Near the end of last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live, something unusual happened. As Ashley Padilla, playing a painfully square high-school teacher named Ms. Perry, intercepted a note from one of her students, a graphic flashed across the screen: “The Contents Of These Notes Have Been Changed Since Rehearsal.” Standing next to the night’s host, Ryan Gosling, who was playing the school principal, she announced her next step: “You know my rule.
The reference points were readily identifiable: a chance meeting between characters from different worlds, a sport involving sticks and a flying round projectile whose nuances would be lost on the average American. Yep, Saturday Night Live was doing yet another Harry Potter sketch—but this time with a spicy twist.
Keeping up with national politics this year hasn’t been easy. Even amid a government shutdown, so much is happening in Washington, at such a rapid clip and such a high pitch, that a browser of The New York Times’ homepage could be forgiven for giving up and clicking straight through to Spelling Bee.
The moment Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth began berating the military officials assembled at Marine Corps Base Quantico last week, he set Saturday Night Live up for an alley-oop. With his clenched fists, hot temper, and stars-and-stripes pocket square, the former Fox News host—as SNL was eager to point out at the top of its 51st-season premiere—did enough self-parody that Colin Jost didn’t have to add much to nail his take on Hegseth.