The 50th season of “Saturday Night Live” continues to provide the show with opportunities to revive many of its long-running characters. Last week, it was the Church Lady; this week, it was Nancy Grace, the TV personality and frequently outraged true-crime commentator, who has been frequently impersonated on “S.N.L.” over the years by cast members including Ana Gasteyer and Amy Poehler.
On this outing, Grace was played by Sarah Sherman as she commented on the outpouring of online support for Luigi Mangione, who was charged in the fatal shooting of the UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson.
“What is going on in this country?” Sherman declared. “Y’all, this man is not a sex icon, OK?”
She added, “And yet, folks online are posting things like — am I reading this right? — ‘Luigi got that BDE.’ Really? I hope ‘BDE’ stands for Behavior Dat’s Evil.”
Sherman went on to interview guests including Kenan Thompson, playing a regular customer at the Pennsylvania McDonald’s where Mangione was arrested.
“Well, Nancy, I’ve been eating McDonald’s every day for three years,” Thompson said. “I got Type 10 diabetes. Blue Cross? Bitch, I got blue foot. You know what my health insurance plan is called? Hoping it goes away.”
Asked if he had ever tried alternative medicine, Thompson replied in the affirmative, “When they tell me how much the procedure costs, I go, ‘what’s the alternative?’”
Opening monologue of the week
If you thought that Bill Burr was too tentative in the “S.N.L.” monologue he performed the weekend after the presidential election, you won’t have that same criticism about Chris Rock. In his standup set, Rock, an “S.N.L.” alumnus and this weekend’s host, did not mince words as he commented on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s return to office and other recent events.
Among his notable riffs, Rock addressed the capture of Luigi Mangione:
Everybody’s fixated on how good-looking this guy looks. If he looked like Jonah Hill, no one would care. They’d already be giving him the chair, already. He’d be dead, OK? But he actually killed a man, a man with a family, a family, kids, man. I mean, I have condolences. I have real condolences for the health-care C.E.O. I mean, this is a real person. But you also got to go, you know, sometimes drug dealers get shot.
Trump’s re-election:
Trump had a good year, man. Trump survived an assassination attempt. Survived assassination attempt. Won the presidency again by winning the popular vote. Was just named Time Man of the Year. You know, it could happen to a nicer guy.
People are like, he’s going to be so undignified. It’s the presidency of the United States. Dude. It’s the United States presidency. Come on. We’ve had some presidents in the United States. Come on, man, this is not the most dignified job in the world. We’ve had presidents show up to the inauguration with pregnant slaves. OK? And I’m just talking about Bill Clinton.
You know what country we live in. You know the history of this country. You know how many rapists are in my wallet right now? A cup of coffee in America costs seven rapists. But Trump’s going to get it down to three.
Trump’s embrace of Elon Musk:
He’s working with the number one African American in the world. The richest African American in the world, Elon Musk. That’s right, he is African American. Elon got more kids than the Cleveland Browns. Nobody knows how to get rid of people like a South African. Oh, he’s serious. Trump is not playing. He’s got Elon, they’re going to put them in a rocket ship. Call it SpaceMex. J Lo’s going to marry Ben again, just so she can stay in the country. I know she’s not Mexican, but Trump don’t know that.
And President Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter Biden:
I got to hand it to Joe, man. He don’t move as fast as he used to. He don’t talk as fast as he used to. But that middle finger still works, boy.
Weekend Update jokes of the week
Over at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors, Colin Jost and Michael Che, riffed on Luigi Mangione and a series of unexplained drone sightings in New Jersey.
Jost began with a picture of Mangione on his screen:
This week, America continued the delicate, sensitive debate over who will play this guy in the Netflix mini-series. After police arrested suspected C.E.O. shooter Luigi Mangione, they found a note on him expressing anger at corporate America. Yet he went to Starbucks before the shooting and then was caught at McDonald’s. So perhaps his greatest crime was hypocrisy. The McDonald’s where the shooter got caught has been getting one-star Yelp reviews to punish them for snitching. First of all, who looks at Yelp reviews of McDonald’s? The only Yelp review of McDonald’s should be, “Was open. Five stars.” Everyone who went to high school with the alleged shooter said they were shocked that he could become an assassin. Whereas everyone I went to high school with was shocked I didn’t. [his screen showed a picture of Jost as a nerdy high-school student.]
Che continued:
Tensions over mysterious drones flying above New Jersey continue to rise after a drone crashed into a person’s backyard. But at least now we know whoever’s flying them is a frigging woman, right?
Weekend Update guest of the week
We haven’t crunched the numbers on this hypothesis, but a quick check of the vibes suggests that Weekend Update has lately been tilting away from cast members’ impersonations of politicians and famous figures in current events, and leaning more toward oddball characters and comedy segments performed as themselves.
Among the better entries in that latter category is this performance from Jane Wickline, the TikTok star turned “S.N.L.” rookie. Wickline showed up with a very silly (if totally deadpan) song told from the point of view of the pop star Sabrina Carpenter, as if she were complaining that no one in the news media is speculating about her sexuality. Wickline isn’t trying to sing like Carpenter, and her song — if it has a meter or rhyme scheme at all — will never be mistaken for an entry from Carpenter’s catalog, which somehow made it funnier.
And speaking of carpenters …
’Tis the season of the week
Next weekend’s episode, hosted by Martin Short, may be the last before Christmas, but that didn’t stop the show from breaking out holiday-themed sketches this weekend. Among the highlights was this segment that features Rock as a mall elf who delights in taunting white families trying to choose between a white Santa Claus (James Austin Johnson) and a Black one (Devon Walker); and this sketch in which an unusual gift given to Rock at an office Secret Santa party prompts him to imagine himself in a particularly unsettling and violent episode of “The Simpsons.”
Happy holidays until next weekend when we’ll be saying happy holidays again!
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