Alec Baldwin was back on Saturday Night Live, February 4, 2017 — antagonizing Donald Trump like a big dog. In the cold open excerpt below, Baldwin in the role of Trump makes it clear who’s really in charge of the country by giving up his presidential seat to Steve Bannon (the Grim Reaper) and then walking a few feet over to sit at the kids desk to play with his toys.
The cold open also touches on Trump’s notorious and most likely illegal Muslim Ban, as well as Trump’s disastrous and embarrassing phone calls/tweets to the Australian and Mexican heads of state. If you look closely, you can also see a sarcastic twinkle in Baldwin’s eye, knowing he’s irritating the begeebers out of @RealDonadTrump.
Kristen Stewart was the guest host and she also dropped some nasty girl digs at Trump in her monologue, bringing up how Trump once tweeted his dislike for her after her split with teen idol Rob Pattinson. She and Pattinson played lovers in the vampire saga Twilight. Stewart joked that Trump was obsessed with Pattinson and has a boy crush him. Between her snark, endearing smile and good comedic timing, it turns out the “brooding” actress is also very funny.
The phenomenal singer Alessia Cara was the featured music guest and her piano/vocal solo of “River of Tears” at the end of the show was breathtaking.
It was a great show with superb writing, but it was actress/comedian Melissa McCarthy of Bridesmaids, Spy and Ghostbusters who swept the audience into a frenzy of roaring laughter as she played the role of the White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer. McCarthy stepped upped to the podium (which she later used as a weapon) and took charge like a raging bull. It took the audience a few seconds to recognize her behind the incredible make-up job (the resemblance to Spicer, at times, was uncanny). Then once into the role, McCarthy was all over Spicer depicting him as an arrogant, puffed-up, bossy, insecure, condescending immature, lying little weenie — in the midst of a political breakdown. And the audience ate it up. Here is the McCarthy skit.
In her Sean Spicer role, McCarthy triangled and trolled reporters from different news groups like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, warning they’d end up in media jail like CNN if they didn't behave.
She calls them out with insults and wrong names, and with each exchange, she comically twists their words, as Spicer kind of does in real life, and then spray-guns “soapy water” at them to clean their “dirty little mouths.”
One of the biggest roars came when McCarthy as Spicer decides she needed to explain her words more clearly using “props” and pictures.
She began pulling objects out of boxes, including a plastic turd to explain how the president was “not to be deterred.”
The show airs after a week of Trump Administration chaos and multitudes of national and international protest by the people. Though rewarding and invigorating for protestors who are out on the streets, signing petitions, making calls, it can still be gut-wrenching and stressful making it hard to find anything to laugh about. Perhaps that’s when we need humor the most. Otherwise, without some kind of a release — we come undone. And how’s anyone going to #RESIST like that?
“Circular-usage of the words.” And picking up the podium? She killed it!