Dressed up like Bernie Sanders, Larry David on SNL looked and sounded almost exactly like Bernie Sanders. But that's not why he was funny. Or rather, that's only half of why he was funny.
In his public persona at least, Sanders focuses relentlessly on problems that in his telling threaten the future of American democracy and humanity itself: galloping income inequality and climate change. Larry David's humor focuses relentlessly on life's trivialities: tuck or don't tuck your shirt, slip a water bottle into a theater, suffer the consequences of new pants tenting around the crotch.
The joke was that David looked and sounded like Sanders but acted (or thought) like Larry David's character on Curb Your Enthusiasm.
David did spoof Sanders on the big picture: We're doomed! But it was funny precisely because he made no distinction between the momentous and the trivial:
Eh, not a fan of the banks. They trample on the middle class. They control Washington. And why do they chain all their pens to the desks? Who's trying to steal a pen from a bank? It makes no sense!
