Having secured Donald Trump as a host, “Saturday Night Live” might have engaged his affinity for self-parody in a way that exposed him more fully than he would have liked. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY NBC

“He’s perfect!” Drunk Uncle, one of the commentator characters on “Saturday Night Live” ’s Weekend Update said of Donald Trump, who happened to be the host of the show last night. “He’s like a big old beautiful Monopoly man.” Drunk Uncle (played by Bobby Moynihan) blinked at his drink. Trump was “someone who has been saying the things that I have been thinking as well as saying.” And the two of them were so alike, sort of. They both liked White Russians. Trump had a wife named Melania and that was, as far as Drunk Uncle could recollect, what his doctor said his mole was called. As Colin Jost, one of the anchors, tried to quiet him, Drunk Uncle cried out about “crime perpetrated by immigrants.” Then he sniffled some more.

There was a scenario in which “S.N.L.,” having secured Trump as a host, might have engaged his affinity for self-parody in a way that exposed him more fully than he would have liked. Instead, all they added was a little gold-plating. Trump looked tacky, but we already knew that. The show didn’t, in any truly cutting way, make fun of Trump: it made fun of Trump voters, or at least the people it imagined them to be. Instead of looking for the weakness in the Republican front-runner, the show looked for the weak characters drawn to him. It’s not clear how much is gained, even in the interests of humor, by simply expanding the circle of people called losers in this race, and leaving it at that. The reply might be that you can’t blame the Donald for Drunk Uncle being sad. Trump can’t help it that he has groupies and stalkers. (When Kenan Thompson, playing Toots Hibbert, who was the musical guest the last time Trump hosted “S.N.L.,” in 2004, gets a bit too pushy about wanting to be considered for the Vice-President’s job, Trump says, “You know I carry a gun, don’t you?”). It’s just natural that two porn-actress characters, in the Vote for Donald Tramp sketch, were desperate to get his attention, since, as one said, he’d be in the White House soon, and “I haven’t been there since the nineties.”

The show, it should be said, also mocked Trump haters. As it was being broadcast, there were protesters outside the NBC studio, complaining that the network had given him this forum. A group called Deport Racism 2016 had offered five thousand dollars to anyone on the set who would call him a racist. They didn’t really get their money’s worth. Trump wasn’t in the cold-open skit, which made fun of the Democratic candidates at MSNBC’s Southern-voters forum—and was more harshly amusing than anything else in the show—with Kate McKinnon as Hillary Clinton, switching between regional accents, and Larry David as Bernie Sanders, the role he was born in Brooklyn to play. (“Go to your closet; pull out your vacuum; dump it upside down; and send me all the pennies that fall out of it.”) Trump waited for his monologue to make an appearance. As he began, flanked by two actors who have played him—Taran Killam and Darrell Hammond, in full Trump regalia—someone offstage called out, “You’re a racist!”

“Who the hell is—ah, I knew this was going to happen,” Trump said, or rather recited; he made it very clear that the interruption was scripted. “Who is that?” The camera switched to Larry David, now in a white T-shirt and a gray hoodie, who shouted, “Trump’s a racist!”—and then lolled his tongue and grinned quickly, as if to confirm that this was a joke. But a joke on whom?

“What are you doing, Larry?” Trump said. David shrugged, and said, “I heard that if I yelled that they’d give me five thousand dollars.” (Deport Racism said in a tweet, after the broadcast, that it still would.) “As a businessman, I can fully respect that,” Trump said. Maybe David thought he got one over on him, but Trump was cagy enough to convey that he didn’t care. (“I loved it,” Trump said, when he was asked about David’s heckling on “Meet the Press.”) Later, on Weekend Update, one of the jokes turned on the supposed parallels between the anti-Trump demonstrators and Iranians shouting “Death to America”: so pathetic, so hilarious. The show also made fun of those who were too weak to decide whether they loved or hated him: the needy types. One skit involved the cast supposedly trying to do a scene at an Italian restaurant but coming undone as “Trump” tweets about them. Mostly, he’s mean, and they crumble; when he’s not, saying that he has “tremendous respect” for Leslie Jones, she instantly declares her love for him, then keens (“Whaaaat!”) when he follows up with “and I love the blacks.” The joke is that none of the actors know what to do with that. That was the point at which the show came closest to acknowledging that it didn’t know what to do with the front-runner, either.

Maybe it tried: in a White House scene, an aide talks about the wild success of “all the laws you’ve tweeted,” but it’s not clear if the idea is that the policies are shallow or that Trump’s tweets are awesomely, hysterically powerful. There’s not really a good sense of the distinction. And Cecily Strong’s attempt at a pushy First Lady Melania Trump, which already felt artificial, was thrown off, as was the skit as a whole, when the actual Ivanka, Trump’s daughter, walked in for a cameo as Secretary of the Interior. Everyone in the studio seemed to pause, for half a second too long, to figure out how real Ivanka or any of this was. (Ivanka’s mother, Ivana, was played brilliantly twenty-five years ago by Jan Hooks, who also did a fine job with the Donald’s second wife, Marla; Cecily Strong has not yet quite captured the sculpted diffidence of Melania, though she was a fine Rachel Maddow in the opening.) The skit could have been provocative, but, like much of the show, it got lost.

During Trump’s opening monologue, Killam and Hammond mostly stood there, jutting out their lower lips in a way that made them look more like kids at a Halloween party, who have just binge-watched “The Apprentice,” than like effective satirists. They got the costume down, but not the real strangeness of Trump—neither his physical nor his political presence. This is disappointing, because the show should know him so well. Both “S.N.L.” and Trump emerged in the same tabloid-tawdry years: during the show’s first season, in 1975-6,Trump was negotiating his deal for the Commodore Hotel, which would define his business in many ways. Perhaps some institutional knowledge has been lost as the show, and Trump, have become more national, and, perhaps, less alive to New York. When Phil Hartman played him, back in the days when Ivana and Marla were circling each other and Trump Tower was new, he did so without what are now regarded as some of the key tropes (the hair isn’t even close). His Trump, giving Ivana a beautiful giant door as a Christmas gift in 1988, then triumphing over her thanks to an iron-clad pre-nup in 1990, was an almost generically crass New York real-estate guy. And yet, in that, Hartman might have come closer to the heart of the matter.

Comedy has to find a way to strip Trump bare. A mastery of mannerisms can help to achieve that, as Tina Fey did with Sarah Palin, Will Ferrell did with George W. Bush, and Hartman did as the mastermind Reagan. Sometimes, though, the portrayal just fluffs the hair a bit more. When Trump last hosted the show, eleven years ago, he appeared in a skit about a bullying father, with Seth Meyers as his son and Horatio Sanz and Jimmy Fallon as their neighbors. In it, Trump is dressed in an off-the-rack sports jacket that looks like something Archie Bunker might wear. He is Drunken Dad. In another 2004 skit, based on "The Prince and the Pauper," he wore a janitor’s uniform. This Saturday, Trump’s costumes included a space-age black number half glimpsed behind a grid of lasers, and, in a brief appearance as a dodgy music promoter, a flashy jacket and glittery earring—more shiny things. And he’s got enough of those.