Donald Glover, preeminent poet-bard of our time, hosted one of Saturday Night Live‘s best episodes in years over the weekend. From sketches where Lando Calrissian ponders the lack of black people in space to doing double duty as musical guest Childish Gambino, Glover was a delight—and the show gifted us with an extremely timely short.
In “A Kanye Place,” a riff on the blockbuster John Krasinski/Emily Blunt-starring horror movie A Quiet Place, Glover and his companions are attempting to survive in a world where monsters attack the source of loud noise. Silence is vital for survival, and there’s even an exchange in ASL.
Unfortunately for Glover’s band of survivors, Glover is following Kanye West on Twitter.
West has been on a controversial Twitter tear as of late, provoking much response—and wall-to-wall media coverage—for his Tweets lauding President Trump and showing off his signed MAGA hat, to his assertion last week that slavery was a choice. In the short above, as Glover gives the group the latest Kanye updates, they are unable to suppress exclamations of shock and surprise, falling victim to the noise monsters one by one.
As objectively funny as this bit is, it’s also a reminder of how much, and how easily, we are distracted by something like Kanye’s tweetstorms. It’s a difficult line sometimes for the media to cover: when there’s an event that everyone is talking about—like Kanye tweeting his support for Trump and the President of the United States retweeting him—it’s hard not to discuss this. But the sheer amount of talking head attention and column inches Kanye received, in a week where the President that he admires was caught up in major scandals and bombshells about those scandals, begs the question of why we cannot stay as laser-focused on Trump’s problems as West’s faux pas.
As Aidy Bryant’s character says above, “Kanye is a distraction. We should only talk about what’s important.”
“Like how to survive the monsters,” Beck Bennett says.
“And then I guess, also, like, the midterms,” says Bryant. “‘Cause like, what’s happening with that?”
“I know,” says Cecily Strong. “I can’t keep up.”
While many of us can recite an in-depth history of what Kanye West has been saying on Twitter, we’d struggle to produce vital information about the upcoming election, which will have a huge impact on the country’s future. It could even make it so that we never have to care who’s wearing a MAGA hat again.
(via SNL, image: screengrab)
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