Lorne Michaels has an answer to the political columns, cartoons and comments that have accused his show, “Saturday Night Live,” of favoring Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton during her primary showdown with Senator Barack Obama: Nope.

“I’m in show business and I never, ever forget that,” Mr. Michaels said in a telephone interview on Tuesday night. “We put on a comedy show.”

Or as Jim Downey, the “SNL” writer who has created all of the recent political sketches on the show  and most of its famous ones going back two decades  put it on Wednesday, “I’m just trying to make the sketches funny.”

Over the past three weeks “SNL” has put itself back into the national discussion  not a bad place for any television show to be, as Mr. Michaels acknowledged  first with a series of sketches that have centered on the premise that Mrs. Clinton has been the target of a vengeful press that sees Mr. Obama with stars in its eyes and also with the overt (albeit comic) endorsement of Mrs. Clinton by Tina Fey, the former “SNL” star who returned on Feb. 23 to be the host of the first show after the recent writers’ strike. “Bitches get stuff done,” Ms. Fey said, using herself as an example.