Earlier this week, Merriam-Webster announced its 2022 phrase of the yr: gaslighting. The dictionary’s number of the time period—outlined as “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for one’s own advantage”—was partially a response to public demand: Searches for gaslighting rose by 1,740 p.c over the previous 12 months. That curiosity may replicate the truth that gaslighting describes a lot, so effectively. It emphasizes the emotional penalties of lies, capturing the destabilizing feeling that may set in when somebody or one thing retains telling you that your notion of actuality is mistaken.
Many latest works of tradition have tried to present form to that feeling. The newest try, appropriately, discovered its articulation by a mouthless cat. Last night time’s Saturday Night Live, hosted by Keke Palmer, displayed the present’s regular mixture of topical humor (the night time’s roastees included Herschel Walker, Mitch McConnell, and Ye) and broad commentary. But one sketch, particularly, managed to seize this dizzying political second by totally conceding to its absurdities. The setting: an worker coaching at a Sanrio retailer in New York City. The gamers: two retailer managers who had been familiarizing 4 new hires with Sanrio’s “official Hello Kitty story.” Among the details that the managers insisted on: Hello Kitty is “a human little girl.” She has a boyfriend named Dear Daniel, who truly is a cat. She is within the third grade. She can be, in some way, 48 years previous.
The sketch was, on its face, a skewering of the ever-expanding Hello Kitty business universe, which options most of the clichés of recent advertising and marketing: “collabs,” kids’s items offered to adults, ludicrous model extensions. A very good portion of the “facts” the managers shared within the sketch had been actual claims that Sanrio, Hello Kitty’s dad or mum firm, has made: The firm actually does argue that its flagship little bit of IP—whiskered, pointy-eared, and surnamed Kitty—is a human woman. Its web site actually does insist, earnestly and considerably militantly, that she was born within the suburbs of London, and that she “lives with her parents and her twin sister Mimmy who is her best friend.”
But the true goal of the joke was not Hello Kitty herself, fortunately. (A formative ritual of my childhood concerned visiting shops’ Hello Kitty sections; the pens and erasers and stationery units smelled of strawberry and chance, and I cherished them.) Instead, the satire got here on the expense of the managers, performed by Cecily Strong and Molly Kearney, who handled their coaching session as an indoctrination—and who saved insisting, with Kool-Aid-drunk fervor, that the “facts” they had been imparting a couple of fictional feline had been inarguable truths. With that upside-down premise, the sketch mocked the velocity with which, fandom, at this time, can flip poisonous. It mocked the authors who attempt to retcon their very own canons. And it mocked, above all, the individuals who assume they’ll retcon actuality itself.
The sketch aired the day after Elon Musk—a really wealthy man and a really poor steward of Twitter—marketed new “revelations” about Hunter Biden’s laptop computer. The “reporting” he teased was neither journalism nor a lot of a scandal. But, just like the Hello Kitty managers, he intimated that he alone had entry to the “official” story—that he alone had the authority to find out the details. The sketch’s two most vocal trainees, performed by Palmer and Bowen Yang, captured the emotional stakes of the highly effective man’s assumption. Alternately confused and amused and offended, they widened their eyes as extra “official facts” had been flung their method. They grew much more baffled because the managers revealed that Sanrio’s executives, regardless of all the small print they’ve claimed for Hello Kitty, have declined to specify her race. (“She has an age, height, pet, and relationship, but she’s raceless?” Yang yells, virtually vibrating with confusion.) Their despair was eloquent. When down is up and up is down, it turns into ever tougher—and exhausting—to remain regular.
“Hello Kitty” was a punctuation mark to an episode that steered how riddled this second is with class errors. In the chilly open, Herschel Walker, performed by Kenan Thompson, referred to McConnell as “Mitch McDonalds” and referred to as a revolving door a “merry-go-round,” the errors drawing consideration to Walker’s woeful miscasting as a politician. Palmer’s monologue culminated in an announcement that she was anticipating a toddler, thus reframing the intimacies of being pregnant as a media occasion. (“It is bad when people on the internet spread rumors about you, y’all,” she joked, “but it is even worse when they’re correct.”) On “Weekend Update,” Colin Jost mentioned “the brain fog of long-haul Kanye”—likening Ye, the human, to Ye, the power symptom.
A truism of Saturday Night Live, and of satire as a complete, is that its job is made tougher when a tradition already makes enjoyable of itself. There’s a well timed logic, then, to SNL’s embrace of absurdity. Gaslighting, earlier than it was utilized to American politics, was a time period of home violence: It emphasised the sense of unreality that may descend when an abuser tries to persuade somebody that their understanding of the world is mistaken. It is a time period of trauma, reclaimed for this political second—a time of massive lies and small, and a time when individuals who declare authority insist that, although the creature seems like a cat and acts like a cat, she is, in reality, a 48-year-old little woman.