By Nate Sloan

Was there any truth to the hysteria set off by Chicago Sun Times reporter Darel Jevens when he wrote that Donald Glover was expected to join the cast of Saturday Night Live as the new face of Obama? I’ll give Jevens credit for coining the term “Fauxbama,” but his embarrassingly bad intel sparked one of the biggest and worst games of Telephone in recent memory. This is what happens when old media tries to play new media. Rumor passing is fine for bloggers and message boarders, but I look to newspaper writers to do some actual fact verification.  The best breaks in the “Has SNL Found Its Fauxbama?” story came from HuffPo’s noted SNL enthusiast, Rachel Sklar and from Gawker, which spent two minutes cybersleuthing it to Donald Glover’s Facebook page for facts.

I came down with Fauxbama fever as well; but this story spiraled out so fast, it was impossible to tell what news was accurate. Names of seemingly random black people with varying degrees of comedic talent were being speculated as top contenders for the role. Daily Kos, of all places, posted a rather marginalizing poll asking “Who Should Play Obama on SNL?” The choices were Kenan Thompson, Jordan Peele, Donald Glover, Jordan Carlos, Tim Meadows, Tracey Morgan, Eddie Murphy, Obama or Some Other Dude. For some reason, Tim Meadows was the favorite; and he hasn’t been a cast member in, like, 10 years. The fact that Fred Armisen nabbed the Obama spot suggests that the media is not as post-racial as we’d like to believe. And neither is Obama.

I took fact checking into my own hands and asked Jordan Carlos whether he actually auditioned or not. He actually did!

“It was a standard audition: characters, impressions, etc. The only thing that was different was that they wanted us to do our best Obama,” says Carlos. “I made a video of that impression, [SNL Producer] Marci Klein liked it and had me come in. It was an amazing experience and as nerve-wracking and gratifying as they say.”

Despite all the online buzz—and SNL scoring its best ratings in two years—black bloggers mention very little about Armisen’s Obama. Instead, there are gads of white people warbling about what black people are gonna think about it. A great example is an article and poll at The Chicago Tribune in which a dour white lady named Mo Ryan asks, “Call me crazy, but shouldn’t Saturday Night Live’s fictional Sen. Barack Obama be played by an African American?” Approximately 75 percent of those who took her poll clicked “Doesn’t Matter.”

Do the results shock you? Why do people in Chicago care so much? I asked comedian Elon James White, producer of a festival taking place this week called The Black Comedy Experiment, for his take.

“The reason why there probably isn’t really an outcry as you might expect about such a thing is because black people aren’t outraged. It’s not like SNL is the premiere spot for incredible black talent. They’ve had some awesome comedians in the past but still aren’t the home base for such concepts,” says White. “They were just fine with the quota of black cast members and then all of a sudden, we have a real candidate for office and SNL is supposed to reflect what’s happening in the media. It’s way easier to blacken up Armisen than to actually bring someone on. It’s not like the ‘new black guy’ would get any play outside of the Obama role anyway.”

He has a compelling point with that last statement. Dean Edwards was in the cast of SNL the same time as Tracey Morgan, and I don’t remember Edwards at all.

I looked to the SNL book Live From New York for some parting insight. In it, Chris Rock says, “I got hired because In Living Color was on. In Living Color was hot, so they had to hire a black guy. With Tim Meadows being on the show, you know somewhere in your mind that if there’s two non-white, pretty good sketches, they probably won’t both get on. That’s how it was in comedy clubs too. One black comic goes on at 9 o’clock, they will not be putting me on at 9:15.”

Rock sums it up pretty nicely when he states: “It was just men in power overreacting, overthinking things.”

The Black Comedy Experiment takes place Feb. 28-March 1 at The Tank, 279 Church St. (betw. Franklin & White Sts.), 212-563-6269; 7, $15/$25 (weekend pass).