Kamala Harris made a surprise appearance on the show, but another segment last night made a sharper political point.
Contrary to what Lorne Michaels said about not having political candidates guest on Saturday Night Live before the polls close Tuesday, the biggest surprise of the show’s final preelection episode was … a cameo by the Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris. Appearing in the final minutes of the cold open, using an oft-trodden mirror premise, Harris sat opposite Maya Rudolph (who has been portraying the vice president since 2019) and exchanged a winking dialogue that added “-ala” to the ends of words. “The American people want to stop the chaos,” Rudolph began, before Harris rejoined “and end the dram-ala.”
The light—and relatively straightforward—moment contrasted James Austin Johnson’s burned-out take on Donald Trump that kicked off the cold open. Satirizing the former president’s speech from his Wednesday rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Johnson briefly cast aside his impersonation, which regularly consists of Trump leaping topic to topic without any firm footing. He instead seemed to break the fourth wall: “Get me out of here,” he said, slumping over the podium. “Make it stop.” It was hard to tell how much of the sentiment was coming from the comedian’s Trump character and how much from Johnson himself.
But another sketch last night more crisply underscored the exhaustion of the current political moment—and the way high-stakes rhetoric can repeat from election cycle to election cycle.
