The ‘SNL’ comedian shared jokes at the Olympic gymnast’s expense and has a long-standing tendency toward punching down on comedic targets
Michael Che’s eyebrow-raising attempt to score comedic points about Simone Bile’s difficult decision to withdraw from Olympic events aired on NBC might be more surprising if this hadn’t been his longstanding pattern. It points to his tendency to attempt to gin up controversy for a degree of attention even beyond the level a “SNL” star usually receives. Che, the co-head writer of the show and co-anchor of its “Weekend Update” segment, added a series of since-deleted posts to his Instagram story on Thursday, beginning with ““man, i wanna make fun of simone biles.” He went on to share jokes other Instagram writers had made about Biles, including a crack about Larry Nassar, the former U.S. Gymnastics team doctor currently incarcerated as a sex offender. (Biles is among Nassar’s accusers.) Che later claimed to have been hacked and wiped his Instagram, but the posts fit what has become a career-long modus operandi of punching down. Che’s jokes about Biles, as well as his implication that there’s an endless wellspring of things to mock about a young assault victim having a hard time on the world’s largest stage, comes from a place of strange and familiar cruelty that has often been reserved for his critics. (A good summary of Che’s history of using a style of aggressive posting that barely registers as comedy can be found here.) The comic’s latest incident also rubs up uncomfortably against the current mood of “Saturday Night Live,” a show that lately has attempted a mood of somewhat affected cuddliness. “SNL” is capacious and has room for a lot of different tones in a single episode, but an especially pronounced one in recent seasons has been a sort of celebratory optimism, epitomized, for instance, by Maya Rudolph’s take on Kamala Harris as a cool, strong role model.
