Matt Damon appears as Brett Kavanaugh in ‘SNL’ premiere

West delivers political rant

LOS ANGELES, Oct 1, (RTRS): “Saturday Night Live” returned for its 44th Season and wasted no time diving back into political sketches, with Matt Damon appearing as Brett Kavanaugh and Rachel Dratch returning as Senator Amy Klobuchar for a cold open sketch about his hearing.

Mysteriously absent from the top of the hearing, as Alex Moffat’s Chuck Grassley explained he was “shadowboxing in the bathroom,” Damon’s Kavanaugh sat down in irate fashion and said, “Oh hell yeah” when asked if he was ready to begin.

“Let me tell you this,” he said. “I’m going to start at an 11. I’m going to take it to about a 15 real quick. First of all I showed this speech to almost no one – not my family, not my friends . ... This is my speech. There are others like it, but this is mine. I wrote it myself last night while screaming into an empty bag of Doritos.”

Damon’s Kavanaugh went on to talk about the “con job” orchestrated by people like the Clintons, Kathy Griffin and “Mr Ronan Sinatra.”

Getting visibly emotional, he pulled up his old “beautiful, creepy” calendars as “evidence” and claimed no one cared about evidence but just wanted to humiliate him in front of his wife, his parents and “Alyssa Milano” – at which point, a cutout of Milano crept up behind him at the desk.

“Well guess what, I’m not backing down. I don’t know the meaning of the word ‘stop,’” he said.

When Cecily Strong’s Dianne Feinstein asked if he would submit to a FBI investigation, he replied, “You want to see a real investigation? Just look at my calendar.”

Later in the sketch, Dratch’s Klobuchar questioned Damon’s Kavanaugh about being a “frequent drinker” in high school.

When asked if he drank so much he blacked out, he stammered for a few seconds before claiming he had just blacked out for a second right then.

The sketch also covered discussed of Kavanaugh’s yearbook and the false definitions he gave of certain slang terms.

Sketch

The sketch also featured Kate McKinnon as Senator Lindsay Graham, who started by saying. “I know I’m supposed to shut up because I’m a single white male” but would not shut up because “this ain’t no trial, no due process. This is hell, that’s what it is, it’s hell.” Comparisons to Bill Cosby were brought up, to which Damon’s Kavanaugh pleaded for McKinnon’s Graham not to compare the two.

After all of this, when asked whether or not he had the right demeanor to be a Supreme Court Justice, Damon’s Kavanaugh said he “worked his ... off to get here .”

“Am I angry? You’re right, but if you think I’m angry now, just wait until I get on that Supreme Court – because then you’re all going to pay,” he said.

But “SNL” wasn’t done with Kavanaugh with just one sketch. Michael Che and Colin Jost of course discussed the hearing during their “Weekend Update” segment as well, taking additional jokes at Kavanaugh keeping his 1982 calendar, lying about terms written in his yearbook and showing actual clips of Kavanaugh talking about drinking and working out.

“You’re not really helping yourself in a drunken assault case when you yell about how much you like drinking and how strong you are at the time,” Jost said, later noting that if you created a drinking game for every time Kavanaugh lied, “you’d be as drunk as was in the summer of 1982.”

He also pointed out that the only ones keeping their composure during the hearing were the woman being questioned (Christine Blasey-Ford) and “the woman Republicans had to hire to talk to the woman being questioned.” On an optics level, Jost said, he understood why she was hired, but “if you’re not the right person to ask questions at a Senate hearing, maybe you’re not the right person to be a senator.”

Che chimed in to say that “all of this yelling and crying happened at this dude’s job interview. Typically when you ask about sexual assault and your drinking problem at a job interview, you don’t get the job!” While Che pointed out he doesn’t know if Kavanaugh actually has a history of assault or substance abuse, he does know he might – “and you shouldn’t be on the Supreme Court if you ‘might.’ You shouldn’t be on ‘The People’s Court’ if you ‘might,’” he said. “Sometimes might is enough. I don’t want to pet your dog if he might bite me.”

McKinnon also appeared in “Weekend Update” as Ruth Bader Ginsburg to discuss Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing. “He thought his...was unfair?” she said. “was they threw me in a river to see if I float.”

She also had words for Jeff Flake after noting that Republicans now want an FBI investigation just to “go ahead and confirm anyway.”

Performance

Meanwhile, Kanye West remained onstage after his performance on “Saturday Night Live” tonight and gave a politically themed speech to the audience after the broadcast ended. In reports to Variety and clips captured on social media, he was at times confrontational as he discussed his support for President Trump, his pledge to run for president in 2020, the need for a “dialogue not a diatribe” and other familiar themes similar to his recent statements.

Wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat, West said at one point, “So many times I talk to a white person and say, ‘How could you like Trump, he’s racist?’ Well, if I was concerned about racism I would’ve moved out of America a long time ago.” At another, he moves rapidly from topic to topic. “You wanna see the sunken place? Okay, Im’a listen to y’all now. I’ma put my superman cape on, because this means you can’t tell me what to do... You want the world to move forward? Try love.”

The cast members appeared embarrassed and two performers gently shook their heads in unison as he spoke. The audience was quiet and booed him at least twice. “The entire studio fell dead silent,” one eyewitness told Variety.

West thanked the show for the platform “even though some of y’all don’t agree,” and then began singing, “Try love,” leading the band back into the song as he walked offstage.

Earlier in the rant, he’d said: “They’re laughing at me. You heard them? They screamed at me. They bully me. They bullied me backstage. They said ‘Don’t go out there with that hat on.’ They bullied me backstage. They bullied me.” However, it was unclear who he was referring to.

“Had so much fun at SNL,” he wrote. “Lorne agreed that I would host before the year is out. Need to set a date. Gonna be sooooooooo lit.”

Reps for West, NBC and “Saturday Night Live” declined Variety’s requests for comment.

It had already been a bumpy evening: West and his accompanists veered between mediocre and bad on the three songs the show generously gave him. In the opening spot, West performed his latest single “I Love It” with Lil Pump.

On Sunday, the President tweeted his approval of West’s actions while slamming “SNL.”