After this past week, we all deserved the return of Saturday Night Live.
SNL had a tall order in the opening of its 44th season premiere. They had to introduce a brand new character, Brett Kavanaugh, who has never appeared on the show before but has become indelible in the minds of Americans after his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee just two days ago.
We opened on Fox News with Leslie Jones as Harris Faulkner halfway through the Kavanaugh hearing. Playing the embattled Supreme Court nominee? None other than Matt Damon, who came in even more fired-up than the real thing. “What?!” he began. Asked if he was ready to begin, he answered, “Oh, hell yeah.”
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Portraying Kavanaugh as a belligerent drunk constantly on the verge of tears, Damon told the senators, “I’m here tonight because of a sham, a political con job orchestrated by the Clintons and George Soros, Kathy Griffin and Mr. Ronan Sinatra.” Through aggressive sniffles, he added, “Now I am usually an optimist, a keg is half full kind of guy, but what I’ve seen from the monsters on this committee makes me want to puke—and not from beer!”
The cold open’s next cameo came from former cast member Rachel Dratch as Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who asked Kavanaugh about his drinking.
“So I asked if you drank in high school and you said ‘I like beer’ ten times,” she said. “That leads me to the next question: Did you ever drink too many beers?”
“You mean was I cool? Yeah,” Kavanaugh replied. Asked if he ever blacked out from drinking, he shot back, “I don’t know, did you? Huh? Huh? Did you ever blackout?” Seconds later, he was apologizing, saying, “I didn’t mean that. I think I just blacked out for a second.”
And then there was Kate McKinnon, debuting her latest impression as an utterly unhinged Lindsey Graham, demanding that Democrats leave Kavanaugh alone and repeatedly comparing Kavanaugh to Bill Cosby. “Put this man on the Supreme Court right now! No votes, no discussion. You give him a goddamn robe and you let him do whatever the hell he wants,” Graham said. “Because this right now, this is my audition for the Trump cabinet.”
The sketch ended with a closing statement from Kavanaugh, who said he deserved to be on the court mostly because he went to Yale. “You think I’m angry? You’re damn right I am,” he said. “But you think I’m angry now, you just wait till I get on that Supreme Court, because then you’re all going to pay!” Then he shotgunned a can of “water.”
By casting Damon, who is unlikely to pull an Alec Baldwin and return week after week, perhaps SNL is predicting that we won’t be seeing much more of Kavanaugh after this coming week’s FBI investigation.
