As the nation is in a fit of laughter that may never stop over the Trump campaign press conference that was, through a hot potato game of incompetence, held not at Philadelphia’s swank Four Seasons hotel but at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping company’s parking lot next to a porn shop, it was only fitting that Kate McKinnon’s Rudy Giuliani made a stop at the Saturday Night Live “Weekend Update” desk.
“Did you see my press conference today?” McKinnon’s Giuliani greeted Update co-anchor Colin Jost. “It was at the Four Seasons. Fancy!”
“I’m glad I made it to the show on time,” he continued. “First I went to 30 Rocks. That’s a granite quarry in New Rochelle.”
Neither performer could keep a straight face through the conversation, which is forgivable as it may not be possible to do anything but reflexively erupt with giggles when it comes to the topic of the Trump campaign damage control press conference accidentally booked in a landscaping company’s parking lot.
Seizing on the widely-held truth that there is no discernible or sustainable legal strategy being mounted by Trump’s crack team of lawyers, Jost quizzed Giuliani on what he has up his sleeve. Throw out the ballots, for one, he said, reasoning, “These ballots could be coming from Mars!” (That’s not a joke purely scripted for SNL. Giuliani really said that.) “If the name is Meep Thorp Xandar and the address is Mars, we’re going to have those ballots thrown out.”
Then there’s the matter, he says, of whether the ballots are even ballots at all, and not, say, tortillas. The plan: Eat them and find out. “If my butt blows after I eat it, you know that’s a tortilla.”
Hitching on to the week-long theme that none of these are tenable strategies, Jost asked what the actual legal recourse is. “In Michigan, we demanded a recount. In Wisconsin, we have demanded a de-count. We called backsies in Nevada, we got safety in Arizona, and in Georgia: Opposite Day. Plus, we’re gonna demand that I do the recount personally and our silver bullet is: I can’t count very high.”
There’s also the issue of the pollsters, who Giuliani accused of being paid to lie to the American people. He claimed first-hand experience on the matter. “They’re always saying, ‘Hey baby, I’m Cinnamon. My real name is Brittany. Shh, don’t tell them I told you.’” After a beat, Giuliani exploded: “And then you find out her name ain’t Brittany!”
If all else fails and Trump can’t secure the White House again, Giuliani explained that he’ll head back to his home city, New York. Not even New Yorkers off-camera pelting lettuce at his face at the mere mention of the return curbed his delusion: “That famous New York lettuce!” he savored.
The “Weekend Update” highlight came in the midst of a hotly-anticipated episode of SNL. Airing the same night Joe Biden was finally projected to defeat Donald Trump and just hours after the new president-elect’s victory speech in Delaware, it opened with a pile-on, having Alec Baldwin as the president sit down at the piano and croon a dreary, defeated version of his campaign anthem, “Macho Man” by the Village People.
Dave Chappelle, returning to host four years after holding the same distinction in the first episode following the 2016 election, performed a standards-and-practices-baiting monologue that was a sermon on the country’s own mortality and conscience as much as it was a polarizing comedy set about race, COVID, and Trump’s mental capacity.
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