Why Matt Damon's hilarious SNL skit couldn't stop the Kavanaugh confirmation

Matt Damon got a lot of laughs — but no votes.

It's hard to imagine a more comprehensive takedown of a political figure than the one Saturday Night Live executed on Brett Kavanaugh in its season premiere last month, at a time when the judge's fate seemed to be hanging in the balance.

Damon added several layers of ridicule to Kavanaugh's angry, aggressive testimony before the Senate, presenting him as a sputtering, sniffing, weeping, beer-loving caricature of judicial temperament. In light of the sexual assault accusations against him, which he has denied, the sketch included an especially devastating line: "I'm not backing down. . . I don't know the meaning of the word 'stop.'"

And then, a few hours before the dress rehearsal of the show's next episode, Kavanaugh was confirmed as a justice to the Supreme Court.

SNL can hardly be blamed/mocked for failing to keep Kavanaugh off the Court. The odds that Senator Orrin Hatch and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley were ever going to stay up late to catch the premiere — or catch it the next day online — are in the vanishingly low range. Not that either man would have been persuaded, of course, even if they had flipped on the set in their pajamas. We are now at a point where television comedy, no matter how potent, is unlikely to pull even a few of the true believers out from the ring of wagons encircling their separate camps.

That was never particularly easy to do, but consistent and clever ridicule, to a level where a kind of cultural branding takes place, has definitely translated into impact in the past. Former New York political boss William M. "Boss" Tweed was arrested in 1873 after cartoonist Thomas Nast exposed his massive corruption ring in Harper's Weekly. The cartoonist "Herblock" was depicting Richard Nixon as a sewer-dweller in his own cartoons as early as 1954; he kept it up until the country decided Nixon was a crook 20 years later. In 1992, The Tonight Show host Johnny Carson pounded on then-vice president Dan Quayle like an (empty) piñata: "If Dan Quayle were a woman, he'd be pointing at dinette sets on a game show." Quayle did not win re-election.

Because it literally portrays politicians with comedians, SNL has had an especially prominent place in the process of stamping public figures with a permanent cultural brand.

In 1975, Chevy Chase cemented then-president Gerald Ford's image as a lunkhead with several left feet. Dan Aykroyd and Norm MacDonald portrayed politician Bob Dole as a grouchy crank, trying to prove he could be hip by joining MTV's Real World. The show didn't even use a cast member to play Quayle; they brought in a pre-teen kid named Jeff Renaudo, who sat on the lap of Dana Carvey, playing a golly-gee, non-sequitur-prone George Bush.

A debate sketch in 2000 was so effective in capturing Al Gore's wooden self-assuredness, his panicked staff made him watch the sketch to try to counter the damaging image. Meanwhile, Will Ferrell's engagingly goofy portrait of George W. Bush as a know-nothing good ol' boy was later widely cited as a possible reason he eked out the election win, because he came across as much more of a guy that people would want to share a beer with. And the word that writer Jim Downey chose to sum up Bush captured the candidate's persona so compellingly, many people believed Bush had actually uttered "strategery."

Similarly, most of the nation now believes Sarah Palin really did once say, "I can see Russia from my house," though of course that was Tina Fey's SNL line. Fey's Palin became so thoroughly imprinted on the nation's consciousness that the caricature is more what people remember than the real woman.

Did that affect the election of 2008? Who could doubt it? Just as the many depictions of Hillary Clinton by Amy Poehler and Kate McKinnon lingered in the memory as somehow friendly (smart, groundbreaking) and devastating (power-mad) at the same time, so did they likely reinforce very unshakeable opinion of the candidate.

Most recently, the show all but chased Sean Spicer into oblivion thanks to Melissa McCarthy's eviscerating impression. He was likely headed in that direction anyway.

But the opportunities for SNL — or the monologues on the weeknight late-night shows for that matter — to shape a cultural take on a public figure and truly influence some kind of outcome for them, are shrinking on their way toward extinction. Alec Baldwin's Donald Trump won an Emmy but has never been able to compete with the real thing for sheer attention-grabbing excess. It is almost impossible to top something relentlessly over the top.

Or to topple it.

Especially when there is little available audience left to be impressed by the impressions. The vast majority of those watching SNL, and most of the other late-night shows, are not neutral observers; they are mostly disposed to approve of — and laugh with — the left-of-center satirical shots being fired. Another segment of viewers is intent on escaping that drumbeat of laughter at the expense of their own political positions and so find comfort on other channels — especially one. Nothing SNL does is going to break through the counter-media of Fox News, where the prevailing entertainment culture is considered prejudiced and exclusionary, and so, dismissible. The laughs are impossible to hear over the ongoing dissonance.

Matt Damon can probably retire his Kavanaugh.

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