been no “Saturday Night Live.” That’s because the CNN train wreck that pitted a befuddled and beady-eyed President Joe Biden against former President Donald Trump was the earliest televised head-to-head ever.

In the past, the three general election matchups have come in the fall after the candidates were formally nominated at their parties’ conventions. But this bout aired in late June, and NBC’s long-running sketch comedy show is on hiatus until August. So, Jim Carrey has not returned to yuk it up as the now-81-year-old Biden — the role he played in 2020 — and there’s been no vicious send-up of the biggest political headline in four years: that our president is losing it.



All of this is to say that Lorne Michaels is the luckiest man alive. Had his show been airing when Biden’s glaring infirmity was so frighteningly and publicly exposed, how the hell could the cast wring laughs out of it? That jaw-dropping night and the ensuing pathetic, near-conspiratorial effort by the White House to chalk up the prez’s nonsensical rambles to jet lag while he clings to the dangerous delusion that he can manage another four years in the Oval Office is hardly hilarious. Mortifying, sad, deceitful, infuriating, unbelievable, yes.

Funny, no. Those poor w.

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