Saturday Night Live returned from hiatus last night, just in time for the midterms — taking aim at Fox News and its anti-immigrant fear-mongering of the last few weeks.
Kate McKinnon brought back her impersonation of Fox News host Laura Ingraham for a special SNL edition of The Ingraham Angle, only slightly exaggerated from the real thing.
The caravan, comprised of about 4,000 men, women, and children fleeing violence in Central America, formed in mid-October with the goal of obtaining political asylum to enter the United States.
President Trump almost immediately began lying about the caravan (he asserted that it’s comprised of “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners“).
Since then, it’s been the subject of breathless coverage on Fox News, making it a perfect skit for SNL.
Turning first to the thing on every Fox News producer’s mind — “the caravaaaan” of Central American migrants en route to the US’s southern border — McKinnon’s Ingraham described the “dozens, maybe millions of illegal immigrants … headed straight for you and your grandchildren.”
The segment repeatedly cut to “footage” of the caravan, showing everything from shoppers flooding into a store during Black Friday sales, to a scene from Brad Pitt’s apocalyptic horror movie World War Z.
Cecily Strong stopped by as fellow Fox News host Judge Jeanine Pirro to inform viewers that the caravan contains “everyone you’ve ever seen in your nightmares … Guatemalans, Mexicans, ISIS, the Menendez brothers, the 1990 Detroit Pistons, and several Babadooks.”
This sentence — along with her claim that the caravan contained “hella Aladdins,” who have apparently flown from Iran to Guatemala to join the caravan, claiming their elephants as service animals on the flight — may sound ridiculous, but it’s not that much more far-fetched than President Trump’s actual claim that the caravan contains “unknown Middle Easterners.”
The real Fox News is stoking racial fears by implying the caravan’s arrival is imminent (not to mention that it will bring disease outbreaks), but SNL’s Fox News made it clear that the caravan is still weeks away from the US-Mexico border.
As Keenan Thompson’s Sheriff David Clarke told Ingraham, the caravan will easily make it to the border in time to (illegally) vote if they walk at a “normal pace of 300 miles a day.”
The segment ends with a mention of Alec Baldwin, a reference to the SNL star’s Friday arrest for punching a man in a dispute over a parking spot.
“When we come back an update from disgraced former actor Alec Baldwin, seen here molesting a boy scout,” she says, , before launching into “and live from New York it’s Saturday night!”
Alec Baldwin and Adam Sandler in the SNL skit “Canteen Boy.”
When the molesting a boy scout comment was made, a photo of Baldwin with Adam Sandler in the SNL skit Canteen Boy flashed on screen, in which Baldwin did in fact portray a man who seemed to have an inappropriate relationship with a young scout.
Saturday’s pre-taped sketches also included a parody political ad from the Democrats, featuring a range of liberals who are definitely not feeling nervous about Tuesday at all.
Who’s ready for Tuesday? #SNL pic.twitter.com/5qsSMOLGrU
— Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) November 4, 2018