The 2020 election is over, and with it goes Saturday Night Live's commitment to reminding us of the hellworld Donald Trump has created in every single, solitary cold open sketch.
The Nov. 7 episode kicked off with a riff on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris's pair of Saturday evening victory speeches, though it also touched on the absurd number of hours put in by CNN's election war room over the past week and even paid a visit to "Trump" himself. In a nod to Kate McKinnon-as-Hillary Clinton's solemn piano-and-voice performance of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" in 2016, Baldwin's Trump took to the piano to play a heartfelt rendition of YMCA's "Macho Man."
But it's the end of the sketch that likely surprised and delighted American revelers the most. As we return to Jim Carrey's Biden and Maya Rudolph's Harris, Carrey digs deep and returns to the character that made him famous. (No, not Fire Marshal Bill.) It turns out that a trademark Ace Ventura line is a great balm to four years of Trump.
I do wonder if anyone in the SNL writer's room considered Ace Ventura's homophobic and transphobic history. It's something that Carrey himself has reckoned with publicly to some extent, but there's a certain amount of tone deafness to summoning up a character with regressive views and applying his persona to a president-elect who, historically, name-checked the transgender community for the first time in a presidential victory speech.
Topics SNL
