News Satire Roundup: May 20th-May 24th

Sunday, May 20 – Lots on the royal wedding, with a fun montage on Gayle King and a good little interlude with the American minister, along with two “And Now This” segments – one on local news anchors faking British accents and another on tacky souvenirs.  We also covered tensions with North Korea, revisiting John Bolton’s less-than-diplomatic approach.  The main story was on rehab.  While I wouldn’t rank it among the show’s absolute best, it was a huge eye-opener.  I was floored by how few qualifications are required for starting a rehab facility and how little oversight the industry receives, as well as the description of the cycle of relapse some facilities nurture, because addicts are more profitable when they relapse.  It was striking that work has been done in Washington to pave the way for addicts to get help, by getting insurance coverage for rehab, but next to nothing has been done to ensure that it’s actually helpful.

Monday, May 21 – Clip show week, with more “best of” specials on the correspondents.  Round 2 for Desi.  For a while, I was so convinced that they were repeating stories from her first special (they weren’t – I looked back at my write-up of that episode,) but I think most of them have been featured in other clips shows at some point or another, because the last segment was the only one that I felt I hadn’t seen multiple times.  Anyway, they reaired her segments on people who translate for Trump (with the ASL interpreter doing us proud!), the guy who voted for Trump despite having a golf course that would get cut off by the border wall (Mexico’s going to pay for a metaphorical wall!), the robot sex doll industry, the finer points of interviewing Trump as taught by Fox News (no “gotcha” questions like, “What’s your infrastructure plan?”), and, the only one I knew I hadn’t seen repeated, Desi’s harrowing adventure into the world of raw water.

Tuesday, May 22 – Second special for Ronny this time.  We started with the young Australian guy who jumped into crocodile-infested waters to impress a girl.  Ronny’s disdain is perfect, especially saying the guy ran counter to natural selectio, that people this stupid shouldn’t get to breed.  Next was the “Progressive Liberal,” the wrestler making progressive ideas palatable to Red Staters, the program teaching Chicago inmates how to make gourmet pizzas (featuring Ronny’s Shawshank-style breakout to bring the rest of Chicago something other than deep dish, and the explosion of cryptocurrency (I liked him arguing with the creator of Dogecoin over its name.)  The tech piece they included was on police technology, from “flying” police cruisers that max out after 25 minutes to a department trying to connect with kids through a robot dog; I still love Ronny’s point that all they had to do was get a real dog and the kids would’ve been sold.

Wednesday, May 23 – Tonight’s clip show was all Dulcé.  We saw her and Desi’s “song for women” summarizing 2017 – good satire of peak white feminisim from Desi, taking credit for Dulcé’s ideas.  I really enjoyed revisiting her trip to Mexico with Michael to ask the locals about the border wall (since she was the one who spoke Spanish, she was a lot more helpful than he was,) as well as her epic victory lap on behalf of Black women after Roy Moore lost the Alabama election.  Another piece with Desi, their “Shafted” story on Elvis hitting it big by coopting Willie Mae Thornton’s “Hounddog.”  I giggled at the skit solving the issue of white people calling the cops on innocuous Black people by hiring Dulcé as a 911 operator, and we also got her briefly playing God after Bill O’Reilly admitting to being mad at the Almighty for the way he “suffered” after his sexual harassment allegations finally caught up with him.

Thursday, May 24 – The final episode was for Michael.  We got his plan to get more funding for lakes by “turning them into oceans,” as well as one of his naughty charts, the “Wrong/Legal” Venn Diagram he fingered (to demonstrate the intersection of things that are both wrong and legal) in discussing an Alabama sheriff who skimmed money from his prison’s food budget.  Next was his problematic statue tour, followed by one of his sports pieces with Roy (the 2017 wrap-up one, wherein he found a way to turn any lighthearted sports blurb into a commentary on the oppression of “the Black man.”)  We revisited his field report on a program to incentivize violent criminals away from crime (sometimes with cash rewards or trips to Disneyland!), and finally, we got his woe-is-me piece on his physical similarity to Donald Trump Jr. – I laughed at his description of his “Wall Street Fuck Boy” haircut.