BOMBSHELL: 91 Percent Of SNL Political Jokes Target The…

A comprehensive study by the Media Research Center’s NewsBusters, provided exclusively to the New York Post, has confirmed with documented precision what tens of millions of conservative Americans have been saying for decades about Saturday Night Live: the show is not a comedy program with political opinions. It is a political operation with comedy as its cover.

Season 51 of NBC’s Saturday Night Live recently came to an end, and it was considerably more liberal than Season 50. NewsBusters analysts found that Weekend Update anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che combined to tell 217 out of 238 jokes, or 91 percent, about conservatives during Season 51.

They also told 18 about liberals and three nonpartisan jokes.

The full scope of the numbers destroys any pretense of comedic balance. Of the 226 political jokes delivered by Weekend Update anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che, 205 targeted conservatives, only 18 slammed Democrats and other liberals, and three were non-partisan.

During cold opens, actors playing Republicans and conservatives appeared 49 times, lefty characters only 10 times, and one nonpartisan character was featured.

The top ten targets in Weekend Update tell the complete story without needing further analysis. The list featured President Trump at 108, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at 15, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at 12, Tucker Carlson at 11, former Rep. George Santos at 10, First Lady Melania Trump at 7, Vice President JD Vance at 7, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo at 5, Immigration and Customs Enforcement at 5, and FBI Director Kash Patel at 5.

The lone liberal in the top ten is Andrew Cuomo, a disgraced former governor who is politically toxic even among Democrats and whose inclusion provides the thinnest possible cover for the claim that the show does not exclusively target the right.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who has been one of the most prominent progressive political figures in the country this year, appeared exactly once. One joke. One appearance. For the man who is the socialist mayor of the largest city in America.

The contrast with the 108 jokes aimed at Trump is the quantitative expression of a political operation, not a comedy writers’ room.

One of Che’s jokes appeared to make fun of assassination attempts on the president. Che said: “President Trump attended the opening night of ‘Chicago’ at the Kennedy Center, and I think that’s cool that the president is going to the theater. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen,” referring to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination at a theater.

That joke aired in the weeks following the third alleged assassination attempt on Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, in which a Secret Service agent was shot in the chest and survived only because of his ballistic vest.

The decision to make a theater-assassination joke about a man who had recently survived a literal assassination attempt in a public venue is the kind of editorial choice that no professional comedy organization with a functioning conscience would make.

A whopping 94 percent of the jokes delivered by late-night hosts during the first week of Operation Eric Fury slammed the United States and its allies instead of Iran and other adversaries. And 92 percent of jokes made by Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, and the Daily Show universe targeted the right in 2025, with liberal guests outnumbering conservative ones almost 100 to 1. SNL is not an outlier in the late-night television ecosystem.

It is the flagship of a coordinated entertainment media apparatus that has decided its function is Democratic Party advocacy dressed in comedy writing. The data documents what that advocacy looks like at the joke-by-joke level.

The season finale on May 16 featured James Austin Johnson’s Trump character in a cold open alongside Will Ferrell playing the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein.

The skit took shots at the president for his acquaintance with the late notorious sex offender, including a quip in which Trump says his approval was in the 30s, and Ferrell’s Epstein said “Call me when you hit 17.” The decision to make a child sexual abuse joke, with a pedophile’s preferred victim age as the punchline, as the finale’s political statement represents a creative and moral judgment that the show’s audience and its NBC parent company should be asked to defend publicly.

MRC President David Bozell said in a statement: “Michael Jordan famously said, ‘Republicans buy sneakers, too.’ Entertainment companies once understood that alienating half the country was probably not a great business model. Nobody is asking SNL to become conservative, but when every political punchline is nothing more than all Trump Derangement Syndrome all the time, SNL risks turning itself into a caricature of what it once was.”

Bozell’s Michael Jordan observation is the appropriate commercial framing for what the data describes. SNL is not just politically biased. It is commercially self-destructive in its bias, choosing to alienate roughly half of its potential audience on every episode because the writers’ room and the host selection process have systematically excluded people who would write jokes about Democrats.

The prior season’s comparable number was 82 percent. Season 51’s number is 91 percent. The trend is not toward balance. It is toward the intensification of a partisan comedy operation that has abandoned any pretense of speaking to all of America and instead functions as the most-watched left-wing political message delivery system in American prime-time television.

The 9-point jump from 82 to 91 percent in a single season suggests either that the Trump administration’s second term has intensified the writers’ partisan focus or that the departure of writers or cast members who maintained any residual instinct for balance has created an even more homogeneous creative environment.

The comparison with SNL’s historical programming is instructive. The show’s early years under Lorne Michaels in the 1970s were genuinely transgressive in ways that cut across political lines. Gerald Ford’s physical clumsiness was mocked. Jimmy Carter was mocked.

The show’s comedic sensibility was irreverent toward power in ways that did not systematically exempt one party from scrutiny.

The evolution from a show that mocked everyone to a show that directs 91 percent of its political content at one party is not a creative evolution. It is a political capture of a cultural institution that has enough brand recognition to sustain its audience despite becoming something fundamentally different from what it once was.

The NBC network that airs SNL has not responded to requests for comment on the study. That silence is the appropriate institutional response for an organization that cannot defend the numbers and would rather not amplify the conversation about them.

The 91 percent figure is not contested by the network because it cannot be contested. The jokes are on tape. They are countable. The methodology is transparent. The conclusion is the conclusion of the arithmetic.

The practical consequence of SNL’s documented political monoculture is not merely that conservative Americans feel excluded from a cultural institution that their grandparents helped make into a television landmark. It is that the show functions as unpaid political advertising for the Democratic Party at a scale that no single political advertiser could purchase.

Sketch comedy that portrays every Republican as corrupt, every conservative as foolish, and every Trump administration official as villainous, broadcast on NBC to millions of Americans every Saturday night, shapes cultural attitudes about politics in ways that the Federal Election Commission does not and cannot acknowledge.

The MAGA audience’s relationship with SNL has evolved from outrage to indifference to something closer to contempt for the show’s creative limitations.

When 91 percent of your political jokes target the same people, your comedy writing is not being tested against the full range of political human experience. It is being written in an echo chamber that produces comedy that is funny to the people who already agree with the premise and baffling to everyone else.

The show’s ratings reflect that creative narrowing, and the commercial consequences of choosing partisan loyalty over artistic range will continue to accumulate regardless of what any study documents.

The 18 jokes about liberals in a full season of 20 episodes are the detail that most concisely summarizes SNL’s editorial posture.

Eighteen jokes about the entire political left in 20 episodes of a show that has access to the Biden cognitive decline, the Kamala Harris campaign implosion, the Feeding Our Future fraud, the Hunter Biden laptop, the autopen pardon controversy, the AOC presidential speculation, the Buttigieg popular vote confusion, and every other piece of genuinely funny political material that the left side of the spectrum has generated this year. Eighteen.

The writers chose not to use any of it because using it would require the kind of professional courage that a writers’ room that has spent years generating its social belonging from shared contempt for conservatives has entirely lost the capacity to exercise.

The Season 51 study is the most comprehensive single-season documentation of SNL’s political bias that has been produced in this analysis framework.

Combined with the prior season’s 82 percent figure and the broader late-night data showing 92 percent conservative targeting across the television comedy landscape, it establishes that what is happening at SNL is not an aberration or an exception but a feature of an entertainment media ecosystem that has chosen sides as deliberately and explicitly as any political campaign.