SNL Cold Open tends to skewer the most ridiculous political to-do of the week. There was a lot to choose from: George Santos joining Cameo, the chaotic fourth GOP debate, Donald Trump straight-up admitting he’d be a dictator. But the show’s writers decided to tread into the uncertain waters that is the spike in anti-Semitism on college campuses.
The night’s maiden sketch found Ego Nwodim, Heidi Gardner, and Chloe Fineman playing MIT’s Claudine Gay, Harvard’s Sally Kornbluth, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill, all of whom testified in Congress on Tuesday. That didn’t go well for them; on Saturday, mere hours before the show, Magill resigned after massive pushback. It didn’t go well for the sketch either, which struggled to find laughs in a powder keg situation.
Most of the attempted yuks came from Chloe Troat’s take on MAGA lawmaker Elise Stefanik, who at the beginning of the sketch vowed she would be “screaming questions at these women like I’m Billy Eichner.” She sure did, saying things, like, “Antisemitism: Yay or nay?” and admitting that no matter what they said, they were “going to make me look good, which is really, really hard to do.”
Kenan Thompson arrived late in to save the day, playing the president of the University of Phoenix Online. When Stefanik asked him if he promised to eliminate all anti-Semitism from his campus, he replied, “Well, my campus is the internet, so anti-Semitism is kind of our most popular major.” He added, “And our mascot is porn.”
You can watch the SNL Cold Open in the video above.