Mocking COVID public health theater is finally going mainstream.
The best Saturday Night Live sketches feel like funhouse-mirror versions of real life—echoes of conversations or situations we’ve experienced, but with comedic exaggerations. I mean, who hasn’t seen lobster on a menu in a diner and wondered: « Why? » The best sketch in last night’s show, hosted by former SNL writer and recently out-of-rehab standup superstar John Mulaney, is a perfect example. It could have been yanked out of probably thousands of conversations around the country this week after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) finally loosened their guidelines for masking —guidelines that have been used to justify all sorts of local and state polices that often make little sense. Like, say, the rules in D.C. and several other major cities requiring you to wear a mask to enter a restaurant even though you’re going to take it off as soon as you sit down to eat. That’s where the sketch begins, with six friends gathered for dinner. One of them, Keenan Thompson, is still wearing his mask when we join the group mid-conversation. After he removes it, fellow diner Heidi Gardner cautiously mentions an article she’d read suggesting that « mask mandates had, I don’t know, little to no effect on COVID.
