SNL is taking a bit of heat this week for its sketch of Tiger Woods (impersonated by Kenan Thompson) and his wife Elin (played by host Blake Lively) at a press conference in which he keeps getting beat up (presumably) by his wife.
Here’s the skit:
The problem that some are having with the skit is that the underlying theme is about domestic violence and the musical guest that night was Rihanna, who has been a victim of domestic violence herself.
And apparently, some didn’t even find the skit funny in general. From Popwatch.com:
It wasn’t just unfunny, though: It was also incredibly tone-deaf. Intimate partner violence isn’t a ripe source of material in the first place, but with Rihanna as the musical star the sketch seemed even more poorly thought out. The whole joke was that Tiger Woods was lying about his wife assaulting him, with every imaginable cliché and crummy lie we’ve seen in a hundred Lifetime movies about domestic violence. It was lazy.
Could there have been a funny bit here? Definitely. But this hypothetical funny take would need to present an actual point of view, a unique thought, or some sharp commentary. This bit suffered from both an ill-conceived problem (Tiger Woods covering up his wife assaulting him) and a total lack of transformation or change. It was a padded stand-up bit, not a fully realized sketch, which makes it really hard to forgive the poor taste of the subject matter.
Not to sound insensitive, but I laughed several times throughout the skit. That doesn’t mean I think domestic violence is funny, because I don’t. But Woods’ incident and Rihanna’s situation are two different things and while the timing was bad, there are some comedic elements to Tiger’s ordeal, which SNL portrayed.
Is it a double standard? Yeah. But I don’t think SNL went over the line, which some are suggesting.
