Palin vs. Clinton: The SNL Match-Up

For those of you haven't seen last night's Saturday Night Live sketch starring Tina Fey as Sarah Palin and Amy Poehler as Hillary Clinton, I'm posting it here. I love this not only because Tina Fey does a DEAD-ON Palin impersonation, but because this is some great political sketch producing.

I love it not only because of Fey's performance and the biting wit, but because the SNL writers do a terrific job of creating a little "relationship" between these women on screen. (For those of you who haven't been to one of my L.A. classes, I'm a HUGE proponent of pounding home that all good storytelling-- regardless of length or purpose-- is about only three things: RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS.)

It would've been easy for the writers to simply string together some snarky political one-liners and rely on the strenth of their performers' impersonations (Amy Poehler does a decent job, but not as good as Tina Fey), but instead they took the time to let the fictional Palin/Clinton relationship build.

Both characters in this sketch have strong personal/emotional wants... which they articulate at the beginning of the sketch... but in order to achieve their wants they're forced to team up with the one person most antithetical to their objective. (Well, Hillary is, anyway-- Palin is practically oblivious to the tension in the relationship.) You can almost hear the SNL writers asking themselves "how would these two women feel-- and behave--
if forced to join together for a brief moment on the political stage?" 
"How would their world-views conflict, and how would these conflicting
views affect their behavior?"

Take a look... lemme know what you think...