SNL HIGHLIGHTS
Saturday Night Live has wrapped up its 42nd season, and boy, has it been an unusual one. Some of best political sketches from this season:
BLACK JEOPARDY WITH TOM HANKS (OCT. 22)
One of the most incisive and best political sketches this season didn’t even feature Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump or Kate McKinnon as Hillary Clinton. Instead, SNL turned to its running Black Jeopardy sketch, but this time, with Tom Hanks playing a white Trump supporter.
THE FIRST SEAN SPICER NEWS CONFERENCE (FEB. 4)
While SNL has no shortage of white guys to impersonate a white guy in Washington, Melissa McCarthy playing White House press secretary Sean Spicer ended up being the breakout sketch of the year. We had come to expect Baldwin making fun of Trump, but McCarthy seemed to come out of nowhere.
TRUMP VS. CLINTON TOWN HALL DEBATE COLD OPEN (OCT. 15)
This sketch incorporated several key moments from the second of the TrumpClinton debates and mixing in plenty of pointed jabs. Plus, Baldwin’s Trump was great lurking behind McKinnon’s Clinton to the theme of Jaws.
This was also the sketch that first prompted Trump to tweet his disdain of SNL — which he continued to do repeatedly in the ensuing months.
ELECTION NIGHT (NOV. 12)
This sketch perfectly encapsulated conversations many white liberals had at parties on election night. Guest host Dave Chappelle, joined by Chris Rock, responded to the increasing worry among other partygoers over Trump’s impending win. “Oh, my God, I think America is racist,” one white liberal said. “Oh, my God,” Chappelle’s character said, with fake shock. “You know, I remember my great-great-grandfather told me something like that. But you know he was, like, a slave or something, I don’t know.”
COMPLICIT (MARCH 11)
SNL has turned to more than one person to play Trump’s daughter, Ivanka. Here, we have a fake perfume ad that stars guest host Scarlett Johansson in the role.
Writer Chris Kelly told The Hollywood Reporter, “We’d spend hours and hours trying to come up with an Ivanka sketch and then bail on it because it just didn’t seem right. ... We really tried to jam through some Titanic-y idea for weeks, and then eventually we thought of this perfume angle.”