Saturday Night Live decided to bring in a ringer for Season 46 of its show, opting not to use a member of its cast to play Joe Biden but to let movie star Jim Carrey play the Democratic presidential candidate. For five straight weeks, Carrey played a Biden that alternated between barely keeping his rage in check and often morphing into other characters and people altogether. But on Saturday, with the real Biden declared president-elect by the national news media, he did something many have long desired to do: called Donald Trump a loser.
SNL’s cold open on Saturday featured all the characters viewers have come to expect in recent weeks. Carrey played a victorious Biden, who graciously mimicked the real Biden and his call for unity and bringing America together. He also broke out an Ace Ventura voice to call Donald Trump a “loser,” but that came much later on.
“We did it. Can you believe it?” Carrey’s Biden asked to start his speech. “I honestly kinda can’t. It’s been so long since something good happened.”
Maya Rudolph played Kamala Harris, the former of which was likely thrilled to have four more years of guest spots on the show she once shined on weekly. And Alec Baldwin played a morose Trump who went to a piano to not play Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, but a mournful version of the Village People’s “Macho Man”. It was a “goodbye” of sorts from Baldwin’s Trump, whose campaign had made the same group’s “YMCA” a mainstay at Trump rallies despite the many ways the song was an odd bedfellow to the Trump campaign.
The sketch started with a riff about Wolf Blitzer and John King on CNN, which finally called the election for Biden after days of a nation anxiously watching cable news. There were a lot of jokes about the week that was that clearly came together at the last minute, as Biden’s victory was officially called just hours before the sketches were recorded in front of a live studio audience in NBC’s Studio 8H. But on an historic day in America, many turned to SNL to sum up the end of one of the oddest elections in American history. It likely won’t be the last we see of anyone in the sketch, but it certainly seemed to be a fitting end to five straight weeks of new SNL cold opens.