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  So Sarah Palin Has Nothing To Say for Herself?

  Posted Monday, October 20, 2008 4:38 PM | By E.J. Graff

  Apparently I am the last person in the developed world without a DVR. In any case, I have only just now caught up with the Sarah Palin SNL sketches, via all of your links and the discussion thread. It was a little jerky on my computer, and I almost immediately read the thread of conversation, so take this with a grain of salt—but what struck me most forcefully was how *little* Palin there was. She had almost no lines. Did she (or the SNL team) think she couldn't carry them off? Was she simply standing there, hitting her mark without moving, because her campaign told her she had to? She looked to me as if she was just a prop for everyone else's admittedly limp comedy.

  I like Anne's idea that it's laudable that American politicians can laugh at themselves. But I'm not sure this showed that Palin can. Remember the 2000-election Al Gore? I thought that, when not doing her own attack material, she was a little ... wooden.

  Filed under: Sarah Palin SNL

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

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