As a Weekend Update anchor, Colin Jost doesn’t frequently appear in the sketches on “Saturday Night Live.” So when he gets the rare opportunity to play someone other than himself, he comes on brimming with pent-up energy, a quality that suited him especially well to play Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the start of this weekend’s show.
In the opening sketch of this weekend’s broadcast (hosted by Melissa McCarthy and featuring the musical guest Dijon), Jost spoke at a Pentagon news conference where reporters were told he would “answer your questions in a calm, nonaggressive fashion.”
Returning to his recurring role as Hegseth, Jost took the stage like someone who gets to be featured only once every 10 or 15 episodes: he chest-bumped Jeremy Culhane, who had just introduced him to the lectern; he chugged an energy drink; and he commanded the assembled reporters to “shut the hell up.”
“First things first,” Jost demanded, “Where are the fatties?” Jost then announced that the United States was at war with Venezuela (“as you probably read in some gay newspaper”) and invited the reporters to “pretend I’m a random fishing boat and fire away.”
Asked by Mikey Day if he had ordered a second strike on a boat in the Caribbean in September, Jost responded, “Uh, first of all, that kind of cruel, heartless act has no place in Operation Kill Everybody.”
He added, “I was so jacked up after the first strike, I had to make an emergency call to my sponsor — sorry, a guy I met at an anonymous meeting so I don’t drink something that I like and I want but I can’t have but I want it and I need it and I want it right now.”
Singing a version of the McDonald’s jingle, Jost continued, “Ba-ba-ba-ba-da — it’s booze.”
He also took questions from Sarah Sherman, who was playing the former congressman Matt Gaetz, who recently became a reporter.
“You’re only killing people who are trafficking drugs, right?” she asked. “So, hypothetically, if someone were trafficking something else, they’d be OK?”
Told by Jost that they were focusing exclusively on drug smugglers, Sherman answered, “No further questions, Your Honor.”
Jost confidently declared that President Trump supported him because “unlike you beta cucks, he’s a high-energy alpha who trusts me and listens to me no matter what.”
Cut to — who else? — James Austin Johnson in his recurring role as President Trump, who had fallen asleep at the news conference. In his sleep, Johnson said to himself, “Stop, Mamdani. You can freeze my rent any time.”
Once awakened, Johnson told the reporters, “I wasn’t sleeping. I’m very much awake. Now someone quickly tell me, where am I, who am and what year might it be?”
Before he could answer another reporter’s question about cost-of-living concerns, Johnson had fallen asleep again.
Jost instructed the reporters to keep quiet. “We’ve got to get him to another M.R.I. before he wakes up,” he said.
Welcome back of the week
McCarthy, the “Bridesmaids” and “Gilmore Girls” star, was an “S.N.L.” mainstay in the 2010s, when she hosted five times, contributed a memorable parody of the former White House press secretary Sean Spicer and won an Emmy Award for her performance on the show.
Though she has since appeared on “S.N.L.” in surprise cameos, McCarthy hadn’t hosted the show since 2017. With nothing to promote, she returned to immerse herself in the kinds of eccentric, well-observed character roles she excels at: a supermarket shopper who becomes inordinately flattered when she’s offered a free sample of cheese; an unruly UPS worker being disciplined for her poor delivery performance.
But if we had to pick a favorite sketch this week, we’ll give the edge to a Christmas-themed segment where McCarthy played the largely silent role of a suburban denizen who doesn’t quite know how to help a young neighbor who lives across the street. (When she sees the boy get demolished in a snowball fight, she sends him a gift box with a gun in it.)
Let’s do this again soon, hopefully some time before 2033.
Weekend Update jokes of the week
Over at the Weekend Update desk, Jost and fellow anchor Michael Che continued to riff on President Trump’s appearance at the World Cup draw in Washington, D.C., and a special prize he received there.
Jost began:
President Trump has not yet won the Nobel Peace Prize, but this week, he did win the equally prestigious Soccer Peace Prize. At yesterday’s World Cup Draw, FIFA actually invented a fake peace prize in Trump’s honor. And that’s why the trophy shows Trump’s gnarled hands dragging the entire earth into hell.
Che continued:
The World Cup draw was held Friday and Team USA will first face Paraguay. The US team is heavily favored to beat Paraguay with the help of their star players, ICE. On Monday night, President Trump made hundreds of posts on Truth Social, including conspiracy theories, attacks on Democrats and even a video of his cameo in “Home Alone 2,” which I haven’t seen in a while and, I have to say, the dialogue, it hits different now, check it out.
[He played a video clip of Trump’s appearance in the film with altered dialogue, where Macaulay Culkin asks him, “Excuse me. Where’s Jeffrey Epstein?” Trump responds, “Down the hall and to the left.”]
Jost added:
President Trump said that he will soon release the results of his M.R.I. test from October. He just needs a little more time to write “of genius” after the word “stroke.”
Weekend Update desk segment of the week
Though there were no appearances from cast members playing celebrities or politicians, Weekend Update did have one desk segment inspired by a real-life news event: a widely shared security video from a liquor store in Ashland, Va., where a raccoon had broken in, gotten drunk and passed out in the bathroom.
Sherman (who we assume beat Bowen Yang in a coin toss or arm-wrestling match) got to play that drunk raccoon, dressed in a furry head-to-toe costume, swigging from a bottle of booze and nibbling on the papers that Jost kept in front of him on the Weekend Update desk.
“Those are my jokes,” Jost protested. “I thought raccoons only eat trash.”
“Exactly,” Sherman replied.
Dave Itzkoff is a former Times culture reporter.
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