Actor and comedian Bill Murray praised Republican tax reform as a “fantastic thing” for business and criticized identity politics in a CNBC interview aired Friday.

“The change in the tax law is a great thing for the corporations, it’s a fantastic thing,” Mr. Murray, 67, said during a sit-down interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

“I don’t pretend to understand what that will mean in the future in terms of the economy or what the budget will have to do to take care of what people call entitlements,” he said. “In the first step, it’s made things easier. I think people feel like there was probably too much regulation, and yet you just hope that they don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater when breaking down regulations.”

Mr. Murray, who debuted his impersonation of former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon last month on “Saturday Night Live,” also commented on the country’s divided political climate and how identity politics have started to dominate the Democratic Party and the comedy industry as a whole.

“How can Kristen Wiig make everyone laugh?” he posited. “She’s not thinking about being political, she’s thinking about what resonates and what is common to all of us. I think that’s harder and harder to do because people are trying to win their point of view as opposed to saying, ‘What if I had spoke to everyone?’”

“My friend who’s a great comedy writer, Jim Downey, he’s accused of being a right-wing comedy writer, if there is such a thing,” Mr. Murray said. “He says, ‘No, I just think the way the Democrats handle things is poor, where they try to pick out little pieces of a population, of well we represent the Hispanics, we represent the LGBT or something.’ And they’re not speaking to everyone at once. And it’s almost demeaning to say, ‘I’m choosing you because you’re a splinter group or you’re a certain minority group.’ There’s almost a resentment that somehow you’re separated, again, by a politician — ‘You’re my people. I’m in control of you, I represent you,’ instead of thinking that each citizen has a right to be respected as a citizen first, under the laws of the country.”