Year in and year out, one very deserving woman wins the Lead Actress In A Comedy Emmy. And that woman is Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the wildly talented actress first beloved for her antics on Seinfeld, and now beloved even more for her delivery of acerbic one-liners and speeches on HBO's Veep (seriously, check out the one about the croissant — it'll change your life). And while JLD undoubtedly deserves the award for killing it on the political sitcom season after season, it gets to be a bit of a bore. She is bookended in this category by some seriously talented women: Tracy Ellis Ross from black-ish, Lily Tomlin from Grace & Frankie, & Amy Schumer from Inside Amy Schumer (and everywhere on the internet) have all delivered trophy-worthy performances. And in the end, the Academy chose JLD for the sixth consecutive time. And it was when Julia Louis-Dreyfus gave her 2016 Emmys speech that it became clear why she was standing up on that stage yet again.
After making some cracks about tricking her colleagues into letting her run things on Veep, Dreyfus moved onto bigger things: the election. "I'd like to apologize for today's political climate," she said, with almost enough sincerity to carry it. She joked that Veep must have broken down the barrier between fiction and politics — "it was satire, but now it feels like a sobering documentary."
She seemed to be referencing the fact that Donald Trump has become the actual Republican nominee for president. And just in case that wasn't clear, she drove the point home by mimicking Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan and his promise that Mexico will pay for a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico.
Naturally, the crowd loved every (intentionally) painful second of it. It is what our fictional Veep does best, after all.
