The Best ‘SNL’ Trump Sketch Did Not Feature Trump
Anticipation was high for Saturday Night Live this weekend: Alec Baldwin, who’s been playing Donald Trump as a manipulated suckerfish, was host. It was a likely bet that Melissa McCarthy would reprise her instant-sensation Sean Spicer. And rumors abounded that Rosie O’Donnell would be enlisted to play Steve Bannon. Well, OK, that last rumor seems to have been primarily floated by Rosie O’Donnell.
Related: ‘SNL’ Recap: Melissa McCarthy Returns to Troll Trump
And sure enough, the show led off with McCarthy-as-Spicer, this time equipped with a motorized podium to plow through the White House press corps. It was jolly fun. The night was politics-heavy: Baldwin did an obligatory Trump sketch set in The Peoples Court, pleading for “broad, unchecked power” for his Muslim ban — it fell as flat as a dime. Then there was a bit about Leslie Jones wanting to play Trump. It was a clever, theoretically provocative notion, but it ended up being a sketch about the limited range of roles Leslie Jones is offered on SNL. In other words, kind of depressing.
No, the best sketch of the night — and probably the best political sketch SNL has run since election season — was Kate McKinnon reprising her Kellyanne Conway, trying to get booked on one of Jake Tapper’s CNN shows, The Lead or State of the Union. (Tapper was played by Beck Bennett.) The real Tapper is riding high right now: His calm, direct questioning of Conway last week was a model of TV-journalistic inquiry, and he is the sole CNN news anchor who has managed to strike the right tone of impartial truth-seeking. (It helps that when he’s not grilling a politician, he also demonstrates a quick, puckish sense of humor — you’ll never catch Tapper trying to go all solemn in the grand manner like Dan Rather or, God help us, Wolf Blitzer.)
The Conway sketch played off the actual media discussion as to whether CNN should continue to book Conway and other Trump surrogates who persistently flaunt the truth. It had Tapper/Bennett coming home late one night to find Conway/McKinnon in a silk slip, making a wheedling demand to be booked on his show, threatening him with a knife. The sketch could have been a self-inflicted wound on SNL if it had over-emphasized the Fatal Attraction echoes of its premise and made Conway seem like a crazy woman, desperate or deranged. It adroitly avoided this.
In the past, McKinnon has been asked by the SNL writers to play Conway as a sensible woman weary of defending Trump’s fabrications — that was just frustratingly false. This time, the right tone was struck: Conway as a knowing collaborator in Trump’s ongoing propaganda strategy, an aggressive proponent who’d do anything to get herself in front of the camera to continue bamboozling the American public.
The sketch had some nice lines. Tapper offered to get her on Carol Costello’s CNN daytime segment. Conway sneered, “What do I look like, Kayleigh McEnany?” Just before falling out a window, she nearly completed a funny slogan, “I’m Kellyanne Conway, and I always get my Kellyanne Con-way!” But she did fall, seemingly to her death. Yet Conway then rose up, an undead, malign creature who could instantly repair her broken bones to continue her ungodly mission. Now, that’s the kind of realism we’ve been wanting from SNL.
Saturday Night Live airs Saturdays at 11:30 on NBC. Watch clips and full episodes of SNL for free on Yahoo View.
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