There’s some good comedy in this Saturday Night Live cold open, but you’ll forget all of it once Bowen Yang’s plunger nipple arrives on the scene.
The sketch riffs on a very real meeting the White House had with TikTok influencers on Thursday in an effort to counter Russian misinformation on social media that has framed Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a good and necessary thing. That meeting prompted SNL writers to imagine what happened behind closed doors, and it’s as deranged as you’d expect.
I don’t follow much on TikTok personally, so I probably missed a bunch of references. There’s a great moment with Kenan Thompson, who plays a roofer from Pittsburgh named Charles D’Amelio — a case of mistaken identity for a White House that meant to invite top TikTok follow Charli D’Amelio. And another with Aidy Bryant playing a cutesy animal makeup artist who turns out to be an alt-right wingnut. Also, James Austin Johnson, as Biden, refers to himself at one point as “the landline of presidents,” which is just great.
But Bowen Yang owns the best bit of the sketch. He shows up shirtless and with a plunger affixed to one of his nipples, which I assume is a riff on Japanese comedian Kazuhisa Uekasa’s own antics with the clog-breaking tool. He’s got the most insightful comments of the entire sketch, but the camera can only seem to focus on one thing. Just good visual comedy for the TV audience at home.
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