If you’re going to watch anything on YouTube today, I think it needs to be this, SNL’s take on Friday’s White House fiasco. It is, of course, hilarious, even Pythonesque, but at the same time it has a deeply troubling undercurrent. Americans are clearly very embarrassed indeed by the behaviour of their president – who wouldn’t be? They’re obviously trying to make light of it; but when you see a mainstream, flagship Saturday night comedy show trying to satirise something like this which happened just the day before, you know something is gravely amiss. It’s a kind of coping mechanism, and the only reason such mechanisms are ever used is if something is very wrong. It is clear that they are laughing in an effort to mask their discomfort, not only with what happened but I suspect also with their current state of affairs as a whole. While political satire is usually very healthy and a sign of a society’s intellectual vigour, to see a head of state being mocked like this suggests to me a deep, dangerous underlying tension in American society.