Yahoo Lifestyle 'SNL' Cold Open Roasts Trump's Inauguration With Surprise Celebrity Cameo
Saturday Night Live shines during an election year, offering satirical takes on the presidential race and skewering candidates with laser precision. This week’s cold open was the culmination of not just the hectic face-off between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, but also of the season so far. As Maya Rudolph and Dana Carvey retire their impersonations of Kamala and Biden, James Austin Johnson and his prosthetic neck-waddle find a renewed sense of job security for the next four years. If the first week of this all-too-familiar presidency is any indication of what’s to come, Saturday Night Live will have more than enough Trump fodder to keep them busy for the seasons to come.
With Trump’s second inauguration cemented in the pages of US history, SNL took us all the way back to the country’s founding where the sketch show’s cast mates (Mikey Day, Andrew Dismukes, Chloe Fineman, Sarah Sherman, Michael Longfellow, Ashley Padilla and Emil Wakim) donned powdered wigs during the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Seeing as the first cold open back after the inauguration is the kind of thing people are going to talk about, SNL had to make it splashy, and they did just that with the aid of a celebrity cameo. As the founding fathers deliberate among themselves, Longfellow asks, “What say you, Alexander Hamilton?” The cast parts, and from behind them enters Mr. Hamilton himself, Lin Manuel Miranda. Stepping back into the role he originated on Broadway, Miranda begins to rap (it wouldn’t be Hamilton without rap after all), singing, “We will have leaders, but know one thing in America we will never have a king.” Enter: Donald Trump (Johnson). “Never say never.”
The rest of the sketch is almost more akin to a stand-up set than a scene, as the actors behind Johnson freeze while he spits a stream of non-stop jokes about the inauguration, tackling everything from Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos’s seating assignments (“You know I had to put my nerd herd in the front row. Bro-ligarchs before oligarchs.”) to “surprise guest” Melania Trump. While for many people in the US, the new presidential administration has elicited fear or at the very least exhaustion, shows like SNL can keep us laughing.
You can watch the entire cold open here:
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